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What is dirt, and what does it really mean to be dirty or clean? Dirt and cleaning are often associated with ideas of guilt, otherness, and social control, but also with living responsibly and in harmony with the environment. In this learned, innovative study, Olli Lagerspetz offers a persuasive discussion of dirt and its ramifications across philosophy and culture. Writing with wit and grit, he argues that questions of dirt and soiling can neither be reduced to hygiene nor to ritual pollution. Instead, they are integral to almost every human activity. As participants in material culture, we not only produce things and dispose of them, but we also engage with them practically, aesthetically,...
This collection of essays approaches the problems and strengths of nationalism from a number of philosophical perspectives. The contributors craft a definition of nation/nationalism that emphasizes the cultural and sociopolitical ties uniting members of a country rather than merely their place of origin.
In a world of seemingly never-ending technological advances, questions of ethics take on even more significance than in the past. Conflicts of interest abound and pressure mounts at every turn for more profits, higher incomes, power and instant gratification leads to the temptation to ignore questions of ethics. This book presents new and interesting research on ethical issues in the modern day.
“Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives” writes Sissela Bok. Although trust is ubiquitous, understanding trust is a non-trivial challenge. Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives addresses critical and analytical issues of trust. It examines trust from a conceptual perspective as well as considers it in practical contexts ranging from the public sphere broadly understood to particular social institutions, such as universities and medical care. Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives explores what kind of good trust is, what kind of goods it can protect and how it can bring about goods, and develops subtle distinctions between trust and other virtu...
Even though several branches of philosophy meet in the notion of trust, it has nevertheless been largely neglected by mainstream philosophy. Arguably, most existing analyses fail to give a just account of the reality of human experience. The author believes that this is not a coincidence but symptomatic of the irrelevance of received ideas of rationality for crucial areas of human agency. `Individualist' approaches, he argues, can be accused precisely of ignoring fundamental questions about the nature of the individual. Expanding on the works of Wittgenstein, Winch, and others, in Trust: The Tacit Demand the author demonstrates the conceptual significance of our dependence on others. The discussion stretches over philosophical psychology, epistemology, political philosophy and moral philosophy. The book may be of interest to anyone in philosophy, psychology or the social sciences.
Questions of ethics and the study of culture are tightly interwoven. Are we to see ethics as one thread in the fabric created by human culture or does ethics rather transcend culture? The discussions in this volume take place within this spectrum. Eleven Wittgenstein scholars explore how ethics is embedded in everyday activities and speech. The topics dealt with range from the ways we speak about human practices and nature, religious belief, gender, and moral understanding to questions about Wittgenstein’s views on ethics and what it means to understand and attend to a particular individual. Central points of departure are, firstly, that ethics cannot be reduced to any specific cultural form and, secondly, that how we conceive of language is crucially connected with how we perceive the relation between culture and ethics. The points of view put forth frequently pose radical questions to the mainstream of philosophy. The different uses to which Wittgenstein’s thought is put also raise important questions about how one should understand the role of language, ethics and culture in his philosophy.
Trusting Others, Trusting God is an investigation of the concepts of moral and religious trust. The question of why or how it is rational to trust anyone has been the typical focus of philosophers, with an underlying assumption that trust must be justified. In most cases, trust (even – or perhaps especially religious trust) is portrayed as irrational. Sheela Pawar argues that a grammatical investigation of the concept of trust can help rectify this mistreatment.
The variety of approaches to the concept of trust in philosophy reflects the fact that our worries are diverse, from the Hobbesian concern for the possibility of rational cooperation to Wittgenstein's treatment of the place of trust in knowledge. To speak of trust is not only to describe human action but also to take a perspective on it and to engage with it. Olli Lagerspetz breathes new life into the philosophical debate by showing how questions about trust are at the centre of any in-depth analyses of the nature of human agency and human rationality and that these issues, in turn, lie at the heart of philosophical ethics. Ideal for those grappling with these issues for the first time, Trust, Ethics and Human Reason provides a thorough and impassioned assessment of the concept of trust in moral philosophy.
How dirty were our ancestors, really? Academic history has persuaded us that everyone in the early modern era thought bathing was unhealthy, so they didn't do it. Sweet and Clean? challenges this view, using a range of fascinating evidence to tell a different story about the washing of bodies and scrubbing of clothes in early modern England.
Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory.