Talking Wolves advances an analysis of Hobbes which takes language seriously (as seriously as Hobbes took it). It presents a reading of Hobbes's view of society at large, and political society in particular, through a comprehensive discussion based on, and intimately linked to, his philosophy of language. This philosophy, in turn, is seen in a new light as being a pragmatic theory of language in use, language in action.

During the last 20 years, philosophers from different quarters and with very different approaches have begun to theorize human rights in an outpouring of authored and edited books and journal articles. In addition, among policy makers and in the legal arena—the so called workings fields of human rights—there have been noteworthy investigations of human rights that tackle philosophical issues. In this book, Anat Biletzki brings a systematic approach to the multitudinous philosophical analyses of human rights, offering a cohesive overview (...) and analysis of this diverse but now very active field. She explores both the conceptual and historical treatments of human rights and the roots of its practice and examines its derivation from classical theories of rights all the way to existing uses. The book is "contemporary" in two senses: it investigates the most current human rights issues and it addresses emerging criticism of human rights, now arising in various sectors. A long introduction provides background information on the history of human rights, a synopsis of modern-day documents, and an articulation of basic questions. This is followed by a section on the philosophical groundings of human rights, proceeding from a philosophy of rights, to specific theories of human rights, to the questions of universalism vs. relativism. The third sections focuses on specific philosophical issues in human rights, including cultural relativity, economic rights, women’s rights, group, indigenous, and minority rights, security, and sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. And a final section on critiques of human rights has separate chapters on postmodernism, anti-foundationalism, and human rights discourse and practice. (shrink)

(Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein will be read by philosophers investigating Wittgenstein and by scholars, interpreters, students, and specialists, in both analytic and continental philosophy. It will intrigue readers interested in issues of interpretation and cultural studies. This book tells the story - as yet untold - of Wittgenstein interpretation during the past eighty years. It provides different interpretations, chronologies, developments, and controversies. It aims to discover the (socio-cultural rather than psychological) motives and motivations behind the philosophical community's project of interpreting Wittgenstein. As (...) a cultural history of ideas, it traces the parallelism between Wittgenstein interpretation and the move from metaphysics, to language, to postmodernism effected in the twentieth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.1 (2000) 59-73 [Access article in PDF] Thomas Hobbes: Telling the Story of the Science of Politics Anat Biletzki Science and storytelling First, the traditional commonplaces: Science does not tell stories. Disciplines purporting to be sciences eschew their storytelling aspects in favor of axiomatic, deductive, demonstrative, or whatnot essentials of science. Those deeming the story itself essential give up (happily or less willingly) the label (...) of science and locate themselves under other institutionalized labels such as Humanities. 1 Then there are the disciplines that wobble on the fence, desiring, for various reasons that are more readily analyzed by historical sociologists, the epithet of Science, yet not always achieving such recognition. Chief players in this game are history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. And if my rendition of this conflict between pretensions and performance seem blatantly pejorative, let me rephrase it: their own practitioners--historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists--believe the issue of their scientific status a problem of no small import. It is, indeed, the question "Are we a science?" that figures in the most fundamental debates concerning the purpose, essence, and methodology of these disciplines.By use of a case study, I will try to support a seemingly conciliatory thesis: social sciences are, by definition and therefore of necessity, on the fence. On one side of the fence lies Science, the monolithic framework that enslaves its method to a grand purpose--knowledge of reality. On the other lies Humanism, a far less easily defined area about which I would hesitate to use the word framework, but through which one meets a no-less-grandiose focus--knowledge of the human. Why then does it seem natural to foster storytelling on the humanistic side of the fence? Or, alternatively, one can ask about the "why not" of narrative in the sciences.Narrative is storytelling; and stories are about heroes; and heroes conduct their actions in a place through a time. So these three building blocks-- [End Page 59] hero, time, and place--point to a pattern of knowledge that, it seems obvious, cannot, and definitely should not, belong to science in its idealized form. There is, of course, a stronger thesis deriving from the intricacies in (post?)modern discussions: that even the exact and natural sciences use narrative while still remaining sciences. This idea--that science does countenance narrative and, indeed, may even use it beneficially--thereby becomes forceful, since science, with its universalistic airs, pretends to ignore heroes in specific times and places.What of the social sciences? Their claim to science is based on that same universalistic end coupled with an attempt to develop a methodology to fit that end. The rub lies in the subject matter of the social sciences, the human being and society. A strictly positivistic view of such subject matter, or even a generally scientific one, must abstract from any and all "humanistic" traits of the human being and society and objectively treat them on a par with any other "neutral" (some might say, even material) object of research. My weak thesis merely claims that such abstraction is inherently impossible and, furthermore, that an attempt at such abstraction waylays the ultimate end of these "sciences." 2 Yet, such a thesis must contribute more than it eliminates. If the social sciences cannot live up to the original scientific ideal of one side of the fence, and if their product can be valued as more than (or at least different from) a mere story on the other side, a more fruitful characterization than just "sitting on the fence" is called for. It is here that narrative makes its essential contribution: narrative is that pattern of knowledge which can encompass the social sciences, given their necessary turn to the human being. Looked at from the receiving end, the social sciences have no option but to turn to narrative in order to buttress their scientific ideal of explanation. The phenomena they claim to explain are human and social phenomena and, as such, cannot be distanced from narrative. 3I shall try to illustrate my... (shrink)

