Inventing Philosophy's Other PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Strassfeld
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226821587
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
The history of phenomenology, and its absence, in American philosophy. Phenomenology and so-called “continental philosophy” receive scant attention in most American philosophy departments, despite their foundational influence on intellectual movements such as existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. In Inventing Philosophy’s Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth-century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom holds that phenomenology’s absence from the philosophical mainstream in the United States reflects its obscurity or even irrelevance to America’s philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this story as he traces phenomenology’s reception in America, delivering the first systematic historical study of the movement in the United States. He examines the lives and works of Marjorie Grene, Alfred Schütz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing a fresh introduction to phenomenological philosophy.

Author: Jonathan Strassfeld
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226821595
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
"Phenomenology was first described by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and developed by a group of thinkers that includes Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The works of these philosophers were a foundational influence on many of twentieth-century Europe's most important intellectual movements, including existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. Yet in most American philosophy departments, phenomenology and the corpus of works branded "continental philosophy" received scant attention. In Inventing Philosophy's Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday administrative needs and institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom has held that the absence of continental philosophy from America's philosophical mainstream reflects its obscurity or even irrelevance to America's philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this oft-told story as he traces phenomenology's reception in America, delivering the first systematic historical study of the movement in the United States. He examines the lives and works of Marjorie Grene, Alfred Schütz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing an introduction to phenomenological philosophy"--

Author: Michela Beatrice Ferri
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331999185X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
This book presents a historiographical and theorical analysis of how Husserlian Phenomenology arrived and developed in North America. The chapters analyze the different phases of the reception of Edmund Husserl’s thought in the USA and Canada. The volume discusses the authors and universities that played a fundamental role in promoting Husserlian Phenomenology and clarifies their connection with American Philosophy, Pragmatism, and with Analytic Philosophy. Starting from the analysis of how the first American Scholars of Edmund Husserl's thought opened the door to the reception of his texts, the book explores the first encounters between Pragmatism and Husserlian Phenomenology in American Universities. The study focuses, then, on those Scholars who fled from Europe to America, from 1933 onwards, to escape Nazism - Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Herbert Spiegelberg, Fritz Kaufmann, among the most notable - and illustrates how their teaching provided the very basis for the spreading of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. The volume examines, then, the action of the 20th Century North-American Husserl Scholars, together with those places, societies, centers, and journals, specifically created to represent the development of the studies devoted to Husserlian Phenomenology in the U.S., with a focus of the Regional Phenomenological Schools.

Author: Jon Mills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317218442
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value. After demonstrating the lack of any empirical evidence and the logical impossibility of God, Mills explains the psychological motivations underlying humanity’s need to invent a supreme being. In a highly nuanced analysis of unconscious processes informing the psychology of belief and institutionalized social ideology, he concludes that belief in God is the failure to accept our impending death and mourn natural absence for the delusion of divine presence. As an alternative to theistic faith, he offers a secular spirituality that emphasizes the quality of lived experience, the primacy of feeling and value inquiry, ethical self-consciousness, aesthetic and ecological sensibility, and authentic relationality toward self, other, and world as the pursuit of a beautiful soul in search of the numinous. Inventing God will be of interest to academics, scholars, lay audiences and students of religious studies, the humanities, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines. It will also appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804747981
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
A twenty-eight essay collection that is published in two volumes. This work includes translations of seminal essays such as "Psyche: Invention of the Other," "The Retrait of Metaphor," "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," "Tours de Babel" and "Racism's Last Word"; as well as three essays that appear in English.

Author: John M. Cooper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069115970X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This is a major reinterpretation of ancient philosophy that recovers the long Greek and Roman tradition of philosophy as a complete way of life--and not simply an intellectual discipline. Distinguished philosopher John Cooper traces how, for many ancient thinkers, philosophy was not just to be studied or even used to solve particular practical problems. Rather, philosophy--not just ethics but even logic and physical theory--was literally to be lived. Yet there was great disagreement about how to live philosophically: philosophy was not one but many, mutually opposed, ways of life. Examining this tradition from its establishment by Socrates in the fifth century BCE through Plotinus in the third century CE and the eclipse of pagan philosophy by Christianity, Pursuits of Wisdom examines six central philosophies of living--Socratic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, and the Platonist life of late antiquity. The book describes the shared assumptions that allowed these thinkers to conceive of their philosophies as ways of life, as well as the distinctive ideas that led them to widely different conclusions about the best human life. Clearing up many common misperceptions and simplifications, Cooper explains in detail the Socratic devotion to philosophical discussion about human nature, human life, and human good; the Aristotelian focus on the true place of humans within the total system of the natural world; the Stoic commitment to dutifully accepting Zeus's plans; the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure through tranquil activities that exercise perception, thought, and feeling; the Skeptical eschewal of all critical reasoning in forming their beliefs; and, finally, the late Platonist emphasis on spiritual concerns and the eternal realm of Being. Pursuits of Wisdom is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what the great philosophers of antiquity thought was the true purpose of philosophy--and of life.

