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This provocative, lucidly written reconstruction of utilitarianism focuses on the practical constraints involved in ethical choice: information may be inadequate, and understanding of causes and effects may be limited. Good decision making may be especially constrained if other people are closely involved in determining an outcome. Hardin demonstrates that many of these structural issues can and should be distinguished from the thornier problems of utilitarian value theory, and he is able to show what kinds of moral conclusions we can reach within the limits of reason.
Why are some critical texts more compelling, memorable, or engaging than others? Can criticism be judged as a discourse of description, explanation, and analysis alone, or do our evaluations reflect other kinds of investments in it? In this book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that the most powerful and effective criticism demands to be read as an expression of a distinctive sensibility, a way of being in the world; it demands, in other words, to be read as a discourse of character. Through a series of detailed and intimate intellectual portraits of leading critics--Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek, and Edward Said--Harpham unfolds the complex and indirect ways in which human character is expressed in criticism. A final chapter on Criticism in a State of Terror assesses the contemporary situation. The Character of Criticism represents not just a snapshot of contemporary criticism but a fresh approach to criticism itself that clarifies the stakes involved for writers and readers of criticism alike. It does so not by making difficult thinking easy but by making it stranger--more idiosyncratic, exotic, and singular.
Classic texts by thinkers from Althusser to Žižek alongside essays by leaders in interaction design and HCI show the relevance of critical theory to interaction design. Why should interaction designers read critical theory? Critical theory is proving unexpectedly relevant to media and technology studies. The editors of this volume argue that reading critical theory—understood in the broadest sense, including but not limited to the Frankfurt School—can help designers do what they want to do; can teach wisdom itself; can provoke; and can introduce new ways of seeing. They illustrate their argument by presenting classic texts by thinkers in critical theory from Althusser to Žižek alongs...
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In a collection of intriguing essays on the work of Edward Said, internationally-recognized scholars pay homage to the late critic by addressing many aspects of his oeuvre, including his breakthrough Orientalism, the role of the intellectual, the Question of Palestine, and finally his dramatic memoir, Out of Place. This volume is a useful contribution for classroom use, as well as recreational reading for those interested in the work of this controversial thinker.
The first truly introductory text on Lyotard, this book situates Lyotard's interventions in the postmodern debate in the wider context of his rethinking of the politics of representation. Bill Readings examines Lyotard's relationship to structuralism, Marxism and semiotics, and contrasts his work with the literary deconstruction of Paul de Man; he positions Lyotard's work so as to draw out the implications of poststructurlaism's attention to difference in reading. Lyotard's willingness to question the political and examine the relationship between art and politics is shown to undermine the charge that deconstruction abdicates political and social articulation.
A critical overview of the work of Fredric Jameson, with an emphasis on his notoriously difficult writing style.
This book has roots in our respective doctoral dissertations, both completed in 1970 at Stanford under the tutelage of Professors Dagfmn F øllesdal, John D. Goheen, and Jaakko Hintikka. In the fall of 1970 we wrote a joint article that proved to be a prolegomenon to the present work, our 'Intentionality via Intensions', The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971). Professor Hintikka then suggested we write a joint book, and in the spring of 1971 we began writing the present work. The project was to last ten years as our conception of the project continued to grow at each stage. Our iritellectual debts follow the history of our project. During our dis sertation days at Stanford, we joined with fellow doctoral candidates John Lad and Michael Sukale and Professors Føllesdal, Goheen, and Hintikka in an informal seminar on phenomenology that met weekly from June of 1969 through March of 1970. During the summers of 1973 and 1974 we regrouped in another informal seminar on phenomenology, meeting weekly at Stanford and sometimes Berkeley, the regular participants being ourselves, Hubert Dreyfus, Dagfmn Føllesdal, Jane Lipsky McIntyre, Izchak Miller, and, in 1974, John Haugeland.
Dramatic Events shows you how to stimulate workshop participants, through a series of exercises and examples, to release their energy, to free their bodies and their voices, to listen, to think, to be creative, to engage in focussed exchanges with other people, to take risks and to watch others and learn.
Set against the collapse of social theory into a theory of ideological discourse, Geoff Boucher sets to work a rigorous mapping of the contemporary field, targeting the relativist implications of this new form of philosophical idealism. Offering a detailed and immanent critique, Boucher concentrates his critical attention on the 'postmarxism' of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek. In response Boucher points to 'intersubjectivity' as an exit from postmarxist theory's charmed circle of ideology.