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The Vocation of Man
by Peter Preuss Johann Gottlieb FichteContents:Translator's Introduction Selected Bibliography Note on the TextThe Vocation of ManPreface Book One: Doubt Book Two: Knowledge Book Three: Faith
The Vocation of Writing: Literature, Philosophy, and the Test of Violence (SUNY series, Literature . . . in Theory)
by Marc CréponWithin the violence our societies must confront today exists a dimension proper to language. Anyone who has been through the educational system, for example, recognizes how language not only shapes and models us, but also imposes itself upon us. During the twentieth century, this system revealed how language can condemn one to a certain death. In The Vocation of Writing, philosopher Marc Crépon explores this dimension of language, convinced that the node of all violence pertains first to language and how we make use of it. Crépon focuses on Kafka, Levinas, Singer, and Derrida, not only because each rose against commandeering language in order to warn against the next massacres, but also because their work affirms the vocation of writing—that which makes literature and philosophy the final weapon for unmasking the violence and hatred that language bears at its heart. To affirm the vocation of writing is to turn language against itself, to defuse its murderous potentialities by opening it toward exchange, responsibility, and humanity when the latter fixes the other and the world as its goals.
The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction
by Lynda Lytle HolmstromOver the past half-century, Eric Voegelin has produced a demanding body of writing on the philosophy of history and the history of political theory since antiquity. This is the first full-scale treatment of his inquiry into the reality of man's political existence. It includes close readings of the texts, with Voegelin's own comments on them interspersed, offering a thorough explication of the philosopher's quest.Incorporating an "Autobiographical Memoir" prepared in collaboration with Voegelin especially for the volume, Ellis Sandoz interweaves the events of this great thinker's life with the philosophical inquiry to which that life has been devoted. Among the uniquely engaging biographical subjects covered are Voegelin's reminiscences of his involvement with such seminal minds as Max Weber, and with Karl Kraus, Hans Kelsen, and other lights of Vienna's intellectual community of the 1920s and 1930s; a full discussion of his early responses to national socialism and his escape from the Anschluss in 1938; and a summary of his early years in America, with particular attention to the years at Louisiana State University with Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Heilman.Carefully analyzing Voegelin's contribution to our understanding of ourselves, Sandoz convincingly argues that Voegelin's achievement is revolutionary. He emphasizes the common sense running through Voegelin's thought, and reveals how Voegelin reached a new analysis of reality and provides us with a new science of human affairs. Sandoz does not reveal the "truth to end the quest for truth," but shows how such "stop history" answers are defective. Exploring the meaning of that "first truth" as it has been intellectually and spiritually unraveled by one of our century's leading thinkers, Voegelinian Revolution shows anyone interested in politics and human affairs how to follow Voegelin's path. This book will be of interest to historians, political theorists, students of philosophy and religion, and educated readers concerned about the plight of American/Western civilization and looking for a new view on our current "crisis."
The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters (Legacies of Social Thought)
by Anna Julia CooperRecently Anna Julia Cooper has emerged as the most important classic writer in the tradition of African American feminist thought. Mary Helen Washington described Cooper's work as "the most precise, forceful, well-argued statement of black feminist thought to come out of the nineteenth century." This is the first collection of all of Cooper's major writings, including many never before published. It includes all of the essays from her famous book, A Voice from the South, in addition to many other essays and letters accessible only in archives until now. The organization of this important new collection lends itself to a clearer understanding of the major themes and contributions of Cooper's thought, her development as a thinker and writer, and the critiques and controversies surrounding her work. Lemert and Bhan introduce Cooper as an activist, settlement founder, school teacher, college president, linguist, and scholar—a life that paralleled the prodigious accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois in so many ways.
The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
by Gert-Jan van der HeidenFrom analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato's literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought.
The Voice of Reason
by Ayn Rand Leonard PeikoffBetween 1961, when she gave her first talk at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, and 1981, when she gave the last talk of her life in New Orleans, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as varied as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces, written in the last decades of Rand's life, are gathered in book form for the first time. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor. The work concludes with Peikoff's epilogue, "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir," which answers the question "What was Ayn Rand really like?" Important reading for all thinking individuals, Rand's later writings reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. This collection communicates not only Rand's singular worldview, but also the penetrating cultural and political analysis to which it gives rise.
