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God for an Old Man blends elements of careful academic thought about God with elements of personal autobiography and memoir. The author is deeply influenced by modern process thought about God, stemming from the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, but he also describes his own life as a child, adult, and now a person entering his eighties. The central premise is that a person cannot write about a meaningful God without taking seriously the meaning, conflict, loss, and joy in one's own life. Thomas M. Dicken is immersed in both literature and visual art. He explores the ways in which art and literature can evoke a sense of ultimacy, even though we can never attain certain knowledge of the ultimate. Just as the psychiatrist Erik Erikson wrote about major stages in human lives, Dicken writes with a sense of fulfillment about the insights and values of old age. Old age is the age of wisdom, a time for offering younger people the insight that all the stages of life have been very much worth living. This is not a book of easy or dogmatic answers; it is a book of honest exploration.
This book treats values as the basis for all of philosophy, an approach distinct from critiquing theories of value and far rarer. “First Philosophy,” the effort to justify the foundations for a system of philosophy, is one of the main issues that divide philosophers today. McDonald’s philosophy of values is a comprehensive attempt to replace philosophies of “existence,” “being,” “experience,” the “subject,” or “language,” with a philosophy that locates value as most basic. This transformation is a radical move within Western philosophy as a whole, since it has never been done in such a thoroughgoing way. Hugh P. McDonald makes a comprehensive case against first philosophy as metaphysical, by mounting a case against all metaphysical systems of philosophy. Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values is a fresh start for a rebirth of philosophy. While other movements debate the “death of philosophy,” this book radically re-evaluates the direction of philosophy by discovering values at the basis of all philosophy. This reorientation addresses the question of what the love of wisdom can mean for us today.
This book presents Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and critically examines many other twentieth century value theorists in its light, including A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, Brand Blanshard, Paul Edwards, Albert Einstein, William K. Frankena, R.M. Hare, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, G.E. Moore, P.H. Nowell-Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Charles Stevenson, Paul W. Taylor, Stephen E. Toulmin, and J.O. Urmson. Open Access funding for this volume has been provided by the Robert S. Hartman Institute.
This book, written by well-known students of Étienne Gilson and especially dedicated to Armand A. Maurer, helps inaugurate a long-overdue special series in philosophy honoring Gilson’s legendary scholarship. It presents wide-ranging expositions of Thomist realism in the tradition of Gilsonian humanism covering themes related to philosophy in general, historical method, aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and politics.
The essays in this volume are from the First Conference of the Central European Pragmatist Forum, held in Slovakia in 2000. Written by prominent specialists in pragmatism and American philosophy from the United States and Europe, they survey contemporary thinking on classical and contemporary pragmatism, social and political theory, aesthetics, and the application of pragmatist thought in contemporary Europe."
This book discovers freedom in the colonial idea of African primitiveness. As human transcendence, freedom escapes the drawbacks of otherness, as defended by ethnophilosophy, while exposing the idiosyncratic inspiration of Eurocentric universalism. Decolonization calls for the reconnection with freedom, that is, with myth-making understood as the inaugural act of cultural pluralism. The cultural condition of modernization emerges when the return to the past deploys the future.
The book explores, in novel form, what can happen to us, whether professor or student, as a result of the philosophical classroom. The approach is to consider the classroom as a unique happening of philosophy, different than reporting theories or doing research, through which a distinctive mode of philosophical formation can occur.
Moral expectation is a concept with which all of us are well acquainted. Already as children we learn that certain courses of action are expected of us. We are expected to perform certain actions, and we are expected to refrain from other actions. Furthermore, we learn that something is morally wrong with the failure to do what we are morally expected to do. A central theme of this book is that moral expectation should not be confused with moral obligation. While we are morally expected to do everything we are obligated to do, a person can be morally expected to do some things that he or she is not morally obligated to do. Although moral expectation is a familiar notion, it has not been the ...
Since the fall of communism in 1989 Southeast Europe has been a site of far-reaching societal transformation, much of it marked by political crisis, economic upheaval, ethnic tension, and bitter war. The book comprises articles investigating the history and development of civil society in post-communist Southeast Europe. How is civil society to be grasped, what are the historical factors shaping the civil societies of the region?, what is the function of civil society in the transition to democracy and a market-economy?, and what are the prospects for the future development of the civil societies of the region in an age of globalization?, –these are just a few of the major questions addressed in this collection of articles. Many of the authors are social scientists, philosophers, and activists from the region, offering first-hand critical analysis of the state of civil society in Southeast Europe and suggesting theoretical and practical strategies for the future course of its development. The aim is to provide the reader with insight into the complex challenges that face the civil societies of the region.
This book tries to uncover science’s discoverer and explain why the conception of science has been changing during the centuries, and why science can be beneficial and dangerous for humanity. Far from being hermetic, this research can be interesting for all who want to understand deeper what really conditions the place of science in culture.