Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Political

Slavoj Zizek is perhaps the most important, original and enigmatic philosophers writing today. Many readers both inside and outside of the academy have been intrigued by both the man and his writing yet, given the density of his prose and the radical views he often espouses, they have struggled to get a handle on his basic positions. He draws upon and makes continual reference to the challenging concepts of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lacan, and Badiou. His prose is dense and frenetic and his dialectical twists and turns seem to make it impossible to attribute to him any specific position: he...

The Rights of Woman as Chimera examines Mary Wollstonecraft's intellectual relationship to Rousseau, Locke, and Aristotle. Although she learned much from each philosopher, her own thought cannot be said to be simply derivative of these thinkers. In considering "the woman question," Wollstonecraft levels important, but friendly, critiques of her male predecessors. She puts forth a conception of the nature of woman, which is informed by and consistent with her larger political philosophy, and this study endeavors to outline this conception of the nature of woman.

If humans are benevolent by nature, how do societies become corrupt? And how do governments founded upon the defense of individual rights degenerate into tyranny? These are the questions addressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, a strikingly original inquiry into much-explored issues of 18th-century (and subsequent) philosophy: human nature and the best form of government.
Rousseau takes an innovative approach by introducing a "hypothetical history" that presents a theoretical view of people in a pre-social condition and the ensuing effects of...

In setting forth his root-metaphor theory and examining six such hypotheses--animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism--Pepper surveys the whole field of metaphysics. Because this book is an analytical study, it stresses issues rather than men. It seeks to exhibit the sources of these issues and to show that some are unnecessary; that the rest gather into clusters and are interconnected in systems corresponding closely to the...