The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
by Ayn Rand Leonard PeikoffBetween 1961, when she gave her first talk at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, and 1981, when she gave the last talk of her life in New Orleans, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as varied as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces, written in the last decades of Rand's life, are gathered in book form for the first time. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor. The work concludes with Peikoff's epilogue, "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir," which answers the question "What was Ayn Rand really like?" Important reading for all thinking individuals, Rand's later writings reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. This collection communicates not only Rand's singular worldview, but also the penetrating cultural and political analysis to which it gives rise.
The Voice of the Thunder
by Sir Laurens Van Der PostFrom the beginning, Lauren Van Der Post has been aware of a dimension in life far longer and more significant than the outer eventfulness of everyday living. His perception of life's mysterious power began with the Bushman, the first people of his native Africa, and grew in the universal imagery of dreams, the fertile legends and stories of ancient civilization, the intuitive teaching of prophets, poets and other pioneers of human awareness. In this book he has brought together two of his most deeply felt and far reaching essays, and has extended their message with great imaginative insight, exploring the potential in all men and women to acquire self-knowledge and to live life according to its fundamental precepts.
The Voices and Rooms of European Bioethics (Biomedical Law and Ethics Library)
by Richard Huxtable Ruud Ter MeulenThis book reflects on the many contributions made in and to European bioethics to date, in various locations, and from various disciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the book advances understanding of the academic and social status of European bioethics as it is being supported and practiced by various disciplines such as philosophy, law, medicine, and the social sciences, applied to a wide range of areas. The European focus offers a valuable counter-balance to an often prominent US understanding of bioethics. The volume is split into four parts. The first contains reflection on bioethics in the past, present and future, and also considers how comparison between countries and disciplines can enrich bioethical discourse. The second looks at bioethics in particular locations and contexts, including: policy, boardrooms and courtrooms; studios and virtual rooms; and society, while the third part explores the translation of theories and concepts of bioethics into the clinical setting. The fourth and final section focuses on academic expressions of bioethics, as it is theorised in various disciplines and also as it is taught, whether in classrooms or at the patient’s bedside. The book features unique contributions from a range of experts including: Alastair V Campbell; Ruth Chadwick; Angus Dawson; Raymond G. De Vries; Suzanne Ost; Renzo Pegoraro; Rouven Porz; Paul Schotsmans; Jochen Vollmann; Guy Widdershoven and Hub Zwart. Chapter 10 of this book ''You Don't Need Proof When You've Got Instinct!': Gut Feelings and Some Limits to Parental Authority' by Giles Birchley is available under an open access CC BY NC ND license and can be viewed at: http://www.tandfebooks.com/userimages/ContentEditor/1438250845242/9780415737197_chapter10.pdf .
The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle
by Friedrich WaismannThe Voices of Wittgenstein brings for the first time, in both the original German and in English translation, over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind. This text is of key historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930's. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932 to 1935, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann. It also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann, closely based on these dictations.
The Voluntary Citizen: An Enquiry into the Place of Philanthropy in the Community (Routledge Revivals)
by Constance BraithwaiteOriginally published in 1938, The Voluntary Citizen discusses the distinctive features of charity and voluntary social service and gives the author’s views as to their scope and limitations, especially in relation to the public social services at the time.It also assembles and co-ordinates the available information about the income of various groups of charities and gives an estimate of the total income of all charities in England and Wales.The last section of the book describes in detail the organization and problems of district nursing as an example of a voluntarily organized social service.Today it can be read in its historical context.
