This book provides a perceptive analysis of the "narrative turn" that led Paul Ricoeur to his magisterial work Time and Narrative. Ricoeur has for many years explored the intersections of diverse strands of European philosophy, but it is his recent work that has attracted the most discussion and engendered the most debate in Europe and America. The Narrative Path explores the roots and meaning of that work. Two of the book's five essays reach back to Ricoeur's earlier work to clarify (...) his themes: Richard Kearney concentrates on the role of imagination in hermeneuties, and Maria Villela Petit explores the development of Ricoeur's concept of history from History and Truth to Time and Narrative. Two essays analyze the significance of Ricoeur's reflections on metaphoric and narrative language: Serge Mellinger looks at the relationship between time and poetry from the point of view of Ricoeur's discussions of the connection between time and narrative, and T. PeterKemp extends Ricoeur's analysis to argue that narration is indispensable to ethics. The book concludes with a reflection by Ricoeur himself on the linguistic, practical, and ethical dimensions of human beings, and with a bibliography of Ricoeur's work in English. T. PeterKemp teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. The Narrative Pathis based on a special issue of the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism, edited by David Rasmussen, who is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. (shrink)
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a global threat to physical and mental health worldwide. Research has highlighted adverse impacts of COVID-19 on wellbeing but has yet to offer insights as to how wellbeing may be protected. Inspired by developments in wellbeing science and guided by our own theoretical framework, we examined the role of various potentially protective factors in a sample of 138 participants from the United Kingdom. Protective factors included physical activity, tragic optimism, gratitude, social support, and nature connectedness. (...) Initial analysis involved the application of one-sample t-tests, which confirmed that wellbeing in the current sample was significantly lower compared to previous samples. Protective factors were observed to account for up to 50% of variance in wellbeing in a hierarchical linear regression that controlled for a range of sociostructural factors including age, gender, and subjective social status, which impact on wellbeing but lie beyond individual control. Gratitude and tragic optimism emerged as significant contributors to the model. Our results identify key psychological attributes that may be harnessed through various positive psychology strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of hardship and suffering, consistent with an existential positive psychology of suffering. (shrink)
This introduction to the philosophy of social science provides an original conception of the task and nature of social inquiry. Peter Manicas discusses the role of causality seen in the physical sciences and offers a reassessment of the problem of explanation from a realist perspective. He argues that the fundamental goal of theory in both the natural and social sciences is not, contrary to widespread opinion, prediction and control, or the explanation of events. Instead, theory aims to provide an (...) understanding of the processes which, together, produce the contingent outcomes of experience. Offering a host of concrete illustrations and examples of critical ideas and issues, this accessible book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of social science, and social scientists from a range of disciplines. (shrink)
There is no education, which can avoid being political. Still, the question is in which sense education is political, and if all education must be politics, or, if not, to what extent politics must be made the explicit telos of the formation and upbringing, and how the relation might be between the principles needed for education and those of the political sphere. -/- Today, after the successive collapses of the modern models of the good society, first realised socialism and then (...) neo-liberal market society, the question is what the standards should be for education and especially what the relation should be between these standards and politics. Do we for instance have to raise human beings to become citizens of a civic republic, a world society or a league of nations? Can education limit itself to local concerns or must it transcend the limits to become international, transnational or even global? Should we educate to a global social democracy? (shrink)
It would be an exaggeration to say that the Victorian age in England was philosophically barren; but it would not be a great exaggeration. By this somewhat uncomplimentary opening, I do not mean to imply that Victorian England contained no competent philosophers at all. Indeed, if one considers thinkers of the second and lower ranks only, their literary productivity was probably greater than those of any previous period in English, or even British, history, even if in sheer numbers they can (...) hardly compete with the prolific hordes of our own century. It is at the very highest level of philosophical greatness and originality that one finds the Victorian age wanting. The great period of British philosophy, which runs roughly from the 1630s to the 1770s, contains at least three thinkers who cannot be matched in the succeeding 140 years, Hobbes, Locke and Hume. (shrink)
The pioneering work of Edwin T. Jaynes in the field of statistical physics, quantum optics, and probability theory has had a significant and lasting effect on the study of many physical problems, ranging from fundamental theoretical questions through to practical applications such as optical image restoration. Physics and Probability is a collection of papers in these areas by some of his many colleagues and former students, based largely on lectures given at a symposium celebrating Jaynes' contributions, on the occasion of (...) his seventieth birthday and retirement as Wayman Crow Professor of Physics at Washington University. The collection contains several authoritative overviews of current research on maximum entropy and quantum optics, where Jaynes' work has been particularly influential, as well as reports on a number of related topics. In the concluding paper, Jaynes looks back over his career, and gives encouragement and sound advice to young scientists. All those engaged in research on any of the topics discussed in these papers will find this a useful and fascinating collection, and a fitting tribute to an outstanding and innovative scientist. (shrink)
Introduction -- Pragmatism and science -- Pragmatic philosophy of science and the charge of scientism -- John Dewey and American psychology -- John Dewey and American social science -- Culture and nature -- Not another epistemology -- Naturalism and subjectivism -- Naturalizing epistemology : recent developments in psychology and the sociology of knowledge -- Democracy -- American democracy : a new spirit in the world -- John Dewey : anarchism and the political state -- Philosophy and politics : a historical (...) approach to Marx and Dewey -- John Dewey and the problem of justice -- Liberalism's discontent : America in search for past that never was -- Why not Dewey? -- The evasion of philosophy -- Democratic hope -- Analytic pragmatism -- Post-modern pragmatism. (shrink)
The question is: how shall we conceive the idea of justice in the world of violence of our time? It takes up the old symbol of justice: the scales that symbolise an equilibrium between different ambitions. The author traces this idea in Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle through Kant to Rawls, Ricoeur and Delmas-Marty for whom it becomes the symbol of global justice. By using the wind rose as another symbol, Delmas-Marty expresses the ethical necessity of a global justice (...) between the philosophical, legal, social and political ambitions that blow across our whole world. All these winds have their rights in globalization, but none of them have the right to dominate the others. (shrink)
Taking as its starting-point Frédéric Worms’s Les maladies chronique de la Démocratie, this paper shows the links between three kinds of interconnections: planetary, socio-cultural, and interpersonal. The contemporary refusal of interdependence is illustrated by an examination of three sicknesses: empiricism, racism, and ultraliberalism. It is proposed that the challenge they represent can be met by a cosmopolitanism inspired in part by both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant.
