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"Roger-Pol Droit's book is a reassessment of our day-to-day engagement with life. In 101 short texts, Droit invites us to reconsider our most ordinary actions as unexpected philosophical events: peeling an apple, trying to lie in a hammock, watching someone sleep, hearing your voice on an answering machine, playing with a small child - activities that, when considered outside of their routine, invite us to experience the familiar in startling new ways. Droit encouarges us to go further: pretend to be an animal of your choice, create a wall with your hands, try to walk around your room in total darkness, spend time in the Underground - and observe your oddity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Description: The common western understanding of Buddhism today envisions this major world religion as one of compassion and tolerance. But as the author Droit reveals, this view bears little resemblance to one broadly held in the nineteenth-century European philosophical imagination that saw Buddhism as a religion of annihilation calling for the destruction of the self. The Cult of Nothingness traces the history of the western discovery of Buddhism. In so doing, the author shows that such major philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cousin, and Renan imagined Buddhism as a religion that was, as Nietzsche put it, a negation of the world. In fact, says the author, such portrayals wer...
Can we learn anything from the ordinary objects that surround us - the things we use in everyday life? The answer is: yes, more than you think. You don't notice these things. You use them, which is enough. Or not enough.
This playful and profound French bestseller about finding the miraculous in the mundane offers 101 experiments in the philosophy of everyday life.
Can we learn anything from the ordinary objects that surround us - the things we use in everyday life? The answer is: yes, more than we think. We don't notice these things but they coexist with and store meaning for us. This is Roger-Pol Droit's diary of a year encountering the world of things.
Based on a selection of texts drawn from UNESCO's archives and accompanied by brief explanations of the issues at stake, this book offers an understanding of the ongoing task of an organization responsible for constructing the defenses of peace in the minds of men.--Publisher's description.
A worldwide survey on the place that philosophy occupies in education and culture, based on a large number of documents from dozens of countries and proposals put forward in various international fora. Its main conclusion: although the teaching of philosophy is highly praised in principle, it is neglected in practice. But in an increasingly interdependent and fragmented world, a sound philosophical education is inseparably linked to the issue of freedom. Publie egalement en franais: Philosophie et democratie dans le monde Publicado tambien en espanol: Filosofia y democracia en el mundo
Praise for the French edition “This is a book that should be read by all those who are interested, whether near or far, in Buddhism, its history and its interpretations. . . . [Faure] proposes considering the ‘Life of the Buddha’ as a kind of treasure that never ceases to be reinvented and experienced, from story to story, from language to language, from culture to culture.” —Roger-Pol Droit, Le Monde Many biographies of the Buddha have been published in the last 150 years, and all claim to describe the authentic life of the historical Buddha. This book, written by one of the leading scholars of Buddhism and Japanese religion, starts from the opposite assumption and argues that we ...
This book analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism. Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness—but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be. Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah.
While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself. Marion begins his profound and personal book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is ...