The Voyage of the Beagle: Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (Modern Library Classics)
by Charles Darwin Steve JonesIn 1831, Charles Darwin embarked on an expedition that, in his own words, determined my whole career. The Voyage of the Beagle chronicles his five-year journey around the world and especially the coastal waters of South America as a naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle. While traveling through these unexplored countries collecting specimens, Darwin began to formulate the theories of evolution and natural selection realized in his master work, The Origin of Species. Travel memoir and scientific primer alike, The Voyage of the Beagle is a lively and accessible introduction to the mind of one of history's most influential thinkers.From the Trade Paperback edition. Includes and introduction by Steve Jones.
The Wabi-Sabi Way: Simple Principles to Bring Calm, Meaning & Authenticity to Your Daily Life
by Mike SturmEmbrace a perfectly imperfect life—the practical guide to wabi sabi With deep roots in Taoism, Shinto, and Buddhism, wabi sabi is a philosophical and spiritual stance that celebrates imperfection, impermanence, contentment, detachment, and natural beauty. The Wabi-Sabi Way can show you how to harness these ancient teachings to help relieve stress and anxiety in your daily life. From decluttering your home and your life to getting in touch with who you truly are, The Wabi-Sabi Way guides you on a more peaceful path through engaging reflections, self-inquiry, meditations, and more. Ultimately, this book's hands-on approach to wabi sabi can help you connect with the world around you in new ways and cultivate a lighter, more holistic outlook. This beginner's guide to wabi sabi can help you to: Live well—Explore the six guiding principles of wabi sabi, including simplicity, authenticity, contentment, detachment, spontaneity, and a return to nature. Manage stress—Discover wabi sabi's answers to easing modern concerns such as anxiety, busyness, competition, materialism, and self-regard. Flow with life—Practice self-inquiry and meditation inspired by age-old Japanese wisdom. Essential lessons to living an inspired existence come alive in The Wabi-Sabi Way.
The Wage Slave's Glossary
by Joshua Glenn Mark Kingwell Pseud SethWhen The Idler's Glossary was released in October 2008 the world was on the cusp of experiencing its greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Depending on your sense of irony, this was either foolhardy or prescient. The Wage Slave's Glossary, a second volume of anti-economic etymology, comes as we climb out of recession, and continues to explore and challenge the interconnected world of work and leisure and labor and how the language we use continues to keep us in chains.
The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice, and Submergence in German Realism (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)
by Alexander SorensonThe Waiting Water addresses one of the most recurrent and troubling motifs in German Realist literature—death by drowning. Characters find themselves before bodies of water, presented with the familiar realm above the surface and the unobservable, uncanny domain beneath it. With somber regularity, they then disappear into the depths. Alexander Sorenson explores the role that these hidden deaths in water play within a literary movement that set out precisely to reveal universal truths about human life. The poetics of submergence, he argues, revolve around two concepts fundamental to Poetic Realism—order and sacrifice.Focusing on texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, along with material from earlier and later epochs, The Waiting Water shows that the pervasive symbolism of drowning scenes in German Realism, which typically occur in zones of narrative invisibility on the social periphery, reveals the extent to which realist narrative uses the natural environment to work through deeply embedded and hidden tensions that troubled the social and moral life of the age.
The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)
by Thom van DoorenCrows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.The Wake of Crows is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.
The Wake of Imagination: Toward A Postmodern Culture
by Richard KearneyWith his remarkable range of vision, the author takes us on a voyage of discovery that leads from Eden to Fellini, from paradise to parody - plotting the various models of the imagination as: Hebraic, Greek, medieval, Romantic, existential and post-modern.
The Walking Dead and Philosophy
by William Irwin Christopher RobichaudThe story of The Walking Dead chronicles the lives of a group of survivors in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. The Walking Dead is an Eisner-award winning comic book series by writer Robert Kirkman. Started in 2003, the comic book continues to publish monthly and has published a total of 92 issues. The popularity of this comic book series led to graphic novel publications (see competing titles) as well as the critically acclaimed TV adaptation on AMC. The Walking Dead is AMC's highest-rated show ever surpassing even Mad Men's ratings at its peak. Both the comic book series and TV show force us to confront our most cherished values and ask: would we still be able to hold onto these things in such a world? What are we allowed to do? What aren't we? Are there any boundaries left? The Walking Dead and Philosophy will answer these and other questions: Is it ok to "opt out?" Is it morally acceptable to abandon Merle? What happens to law in a post-zombie world? Does marriage have any meaning anymore? What duty do survivors have to each other?