This article motions to a real contradiction between online security and civil rights. It traverses semantic and conceptual elaborations of both security and human rights, narrowing their range to national security and human rather than civil rights, and suggests that the concept of security itself, whether online or not, is a rhetorical instrument in the hands of interested parties, mostly states and militaries. This instrument is used to undermine human rights precisely by means of its association and even identification with (...) military and national settings. Asking whether the same ethics applies in the case of online security (vs. human rights), our tentative conclusion is that a similar moral determination rules in the case of online security, which may be exponentially more complex, but no less ethically compelling. (shrink)

This book tells the story of Wittgenstein interpretation during the past eighty years. It provides different interpretations, chronologies, developments, and controversies. It aims to discover the motives and motivations behind the philosophical community's project of interpreting Wittgenstein. It will prove valuable to philosophers, scholars, interpreters, students, and specialists, in both analytic and continental philosophy.

This unique collection looks at analytic philosophy in its historical context. Prominent philosophers discuss key figures, including Russell and Wittgenstein, methods and results in analytic philosophy to present its story. This volume assesses the challenge posed by changing cultural and philosophical trends and movements.

This volume, in memory of Ruth Manor, consists of articles presented at her memorial conference at Tel Aviv University. The articles, by colleagues and students, friends and family represent the wide range of interest and expertise that Manor brought to her teaching and research - from formal logic to pragmatics, and from rhetoric to ethics. The collection includes articles by Jaakko Hintikka, Arnon Avron, Oron Shagrir, Eli Dresner, Eran Guter, Amnon Wolman, Anat Matar, and Anat Biletzki. Emblematic of Manor's (...) hugh panoply of philosophical themes, the diversity and variety of subjects covered also portray her analytical profundity and logical proficiency at always seeing connections'. (shrink)

The Problem of Perception offers two arguments against direct realism--one concerning illusion, and one concerning hallucination--that no current theory of ...

A. H. Louie's More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms (...) are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings. (shrink)

This book argues for the use of nonideal theory in social ontology. The central claim is that a paradigm shift is underway in contemporary social ontology, from ideal to nonideal, and that this shift should be fully followed through. To develop and defend this central claim, the first step is to show that the key questions and central dividing lines within contemporary social ontology can be fruitfully reconstructed as a clash between two worlds, referred to as ideal and nonideal social (...) ontology. Ideal social ontology is characterized by consensus and cooperation, while nonideal social ontology is characterized by conflict and contestation. The second step is to show that, when taken together, objections to the standard model of ideal social ontology (the dominant version of ideal social ontology) imply that this model needs to be given up in favor of nonideal social ontology. In other words, we should look to nonideal rather than ideal social ontology for core concepts. The third step is to offer a positive account, called the power view, of nonideal social ontology. This account places the concept of social power at the core of a general theory of the social world and replaces the flat and narrow conception of power in ideal social ontology with a richer and more extensive conception. In addition, it rectifies a shortcoming in nonideal social ontology by attending to class, which has been notably and oddly overlooked in the literature. (shrink)

