Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Criticism

In the past two and a half decades, Walter Benjamin's early essay 'Towards the Critique of Violence' (1921) has taken a central place in politico-philosophic debates. The complexity and perhaps even the occasional obscurity of Benjamin's text have undoubtedly contributed to the diversity, conflict, and richness of contemporary readings. Interest has heightened following the attention that philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have devoted to it. Agamben's own interest started early in his career with his 1970 essay, 'On the Limits of Violence', and Benjamin's essay...

David Hume is traditionally seen as a devastating critic of religion. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles sits at the heart of the narrative overview of his work that perennially indoctrinates thousands of first-year philosophy students. In Toward a Humean True Religion, Andre Willis succeeds in complicating Hume's split approach to religion, showing that Hume was not, in fact, dogmatically against religion in...

Adam Smith (1723-90) is perhaps best known as one of the first champions of the free market and is widely regarded as the founding father of capitalism. From his ideas about the promise and pitfalls of globalization to his steadfast belief in the preservation of human dignity, his work is as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth century. Here, Ryan Hanley brings together some of the world's finest scholars from across a variety of disciplines to offer new perspectives on Smith's life, thought, and enduring legacy.

Contributors provide succinct and accessible discussions of...

Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the...

Does love command an ineffability that remains inaccessible to the philosopher?

Thinking About Love considers the nature and experience of love through the writing of well-known Continental philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Evolving forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand new approaches to and ways of talking about love. Rather than offering prescriptive claims, this volume explores how one might think about the concept...

In this volume, John Warner grapples with one of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's chief preoccupations: the problem of self-interest implicit in all social relationships. Not only did Rousseau never solve this problem, Warner argues, but he also believed it was fundamentally unsolvable--that social relationships could never restore wholeness to a self-interested human being.

This engaging study is founded on two basic but important questions: what do we want out of human relationships, and are we able to achieve what we are after? Warner traces his answers through the contours of Rousseau's...

This book focuses on Michel Foucault's late work on rights in order to address broader questions about the politics of rights in the contemporary era. As several commentators have observed, something quite remarkable happens in this late work. In his early career, Foucault had been a great critic of the liberal discourse of rights. Suddenly, from about 1976 onward, he makes increasing appeals to rights in his philosophical writings, political statements, interviews, and journalism. He not only defends their importance; he argues for rights new and as-yet-unrecognized. Does Foucault simply...

In Metaphilosophy, Henri Lefebvre works through the implications of Marx's revolutionary thought to consider philosophy's engagement with the world. Lefebvre takes Marx's notion of the "world becoming philosophical and philosophy becoming worldly" as a leitmotif, examining the relation between Hegelian-Marxist supersession and Nietzschean overcoming. Metaphilosophy is conceived of as a transformation of philosophy, developing it into a programme of radical worldwide change. The book demonstrates Lefebvre's...

Our culture is obsessed with youth--and why not? What's the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading possibility for experience?

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect--and demand--very little from it. In Why Grow Up?, she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of...

Lonergan's Insight has frequently been compared with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Giovanni B. Sala, an internationally acknowledged Kant scholar, contrasts the cognitional theory of his former teacher Lonergan with the positions of Kant that have proved so influential, and in many ways so intractable, over the past two centuries.

The first essay is one of the most influential papers ever written on Lonergan; it and the second one inquire into the notion of the a priori. The third essay presents a detailed analysis of Kantian intuitionism and contrasts it with the knowledge as...