The Walking Dead and Philosophy: Zombie Apocalypse Now
by Wayne YuenRick, Lori, Shane, Carl, Dale, Andrea, and Michonne--human survivors of a zombie apocalypse--don't know much about philosophy, but philosophical ideas continue to shamble on through their world, and there's no excape from them.<P><P>The Walking Dead is both a hugely successful comics series and a popular TV show. This epic story of a zombie apocalypse is unique. It focuses on the long-term individual, social, and moral consequences of survival by small groups of humans in a world overrun by infected zombies.Guns, chainsaws, and machetes are not enough for survival: humans also need agreement on rules of conduct. Can equality or fairness have any polace in the post-apocalyptic world? Do theft or even assault and murder become okay under desperate circumstances? Who should be recognized as having political authority? What about eating human flesh? Should survivors have children?As zombies have low IQs, terrible manners, and the overpowering urge to eat people, do they have any rights at all? Am I still me if I become a zombie? Do zombies know anything? are they rational? Would it be ethical to train a zombie and keep it as a pet? What the heck are P-zombies? And why would we all jump at the chance
The Waltz of Reason: The Entanglement of Mathematics and Philosophy
by Karl Sigmund"A mind-bending jaunt ... that makes clear in fascinating detail how math is more than a sum of its parts" (Publishers Weekly) &“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,&” Plato warned would-be philosophers. Mathematician Karl Sigmund agrees. In The Waltz of Reason, he shows how mathematics and philosophy together have shaped our understanding of space, chance, logic, cooperation, voting, and the social contract. Sigmund shows how game theory is integral to moral philosophy, how statistics shaped the meaning of reason, and how the search for a logical basis for math leads to deep questions about the nature of truth itself. But this is no dry tome: Sigmund&’s wit and humor shine as brightly as his erudition.The Waltz of Reason is an engrossing history of ideas as vibrant as a ballroom full of dancers, one that empowers as it entertains, following the complex and occasionally dizzying steps of the thinkers who have molded our thought and founded our world.
The Wanderer King
by Theodore Deppe"In these elegant and searing poems, Theodore Deppe gives voice to the full complexity of human character, creating a world that is charged and expansive. With cinematic vividness and stunning eloquence, these poems examine the tensions between hope and despair, responsibility and mystery - as if a sacred universe we were in danger of losing had been stayed at the moment of vanishing. The dramatic monologues are a triumph of the imagination." --Betsy Sholl
The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy
by Federico FinchelsteinMeet today's almost fascists and learn the warning signs to intercept them on the road from populism to dictatorship. With The Wannabe Fascists, historian Federico Finchelstein offers a precise explanation of why Trumpism and similar movements across the world belong to a new political breed, the last outcome of the combined histories of fascism and populism: the wannabe fascists. This new type of populist politician is typically a legally elected leader who, unlike previous populists who were eager to distance themselves from fascism, turns to totalitarian lies, racism, and illegal means to destroy democracy from within. Drawing on almost three decades of research on the histories of fascism and populism around the world, this book lays out in clear language what the author calls the "four pillars of fascism"—xenophobia, propaganda, political violence, and ultimately dictatorship. Finchelstein carefully explains how and why wannabe fascists like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi embrace the first three pillars but don't quite succeed in dictatorship and total suppression of the popular vote. The Wannabe Fascists stresses the importance of preventing despots from reaching this tipping point and offers a clear warning for what's at stake.
