Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Social

This uniquely engaging introduction to Jean Baudrillard's controversial writings covers his entire career focusing on Baudrillard's central, but little understood, notion of symbolic exchange. Through the clarification of this key term a very different Baudrillard emerges: not the nihilistic postmodernist and enemy of Marxism and Feminism that his critics have constructed, but a thinker immersed in the social world and passionately committed to a radical theorizsation of it.

Above all Baudrillard sought symbolic spaces, spaces where we might all, if only temporarily, shake off the...

In this graceful, incisive book, writer-philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville reexamines the classical virtues to help us understand "what we should do, who we should be, and how we should live." In the process, he gives us an entirely new perspective on the value, relevance, and charm of the Western ethical tradition. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Simone Weil, by way of Aquinas, Kant, Rilke, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Rawls, among others, Comte-Sponville elaborates on the qualities that constitute the essence and excellence of humankind. Starting with politeness-almost a virtue-and...

This highly original book takes as its starting point a central question for nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy: how to represent the poor?

Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin's final texts in the 1930s, Untimely Beggar investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature's relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws...

This highly original book takes as its starting point a central question for nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy: how to represent the poor?

Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin's final texts in the 1930s, Untimely Beggar investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature's relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws...

People often bemoan the spread of malls, suburban strips, subdivisions, and other sprawling places in contemporary America. But are these places as bad as critics claim? In Sprawling Places, David Kolb questions widely held assumptions about our built environments.

Kolb agrees there is a lot not to like about many contemporary places, but to write them off simply as commodified nonplaces does not treat them critically. Too often, Kolb says, aesthetic character and urban authenticity are the focus of critics, when it is more important to understand a place s complexity and...

Engaging Anthropology takes an unflinching look at why the discipline has not gained the popularity and respect it deserves in the twenty-first century.While showcasing the intellectual power of discipline, Eriksen takes the anthropological community to task for its unwillingness to engage more proactively with the media in a wide range of current debates, from immigrant issues to biotechnology. Eriksen argues that anthropology needs to rediscover the art of narrative and abandon arid analysis and, more provocatively, anthropologists need to lose their fear of plunging into the...

A volume on the nature, ingredients, causes and consequences of human happiness by the father and son team of Anthony and Charles Kenny. The book is an updating of Johnson's famous lines: 'How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure Still to ourselves in every place consigned Our own felicity we make or find.'

Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to...

In Angels for the Burning, David Mura examines the experience of contemporary Asian-Americans and the various aspects of familial history between first-, second-, and third-generation Japanese-Americans. Mura believes one of poetry's tasks is to explore the challenges to our identities as we encounter various "others" and other visions of ourselves and our world. Mura's new collection of poems attempts to accomplish this task.

David Mura is a poet, nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. His numerous awards include a Lila Wallace Readers Digest...