Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Essays

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensualityGeorges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and the subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is "a psychological quest not alien to death."

" . . . one of the most...

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his...

In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry, and in poems Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.

-Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death - precisely the perspective of poetry - and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility....

In Book I, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, Schweitzer argues that the essential feature of every culture is its world view, and that a culture can be healthy and stable only as its world view is optimistic and ethical. Without this outlook, it is impossible to avoid the world's destruction.

In Book II, Civilization and Ethics, he reviews the...

Heraclides of Pontus hailed from the shores of the Black Sea. He studied with Aristotle in Plato's Academy, and became a respected member of that school. During Plato's third trip to Sicily, Heraclides served as head of the Academy and was almost elected its head on the death of Speusippus. His interests were diverse. He wrote on the movements of the planets and the basic matter of the universe. He adopted a materialistic theory of soul, which he considered immortal and subject to reincarnation. He discussed pleasure, and like Aristotle, he commented on the Homeric poems. In addition, he...

Agamben's profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and...

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...

This book examines how individual, social, scientific, and ideological "realities" are constructed, after which we naively assume they are the "real" realities. Contributors include Ernst von Glaserfeld (known for his cognitive studies with chimpanzees); cybeneticist Heinz von Foerster; David L. Rosenhan (author of On Being Sane in Insane Places); microbiologist Francisco J. Varela; and Gabriel Stolzenberg, professor of mathematics at Northeastern University. Paul Watzlawick has contributed commentary, an introduction and an epilogue, and two of the ten essays.

For...

A collection of short essays that range across philosophy, politics, general culture, morality, science, religion and art, focusing on questions of meaning, value and understanding.

ENDORSEMENT BY

- Alan Massie

"Professor Haldane's essays are serious in the way that the great writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were serious. He asks what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, and what ethical obligations our idea of humanity imposes on us. They are provocative in the best, and only useful, sense of the word: inviting the reader to consider and...

Basic Writings is the finest single-volume anthology of the work of Martin Heidegger, widely considered one of the most important modern philosophers. Its selections offer a full range of the influential author's writings--including "The Origin of the Work of Art," the introduction to Being and Time, "What Is Metaphysics?," "Letter on Humanism," "The Question Concerning Technology," "The Way to Language," and "The End of Philosophy." Featuring a foreword by Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman, this essential collection provides readers with a concise introduction to the...

• Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them 'Relations Between Philosophy and Literature', 'Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading', 'Literature and the Moral Life', and 'Literary Language'
• Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness
• Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students...