Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Criticism

It is now commonly acknowledged that numerous key players in and around the Bush administration's planning of the Iraq invasion were connected through a common background in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, a German-born University of Chicago professor who died in 1973. These Straussian "neocons" were held responsible for exploiting the September 11th attacks in order to further their own foreign policy agenda. Cloaked in Virtue is the first book to take a critical view of the political ideas of Leo Strauss himself by careful attention to his own writings before and after...

Long celebrated as a great aesthetic idealist and champion of the imagination, Coleridge is now beginning to be understood as a literary critic with many other dimensions, with exciting and far-reaching insights into language, and with detailed notions about the psychological, historical, and linguistic demands of the literary experience.

In this study, Timothy Corrigan sees Coleridge's criticism as "the product of an actively self-conscious reader, of a precise user of language, and, most of all, of a historical man involved with the demands of his day." Specifically he studies the...

Michel Foucault introduced a new form of political thinking and discourse. Rather than seeking to understand the grand unities of state, economy, or exploitation, he tried to discover the micropolitical workings of everyday life that have often founded the greater unities. He was particularly concerned with how we understand ourselves psychologically, and thus with how psychological knowledge developed and came to be accepted as true. In the course of his writings, he developed a genealogy of psychology, an account of psychology as a historically developed practice of power.

The...

If Edmund Husserl's true philosophy lay in his unpublished research manuscripts, as he argues, then it is in these - rather than the "introductions" and fragmentary studies he published during his lifetime - that we may possibly find a systematic of his philosophy. This work constitutes a study of the full range of Husserl's writings with the special task of uncovering there the systematic presentation or presentations of the transcendental phenomenological problematic. Sandmeyer's study contains an overview of Husserl's total set of writings, a translation of Husserl correspondence with...

The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy -- one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France -- provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics -- some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts -- intended to construct...

Unlike many of the major figures in Western philosophy, Kierkegaard explores many issues of interest to feminist theorists today. Moreover, he does so in a style labyrinthine, many-voiced, multilayered, adverse to authority that adumbrates ecriture feminine.

A major question probed in the volume is whether Kierkegaard's writings are misogynist, ambivalent, or essentialist in their views of women and the feminine or whether, in some important and vital ways, they are liberatory and empowering for feminists and women trying to free themselves from the maze of patriarchal constructs.

The...

This new edition of a well-regarded book provides a concise and exceptionally clear introduction to Habermas's work, from his early writings on the public sphere, through his work on law and the state, to his more recent discussion of science, religion and contemporary Europe. Outhwaite examines all of Habermas's major writings and steers a steady course through the many debates to which they have given rise. One major feature of this volume is that it provides a detailed critical analysis of Habermas's most important work, The Theory of Communicative Action. As well as looking at...