Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Criticism

Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy is almost universally understood as the attempt to analyse and defend a morality based on individual autonomy. In The Kantian Imperative, Paul Saurette challenges this interpretation by arguing that Kant's 'imperative' is actually based on a problematic appeal to 'common sense' and that it is premised on, and seeks to further cultivate and intensify, the feeling of humiliation in every moral subject.

Discerning the influence of this model on a wide variety of historical and contemporary political thought and philosophy and critical of its...

Revealing and enlightening, "Conversations with Isaiah Berlin" gives a close view of one of the foremost thinkers of our time. Philosopher and leading proponent of liberal thinking, Isaiah Berlin has changed our sense of history and the world. His impact on the intellectual and political views of the second half of the twentieth century alone makes it critical to understand his works and analyze his thoughts, and these conversations are a perfect introduction to both. This revised edition follows Isaiah Berlin from Petrograd to Oxford, Washington to Moscow, and London to Jerusalem. The...

The crisis or "death" of philosophy currently identified both within and outside professional circles is commonly attributed to the failure to find universals in metaphysics, epistemology, and, most obviously, in valuational judgment. Profundity concentrates on an assumption uniformly upheld in the theory of value, that all human values are contextually dependent. Harrell contends, to the contrary, that there exists one major value that is universal to humans, regardless of context. That value is profundity, or depth.

Considering how "profundity" is used in our language...

In Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment, Denise Schaeffer challenges the common view of Rousseau as primarily concerned with conditioning citizens' passions in order to promote republican virtue and unreflective patriotism. Schaeffer argues that, to the contrary, Rousseau's central concern is the problem of judgment and how to foster it on both the individual and political level in order to create the conditions for genuine self-rule. Offering a detailed commentary on Rousseau's major work on education, Emile, and a wide-ranging analysis of the relationship...

Film noir is a classic genre characterized by visual elements such as tilted camera angles, skewed scene compositions, and an interplay between darkness and light. Common motifs include crime and punishment, the upheaval of traditional moral values, and a pessimistic stance on the meaning of life and on the place of humankind in the universe. Spanning the 1940s and 1950s, the classic film noir era saw the release of many of Hollywood's best-loved studies of shady characters and shadowy underworlds, including Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Touch of Evil, and The Maltese Falcon. Neo-noir...

In his influential philosophical work Insight, Bernard Lonergan made the intriguing and problematic claim that "the polymorphism of consciousness is the one and only key to philosophy." In Lonergan on Philosophical Pluralism, Gerard Walmsley examines Lonergan's many discussions of the different forms of human consciousness, as well as his sustained responses to the problems raised by philosophical and cultural pluralism.

Looking closely at Lonergan's thoughts on patterns of experience, different levels of consciousness, and the differentiations of consciousness that occur...