The War Game: Studies of the New Civilian Militarists
by Irving Louis HorowitzWar gaming has become a characteristic feature of modern life. From amateur clubs to professional academicians playing the war game in the company of military circles, we have come up against the phenomenon of the "robotization" of human life. Irving Louis Horowitz argues that those who protest the idea that war is a game do so on moral grounds that leave unanswered tough questions: What is the alternative to playing the game? What will become of us if we allow the opponent to become the better "player" in an all-or-nothing game of extinction?Horowitz provides answers in a logical manner while focusing on facts and ethical alternatives to risky ethics. The work is divided into three sections: The New Civilian Militarists, Thermonuclear Peace and Its Political Equivalents, and General Theory of Conflict and Conflict Resolution. Included are such topics as arms, policies, and games; morals, missiles, and militarism; and conflict, consensus, and cooperation.Horowitz concludes that it is time to register the fact that the basic option to destructive uses of science is not traditional morality, but better science a science of survival. With a new introduction by Howard Schneiderman along with a major essay and other materials not included in the original edition, this classic work is a worthy contribution to intellectual debate in the twenty-first century and a must read for military strategists, sociologists, and historians.
The War Ledger
by Jacek Kugler A.F.K. OrganskiThe War Ledger provides fresh, sophisticated answers to fundamental questions about major modern wars: Why do major wars begin? What accounts for victory or defeat in war? How do victory and defeat influence the recovery of the combatants? Are the rules governing conflict behavior between nations the same since the advent of the nuclear era? The authors find such well-known theories as the balance of power and collective security systems inadequate to explain how conflict erupts in the international system. Their rigorous empirical analysis proves that the power-transition theory, hinging on economic, social, and political growth, is more accurate; it is the differential rate of growth of the two most powerful nations in the system—the dominant nation and the challenger—that destabilizes all members and precipitates world wars. Predictions of who will win or lose a war, the authors find, depend not only on the power potential of a nation but on the capability of its political systems to mobilize its resources—the "political capacity indicator." After examining the aftermath of major conflicts, the authors identify national growth as the determining factor in a nation's recovery. With victory, national capabilities may increase or decrease; with defeat, losses can be enormous. Unexpectedly, however, in less than two decades, losers make up for their losses and all combatants find themselves where they would have been had no war occurred. Finally, the authors address the question of nuclear arsenals. They find that these arsenals do not make the difference that is usually assumed. Nuclear weapons have not changed the structure of power on which international politics rests. Nor does the behavior of participants in nuclear confrontation meet the expectations set out in deterrence theory.
The War Lover: A Study Of Plato's Republic
by Leon Harold Craig Leon H. CraigThis new examination of the Republic begins with questions ignored by most students of this famous and much-studied dialogue. Why is Plato's most extensive portrait of philosophy pervaded with the language and imagery of war? Why is a discussion supposedly about justice almost entirely about how to educate natural warriors? Why must the philosopher-kings of Kallipolis be first of all 'champions of war'? Why is the supposedly 'feminine drama' of Book Five preoccupied with war? The pursuit of questions such as these brings Craig to an understanding of Plato's teaching about justice, philosophy, and politics that differs radically from what is generally held today. The search for why the Republic's philosophers come from the ranks of 'war lovers' leads Craig to reassess the relation between the `city in logos' and timocracy (the regime openly dedicated to war), and this reassessment in turn brings a new perspective on Plato's political thought in general. Similarly, analysis of the timocratic man leads to a deeper understanding of the psychology on which the whole dialogue is based, especially its teaching about justice and its treatment of love. Following the dialogue's hint that language provides the `tracks' of ideas, Craig compares the four distinct kinds of love that figure in the dialogue, and thereby helps clarify several puzzling issues, not the least of which is the strange kinship between the philosopher and the tyrant. And through examining the peculiar problems posed by what he argues are two distinct kinds of timocrats - exemplified by Glaukon and Adeimantos - Craig illuminates the rationale underlying both educational schemes sketched in the dialogue: the political one of Books Two and Three and the pre-philosophical one of Book Seven. One chapter explores the analogical and allegorical dimensions of Book Five, as well as its actual political implications; there Craig offers clarification of the contemporary debate about sex roles. In bringing the Republic vividly to life, Craig shows that Plato's ideas on virtually all questions of permanent interest to human beings provide a corrective to views now in vogue. The War Lover is thus as much a commentary on contemporary intellectual and political life as it is a challenging new interpretation of an ancient text.