Author: Bennett Gilbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351216244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Historical study has traditionally been built around the placement of the human at the center of inquiry. The de-stabilized concepts of the human in contemporary thought challenge this configuration. However, the ways in which these challenges provoke new historical perspectives both expand and enrich historical study but are also weak and vulnerable in their concept of the human, lacking or omitting something valuable in our self-understanding. A Personalist Philosophy of History argues for a robust concept of personhood in our experience of the past as a way to resolve this conflict. Focused on those who know history, rather than on the abstract properties of knowledge, it extends the moral agency of persons into non-human, trans-human, and deep history domains. It describes an approach to moral life through historical experience and study, rather than through abstractions. And it describes a kind of historiography that matches factual accuracy to both the constructed nature of understanding and to unavoidable moral purpose.

Author: Larry Siedentop
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church. “It is a magnificent work of intellectual, psychological, and spiritual history. It is hard to decide which is more remarkable: the breadth of learning displayed on almost every page, the infectious enthusiasm that suffuses the whole book, the riveting originality of the central argument, or the emotional power and force with which it is deployed.” —David Marquand, New Republic “Larry Siedentop has written a philosophical history in the spirit of Voltaire, Condorcet, Hegel, and Guizot...At a time when we on the left need to be stirred from our dogmatic slumbers, Inventing the Individual is a reminder of some core values that are pretty widely shared.” —James Miller, The Nation “In this learned, subtle, enjoyable and digestible work [Siedentop] has offered back to us a proper version of ourselves. He has explained us to ourselves...[A] magisterial, timeless yet timely work.” —Douglas Murray, The Spectator “Like the best books, Inventing the Individual both teaches you something new and makes you want to argue with it.” —Kenan Malik, The Independent

Author: Luc Brisson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791497569
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
A parallel investigation of both Plato's Timaeusand the contemporary standard Big Bang model of the universe shows that any possible scientific knowledge of the universe is ultimately grounded in irreducible and undemonstrable propositions. These are inventions of the human mind. The scientific knowledge of the universe is entirely composed in a series of axioms and rules of inference underlying a formalized system. There is no logical relationship between the sensible perception of a world of becoming and the formalized system of axioms known as a "scientific explanation." The "irrational gap" between perception and explanation can be appraised historically and identified in three stages: Plato's Timaeus furnishes the first example of a scientific theory dealing with a realm of ideality that cannot be derived from immediate sensible perception; the Big Bang model is constituted on the basis of the purely geometrical notion of symmetry; and in the more recent Algorithmic Theory of Information, the analysis of the purely symbolic language expressing physical reality reveals the level of complexity of any given theory formulated in this language. The result is that the probability of the universe actually conforming with simple mathematics is zero. In a formal system, a theorem contains more information than can be found in the set of axioms of this system, and it remains undecidable. In Aristotle' s language, the theorems that can be proved within a theoretical model are already potentially contained in the system of axioms underlying these theorems.

Author: E.F. Kaelin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400925751
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
THEODORE KISIEL Date of birth: October 30,1930. Place of birth: Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. Date of institution of highest degree: PhD. , Duquesne University, 1962. Academic appointments: University of Dayton; Canisius College; Northwestern University; Duquesne University; Northern Illinois University. I first left the university to pursue a career in metallurgical research and nuclear technology. But I soon found myself drawn back to the uni versity to 'round out' an overly specialized education. It was along this path that I was 'waylaid' into philosophy by teachers like H. L. Van Breda and Bernard Boelen. The philosophy department at Duquesne University was then (1958-1962) a veritable "little Louvain," and the Belgian-Dutch connection exposed me to (among other visiting scholars) Jean Ladriere and Joe Kockelmans, who planted the seeds which eventually led me to the hybrid discipline of a hermeneutics of natural science, and prompted me soon after graduation to make the first of numerous extended visits to Belgium and Germany. The endeavor to learn French and German led me to the task of translating the phenomenological literature bearing especially on natural science and on Heidegger. The talk in the sixties was of a "continental divide" in philosophy between Europe and the Anglo-American world. But in designing my courses in the philosophy of science, I naturally gravitated to the works of Hanson, Kuhn, Polanyi and Toulmin without at first fully realizing why I felt such a strong kinship with them, beyond their common anti positivism.