Demonstrates the capacity of people to bestow and to esteem benevolence, and to strive for virtue even while they are pursuing their own self-interest. This book tells that the root of our motivation to act benevolently toward others is our natural propensity to sympathize with others.
The Sociology of Intellectual Life outlines a social theory of knowledge for the 21st century. With characteristic subtlety and verve, Steve Fuller deals directly with a world in which it is no longer taken for granted that universities and academics are the best places and people to embody the life of the mind. While Fuller defends academic privilege, he takes very seriously the historic divergences between academics and intellectuals, attending especially to the different features of knowledge production that they value. The boook's features include: - an account of the problematic relationship between postmodernism and the university as an institution - the problems facing an academic who wishes also to function as an intellectual - a critical survey of the emerging fields of social epistemology and the sociology of philosophy - a discussion of the ethics and politics of public intellectual life, especially given its largely improvisational (or as Fuller himself terms it, 'bullshit') character.
Meditations on the African Spiritual Journey: From the Middle Passage to
Explores the ideas and influences behind a man who draws on ideas from anthroposophy and other spiritual traditions and applies them in challenging social contexts to remarkable effect.
Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand
This book interrogates the meaning and consequences of the unsettling parallel relationship between today's critical theory and Right-wing political philosophy.
Traces the rhetoric of reform across American history, examining such pivotal periods as the American Revolution, slavery, McCarthyism, and today's gay liberation movement. This book argues that the rhetoric of reform in America represents the continuation of a tradition separate from the commonly accepted principles of the Greeks.
At a time when social movements led by religious leaders, from Louis Farrakhan to Pat Buchanan, are playing a central role in American politics, the author connects this radical tradition with its prophetic roots.
Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History
Philosophy of history is currently dominated by postmodernist anti-realists who claim that historiography can never provide true accounts of the past. The Poverty of Anti-realism exposes the faulty premises and reasoning behind such assertions and shows that anti-realism has political implications unforeseen and unwanted by its adherents.
Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subjec
This work provides a historically grounded critique of postmodernism, and a history of how the socialist left has helped to create its ideas. In the course of this two-sided critique, it develops an account of a Marxism that sets itself the task of building a collective political subject.
Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subjec
This work provides a historically grounded critique of postmodernism, and a history of how the socialist left has helped to create its ideas. In the course of this two-sided critique, it develops an account of a Marxism that sets itself the task of building a collective political subject.
This post-colonial and feminist reading of the Enlightenment explores the proto-postmodernist practice of examining ones conclusions through the eyes of the Other. Self-estrangement to gain critical distance from ones taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the Enlightenment, and remains vital for critical sociopolitical thinking today.
Isaiah Berlin is widely acknowledged as a major figure in twentieth-century political philosophy and the history of ideas. This book examines Berlin's work across its whole range, including his treatment of Marx, Russian thinkers, Jewish themes, liberty, pluralism, the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, nationalism, history, and religion.
With in-depth empirical analysis of a range of case studies, this book offers a comprehensive genealogy of the concepts of economy, despotism and voluntary servitude and provides a thorough and coherent reflection on the wider socio-political agenda of contemporary societies.
The title of this collection, The Logic of Racial Practice, pays homage to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term habitus to name the pretheoretical, embodied dispositions that orient our social interactions and meaningfully frame our lived experience. The language of habit uniquely accounts for not only how we are unreflectively ......
Habermas, Foucault, and Science as a Social Institution
Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society. It explores how science permeates shared human consciousness, to produce effects that ripple through ......
Habermas, Foucault, and Science as a Social Insitution
Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society.
History, Science, and Practice in American Psychoanalysis
"The advancement of psychoanalysis in America has reached an impasse. Scientists are pitted against hermeneuticists, theorists against practitioners, and narrative truth against historical truth, reflecting and refracting the role of the past in theory and therapy through a host of competing approaches. Leonard Lamm argues against the impossible ......
History, Science, and Practice in American Psychoanalysis
Sets out to unravel the opaque idea of the psychoanalytic past as expressed in numerous theoretical voices, from object relations to Lacanianism to ego psychology. To this end, the author looks at current debates on narrative truth, metapsychology and the role of the past in psychoanalysis.
The influence of Jules Lequier on the development of continental philosophy is currently being revived. Ghislain Deslandes introduces Lequier's thought while highlighting its influence in the development, throughout the twentieth century, including in process thought, pragmatism, existentialism, and phenomenology.