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In this expanded edition of The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation of “extensive evil,” her term for systematic, normalized harm-doing on the scale of genocide, slavery, sexualized dominance. The book now includes a new preface, new chapter, and expanded afterword addressing ongoing extensive evils, the paradox of lying, and the importance of developing the thinking without which conscience remains mute. Extensive evils are actually carried out not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next-door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters to do the long hard work of extensive evils, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? Such evils are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing both the worst and best of which humans are capable, we can recognize and say no to extensive evil, practice and sustain extensive good, where they must take root – in ordinary lives.
A new edition of a widely influential book engages with contemporary critiques of inequality and with recent global events.
Thinking has, for many of us, become as passive as breathing.While it’s essential to our very existence, we devote little energy or time to cultivating it. Thought Work:Thinking, Action, and the Fate of the World challenges us to reinstate the restless, complicated activity of thinking as the heart of all education, life, and work. Our underappreciation of careful thought has crippled our ability to sustain a moral, conscience-driven society, and it now falls to each of us to examine the underlying thought processes that guide our every action. Distinguished philosopher Elizabeth K. Minnich and evaluation studies pioneer Michael Quinn Patton gather a diverse cast of thought leaders to resp...
A splendid piece of scholarship on a major twentieth-century thinker often overlooked. / This book presents an original scholarly analysis of the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt, focusing on an area hitherto ignored: the ways in which Augustine s thought forms the foundation of Arendt's work. Stephan Kampowski here offers readers a valuable overview of central aspects of Arendt s thought, addressing perennial existential and philosophical questions at the heart of every human being.
Takes an in-depth look at the practice of privatization. The purpose of this book is to present an analysis of privatisation that will help people understand what is happening to them, and what they can do about it. It provides a framework that allows readers to center their thinking in questions of what it means to build a democratic society.
Controversy over what role “the great books” should play in college curricula and questions about who defines “the literary canon” are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here—themselves distinguished scholars and educators—share the belief that American schools, colleges, and universities can do a far better job of educating the nation’s increasingly diverse population and that the liberal arts must play a central role in providing students with the resources they need to meet the challenges of ...
The essays in this volume explore in detail many of the ways power structures our daily personal, political and intellectual lives, and evaluate the workings of power using a variety of theoretical paradigms, from Hobbesian liberalism to Foucauldian feminist postmodernism. Taken as a whole, the book aims towards an end to unjust and destructive uses of power and the flowering of an encouraging, educated empowerment for all human beings in a pluralistic world. Section I offers a progressive chain of arguments that moves from the acceptance of domination, through the rejection of domination and, finally, to a new vision of power based on equality and mutual respect. Section II explores the questions, how is the philosophical self, that is, our very understanding of who we are, implicated in the web of power and domination? Section III responds to political realism as it explores morally ideal solutions to the global problems of poverty, war and hunger. Section IV discusses ways in which our thought and practice in both public and private life are bound up in hierarchies of domination.
A short story collection hailed as a “welcome and valuable addition to our growing knowledge about the inner lives and literary talents of Chinese women” (Amy Ling, author of Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry). This remarkable anthology introduces the short fiction of fourteen writers, major figures in the literary movements of three generations, who represent a range of class, ethnic, and political perspectives. It is filled with unexpected gems such as Lin Hai-yin’s story of a woman suffering under the feudal system of Old China, and Chiang Hsiao-yun’s optimistic solutions to problems of the elderly in rapidly changing 1980s Taiwan. And in between, a dozen rich stories of aristocrats, comrades, wives, concubines, children, mothers, sexuality, female initiation, rape, and the tensions between traditional and modern life. “This is not western feminism with an Asian accent”, says Bloomsbury Review, “but a description of one culture’s reality. . . . The woman protagonists survive both despite and because of their existence in a changing Taiwan.”
Feminist history of philosophy has successfully focused thus far on canon revision, canon critique, and the recovery of neglected or forgotten women philosophers. However, the methodology remains underexplored, and it seems timely to ask larger questions about how the history of philosophy is to be done and whether there is, or needs to be, a specifically feminist approach to the history of philosophy. In Empowerment and Interconnectivity, Catherine Gardner examines the philosophy of three neglected women philosophers, Catharine Beecher, Frances Wright, and Anna Doyle Wheeler, all of whom were British or American utilitarian philosophers of one stripe or another. Gardner’s focus in this book is less on accounting for the neglect or disappearance of these women philosophers and more on those methodological (or epistemological) questions we need to ask in order to recover their philosophy and categorize it as feminist.
Presents essays by leaders in the field of philosophy of education, organized in three sections on definitions of philosophy of education; variations on the canon, such as the aims of education, moral and ethical education, and politics; and current ideas in philosophical and educational discourse, including art and representation, ecology, gender, and power. No index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR