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Author: Robert Boyers Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231539894 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.
Author: Robert Boyers Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231539894 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.
Author: Lawrence Lessig Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0375726446 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pockets of media magnates, has rewritten copyright and patent laws to stifle creativity and progress. Lessig weaves the history of technology and its relevant laws to make a lucid and accessible case to protect the sanctity of intellectual freedom. He shows how the door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology is creating extraordinary possibilities that have implications for all of us. Vital, eloquent, judicious and forthright, The Future of Ideas is a call to arms that we can ill afford to ignore.
Author: Bill Emmott Publisher: Profile Books ISBN: 1782832998 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
When faced with global instability and economic uncertainty, it is tempting for states to react by closing borders, hoarding wealth and solidifying power. We have seen it at various times in Japan, France and Italy and now it is infecting much of Europe and America, as the vote for Brexit in the UK has vividly shown. This insularity, together with increased inequality of income and wealth, threatens the future role of the West as a font of stability, prosperity and security. Part of the problem is that the principles of liberal democracy upon which the success of the West has been built have been suborned, with special interest groups such as bankers accruing too much power and too great a share of the economic cake. So how is this threat to be countered? States such as Sweden in the 1990s, California at different times or Britain under Thatcher all halted stagnation by clearing away the powers of interest groups and restoring their societies' ability to evolve. To survive, the West needs to be porous, open and flexible. From reinventing welfare systems to redefining the working age, from reimagining education to embracing automation, Emmott lays out the changes the West must make to revive itself in the moment and avoid a deathly rigid future.
Author: Frederick C. Beiser Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674020696 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 414
Book Description
The Fate of Reason is the first general history devoted to the period between Kant and Fichte, one of the most revolutionary and fertile in modern philosophy. The philosophers of this time broke with the two central tenets of the modem Cartesian tradition: the authority of reason and the primacy of epistemology. They also witnessed the decline of the Aufkldrung, the completion of Kant's philosophy, and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism. Thanks to Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of Kant's critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present.
Author: Michael McDevitt Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 019086995X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
"Where Ideas Go to Die explores the troubled relationship of US journalism and intellect. A defender of common sense, the press is irked at intellect yet often dependent on its critical autonomy. A postwar observation from Richard Hofstadter applies to contemporary journalists: "Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: 'Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!'" The book nevertheless documents the prowess of news media in the policing of intellect. Control extends beyond suppression of ideas and ways of thinking to the aggressive rendering of dissent into deviance. The social control of intellect by journalism is accompanied by social control of journalism in newsrooms and in classrooms where norms are cultivated. Anti-intellectualism consequently operates like dark matter in media, a presence inferred by its effects rather than directly observed or acknowledged. When journalists anticipate a punitive public, the reified resentment is no more real than the fiction of omnipotent citizens in democratic theory, yet the audience imagined compels how intellect is rendered in the news as nuisance, deviance, or object of ridicule. Journalism's contribution to the social control of ideas is poignantly democratic: audiences are cast in consequential roles that affirm their wisdom in a closed, self-referential system. The book concludes with a discussion about what intellectual journalism would look like. Interviews with 25 "dangerous professors" demonstrate how alliances in the academic-media nexus can seed intellect in newswork"--
Author: John Martin Fischer Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199311293 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Our Fate collects John Martin Fischer's previously published articles on the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom. The book includes a substantial new introductory essay that puts all of the chapters into a cohesive framework, and presents a bold new account of God's foreknowledge of free actions in a causally indeterministic world.
Author: Léon Krier Publisher: Papadakis Publisher ISBN: 1901092038 Category : Architecture, Modern Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This polemic is essential reading for anyone converned with the state and direction of architecture and urban planning today and will provake wide-ranging discussion.
Author: Helen E. Longino Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691187010 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
Helen Longino seeks to break the current deadlock in the ongoing wars between philosophers of science and sociologists of science--academic battles founded on disagreement about the role of social forces in constructing scientific knowledge. While many philosophers of science downplay social forces, claiming that scientific knowledge is best considered as a product of cognitive processes, sociologists tend to argue that numerous noncognitive factors influence what scientists learn, how they package it, and how readily it is accepted. Underlying this disagreement, however, is a common assumption that social forces are a source of bias and irrationality. Longino challenges this assumption, arguing that social interaction actually assists us in securing firm, rationally based knowledge. This important insight allows her to develop a durable and novel account of scientific knowledge that integrates the social and cognitive. Longino begins with a detailed discussion of a wide range of contemporary thinkers who write on scientific knowledge, clarifying the philosophical points at issue. She then critically analyzes the dichotomous understanding of the rational and the social that characterizes both sides of the science studies stalemate and the social account that she sees as necessary for an epistemology of science that includes the full spectrum of cognitive processes. Throughout, her account is responsive both to the normative uses of the term knowledge and to the social conditions in which scientific knowledge is produced. Building on ideas first advanced in her influential book Science as Social Knowledge, Longino brings her account into dialogue with current work in social epistemology and science studies and shows how her critical social approach can help solve a variety of stubborn problems. While the book focuses on epistemological concerns related to the sociality of inquiry, Longino also takes up its implications for scientific pluralism. The social approach, she concludes, best allows us to retain a meaningful concept of knowledge in the face of theoretical plurality and uncertainty.