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Peter Morriss discusses the notion of 'power' and attempts to show how recent accounts of power have misinterpreted crucial components, thereby producing faulty analyses. He puts the study of power into a modern context and also explains why an understanding of power is so important in developing a radical critique of a society. The revised second edition includes a new foreword.
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.
This lucidly written book examines the social and political significance of the natural sciences through a detailed and original account of science as an interpretive social practice.
Oriented around the theme of a ‘politics of philosophy’, this book tracks the phases in which Foucault’s genealogy of power, law, and subjectivity was reorganized during the 14 years of his teaching at the College de France, as his focus shifted from sovereignty to governance. This theme, Sandro Chignola argues here, is the key to understanding four features of Foucault’s work over this period. First, it foregrounds its immediate political character. Second, it demonstrates that Foucault’s "Greek trip" also aims at a politics of the subject that is able to face the processes of the governmentalization of power. Third, it makes clear that the idea of the "government of the self" is ...
Some years ago, on request of the German Political Science Association (DVPW), an empirical investigation „On the state and the orientation of political science in the Federal Republic of Germany“ was conducted by Carl Böhret. Among other interesting 1 information, in the paper that was subsequently published the author presented the results of a survey among 254 political scientists in the Federal Republic on what they considered to be the sine qua non basic concepts of the discipline. In various respects, the data are remarkable. 2 On the one hand, the enormous diversity of the answers corroborates statistically what has long been known from experience, i. e. , the existence of an ext...
'Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilisation' - Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958. The nineteen essays collected here show Isaiah Berlin at his most lucid: these short, introductory pieces provide the perfect starting point for the reader new to his work. Their linking theme is the crucial social and political role of ideas, and of their progenitors. The subjects vary widely - from philosophy to education, from Russia to Israel, from Marxism to romanticism - and the appositeness of Heine's warning is exemplified on a broad front. The contents include Berlin's last essay - a retrospective autobiographical survey and the classic statement of his Zionist views. As a whole the book exhibits the full range of his expertise, and demonstrates the enormously engaging individuality, as well as the power, of his own ideas.
This book explores the possibility of philosophical praxis by weaving an ontological thread through four principal thinkers: Heidegger, Schelling, Goethe, and Heraclitus. It argues that a special kind of redemptive power awaits the structural understanding of thought that is beyond semantic formations such as concepts and ideational systems. The author claims that the “power” is negative in nature, trans-personal, and derived directly from the understanding of thought as a structural pulse. The book travels backwards in time, encountering successively Heidegger’s critique of calculative thinking, Schelling’s Mind/Nature relation, Goethe’s Delicate Empiricism, and the aphoristic wisdom of Heraclitus in search of a redemptive power that lies in the self-knowledge of thought. This power is ontological and not historical or developmental; it is the same at all times and all points of history. The author refers to the praxis as “philosophical bilingualism.”
This bold and original work of philosophy presents an exciting new picture of concrete reality. Peter Unger provocatively breaks with what he terms the conservatism of present-day philosophy, and returns to central themes from Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Russell. Wiping the slate clean, Unger works, from the ground up, to formulate a new metaphysic capable of accommodating our distinctly human perspective. He proposes a world with inherently powerful particulars of two basic sorts: one mental but not physical, the other physical but not mental. Whether of one sort or the other, each individual possesses powers for determining his or her own course, as well as powers for interaction ...
'Who since Weber, or perhaps even Hobbes, has done as much to show why power is such a profound, elusive and treacherous presence throughout our experience?' The Times Higher Education The third and final volume of the Essential Works of Foucault series, Power brings together his writings on the issues that he helped make the core agenda of Western political culture: medicine, prisons, psychiatry, government and sexuality, in particular showing his concerns with human rights, discrimination and exclusion. It also includes articles and open letters published directly in response to the issues of the time, calling for reform in abortion, asylum and the death penalty. All the pieces here bring a new sense of Foucault's huge influence on the politics of personal freedom. Edited by James D. Faubion Translated by Robert Hurley and Others
As a growing area of research, the philosophy of time is increasingly relevant to different areas of philosophy and even other disciplines. This book describes and evaluates the most important debates in philosophy of time, under several subject areas: metaphysics, epistemology, physics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, rationality, and art. Questions this book investigates include the following. Can we know what time really is? Is time possible, especially given modern physics? Must there be time because we cannot think without it? What do we experience of time? How might philosophy of time be relevant to understanding the mind–body relationship or evidence i...