Absolute identity seems at first sight to be presupposed in the branch of formal logic called identity theory. Classical identity theory may be obtained by adjoining a single schema to ordinary quantification theory.
Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of (...) the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body. (shrink)
Topos Theory is an important branch of mathematical logic of interest to theoretical computer scientists, logicians and philosophers who study the foundations of mathematics, and to those working in differential geometry and continuum physics. This compendium contains material that was previously available only in specialist journals. This is likely to become the standard reference work for all those interested in the subject.
Topos Theory is an important branch of mathematical logic of interest to theoretical computer scientists, logicians and philosophers who study the foundations of mathematics, and to those working in differential geometry and continuum physics. This compendium contains material that was previously available only in specialist journals. This is likely to become the standard reference work for all those interested in the subject.
Topos Theory is a subject that stands at the junction of geometry, mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, and it derives much of its power from the interplay of ideas drawn from these different areas. Because of this, an account of topos theory which approaches the subject from one particular direction can only hope to give a partial picture; the aim of this compendium is to present as comprehensive an account as possible of all the main approaches and thereby to (...) demonstrate the overall unity of the subject. The material is organised in such a way that readers interested in following a particular line of approach may do so by starting at an appropriate point in the text. (shrink)
In this overview of the cosmopolitan ideal, philosopher PeterKemp argues that in the twenty-first century cosmopolitanism is the only viable guiding ideal for politics and education in an increasingly interdependent world.
Topos Theory is a subject that stands at the junction of geometry, mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, and it derives much of its power from the interplay of ideas drawn from these different areas. Because of this, an account of topos theory which approaches the subject from one particular direction can only hope to give a partial picture; the aim of this compendium is to present as comprehensive an account as possible of all the main approaches and thereby to (...) demonstrate the overall unity of the subject. The material is organised in such a way that readers interested in following a particular line of approach may do so by starting at an appropriate point in the text. (shrink)
Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...
The essays gathered here give voice to perspectives on the always improvised relationship between technology and cultural values from Africa, the Americas, Asia ...
What transformation would happen if we could combine the best of liberal politics with psychology? _Awakening our Faith in the Future_ investigates the avenues for creating a new branch of psychology, a transformative political psychology. In the past, political psychology has focused directly on analysis and knowledge acquisition, rather than on interventions that transform self and culture. A transformative political psychology combines the best of traditional social science with the transformative intent of clinical psychology in order to create a new (...) political culture. Peter T. Dunlap suggests that while liberals focus intently outside of themselves on changing the world, those with psychological interests focus much more internally on changing themselves. In this book, he argues that by combining political liberalism and psychology, and encouraging psychologists to develop cultural learning practices based on ideas of self- knowledge, there is opportunity to transform our political culture. Divided into five parts, this book explores: stories of political destiny questions of development opportunities for political development a speculative theory of cultural evolution practices of a political psychologist. This scholarly text uses personal experiences and the stories of progressive political leaders as pathways for addressing political problems, making it ideal reading for professionals and students in the fields of both politics and psychology as well as for activists interested in the future of liberalism. (shrink)
The study of natural law theories is presently one of the most fruitful areas of research in the studies of early modern intellectual history, and moral and political theory. Likewise the historical significance of the Enlightenment for the development of `modernisation' in many different forms continues to be the subject of controversy. This collection therefore offers a timely opportunity to re-examine both the coherence of the concept of an `early Enlightenment', and the specific contribution of natural law theories to its (...) formation. The works of major thinkers such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Malebranche, Pufendorf and Thomasius are reassessed, and the appeal and importance of the discourse of natural jurisprudence both to those working inside conventional educational and political structures and to those outside - such as in the Huguenot diaspora - is evaluated. This volume will therefore be of importance to all those readers concerned to study the character of the debates in the period 1650-1750 surrounding moral and political agency, sovereignty and obligation, and the legitimation of religious toleration in the divergent states and patriotic contexts of Europe. (shrink)