This companion is a cutting-edge primer to critical forms of the posthumanities and the feminist posthumanities, aimed at students and researchers who want to catch up with the recent theoretical developments in various fields in the humanities, such as new media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, human animal studies, postcolonial critique, philosophy and environmental humanities. It contains a collection of nineteen new and original short chapters introducing influential concepts, ideas and approaches that have shaped and developed (...) new materialism, inhuman theory, critical posthumanism, feminist materialism, and posthuman philosophy. A resource for students and teachers, this comprehensive volume brings together established international scholars and emerging theorists, for timely and astute definitions of a moving target – posthuman humanities and feminist posthumanities. (shrink)

I. Ókor -- II. A középkor és a reneszánsz -- III. Az újkor.

On fundamentals of Vedanta and science; a study.

Desde la aparición, en 1927, de su obra central Ser y tiempo, Martin Heidegger ha sido y sigue siendo considerado por amplios sectores de opinión como el filósofo más importante del siglo XX. Frente a esta sobrevaloración del filósofo de los Bosques Negros, Heleno Saña procede, en su documentadísimo libro, a una crítica de la filosofía heideggeriana, intentando demostrar que está basada en una tergiversación e instrumentalización sistemáticas de la terminología y los conceptos esenciales de la filosofía clásica. El resultado (...) final de sus ejercicios hermenéuticos y sus continuos malabarismos lingüísticos, es un irracionalismo de índole claramente nihilista, por su culto implícito y explícito a la muerte. En este sentido es altamente significativo que a la biografía y a la filosofía heideggerianas pertenezcan su adhesión al nacionalsocialismo y la glorificación de Alemania como la “raza de los señores” por excelencia, tema al que Heleno Saña dedica la debida atención. Uno de los signos distintivos de este ensayo es el de la claridad con que expone sus tesis, de manera que el libro no está pensado solo para eruditos, sino para todas las personas interesadas en ampliar sus conocimientos culturales y filosóficos. (shrink)

La admirable riqueza cultural y artística del Renacimiento esconde una desoladora miseria y aquella "edad de la abundancia" contrasta con una inmensa pobreza. Lejos de ser una broma o una pesadilla, la celebrada Utopía de Tomás Moro fue antes que nada un desafío insoslayable, pues proponía que ninguna sociedad merece tal nombre si tolera la miseria de un solo pobre. Rico y pobre explora la cuestión en ese libro de 1516 y en otros del escritor londinense para concluir con un (...) esbozo de su vida a la luz de la pobreza como virtud indispensable y libertadora. He aquí un hombre afortunado que no fue indiferente ante el infortunio de tantos y que vio en la humanitas la virtud por excelencia que lleva a una constante atención y cuidado del prójimo. Inspirado por un cambio de actitud en su época, así como por su fe cristiana y la mejor tradición estoica, mostró una robusta preocupación sobre el tema subrayando el valor social que debe tener toda riqueza, tanto a nivel estatal como individual, destacando la grave obligación cívica de los ricos y la necesidad que tienen todos, ricos y pobres, de empeñarse en la práctica de cierto desprendimiento y generosidad si no quieren mermar su propia humanidad y fallecer en su avaricia. La percepción de la miseria había cambiado de tal manera que su remedio ya no podía estar en una u otra limosna en plazas e iglesias, sino en la acción bien pensada y perentoria de todo gobierno que se tenga por justo. Sir Tomás Moro, privilegiado desde la cuna y seguro en su trabajo profesional, vio la pobreza de tantos como un desastre social, pero uno que, al mismo tiempo, debería llevar a todo ser humano a ver en el desprendimiento y generosidad una excelencia o virtud que alumbra la "otra" libertad, y tan íntima y valiosa que en su caso brilló aun en la prisión y ante el horror de una muerte injusta y atroz." -- Page 4 of cover. (shrink)