Norberto Bobbio - Old Age and Other Essays

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Old Age and Other Essays

by Norberto Bobbio

This book by one of Italy's oldest and wisest intellectuals is a philosophical and personal meditation on ageing. The question of old age has preoccupied writers from Cicero to Améry, but in this volume Norberto Bobbio produces an account that is specific to our times. Born in 1909, Bobbio has lived through the major events of the past century, and his experiences of Fascism, Communism and the Cold War lend his reflections a melancholy that distinguishes them from earlier eulogies on old age and death. Bobbio's conclusions are often sobering, yet his investigation into memory and mortality is written with both humour and emotion. In the opening chapter, Bobbio reassesses the notion of progress from the perspective of an old man. Arguing for an understanding of historical change as the transfer between generations, Bobbio explains how the elderly are increasingly marginalized in contemporary society. Referring to the traditional idea of old age as the 'age of wisdom', Bobbio argues that our ever-accelerating technological progress has dramatically shifted the power of knowledge from old to young. This discussion of old age as a social problem is accompanied by a reflection on old age as a personal predicament. In his elegant and lucid prose, Bobbio confronts the facts of decrepitude and death. In taking stock of his life, he argues once again for the importance of democracy and human rights. This is a beautifully written book that will be of great interest to the academic and general reader alike. Its intellectual content renders it of particular value to students in the fields of philosophy, politics and the social sciences.

A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy

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A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy: 2 Volume Set (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy)

by Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, Thomas W. Pogge (Editors)

Product DescriptionThis new edition of A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy has been extended significantly to include 55 chapters across two volumes written by some of today's most distinguished scholars.
New contributors include some of today’s most distinguished scholars, among them Thomas Pogge, Charles Beitz, and Michael Doyle
Provides in-depth coverage of contemporary philosophical debate in all major related disciplines, such as economics, history, law, political science, international relations and sociology
Presents analysis of key political ideologies, including new chapters on Cosmopolitanism and FundamentalismIncludes detailed discussions of major concepts in political philosophy, including virtue, power, human rights, and just war

Walter Benjamin - The Arcades Project

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The Arcades Project

by Walter Benjamin

"Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest." --T. J. Clark, author of The Painting of Modern Life The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin "To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

The Cultures of Globalization

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The Cultures of Globalization (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

by Fredric Jameson, Ioan Davies, Subramani, Barbara Trent, Sherif Hetata, Joan Martinez-Alier, Noam Chomsky

A pervasive force, globalization has come to represent the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased to unprecedented levels in recent years. Here an international panel of intellectuals consider the process of globalization and how the global character of technology, communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have all been affected by recent worldwide trends.

Edward W. Said - presentations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures

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presentations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures

by Edward W. Said

Celebrated humanist, teacher, and scholar, Edward W. Said here examines the ever-changing role of the intellectual today. In these six stunning essays - delivered on the BBC as the prestigious Reith Lectures - Said addresses the ways in which the intellectual can best serve society in the light of a heavily compromised media and of special interest groups who are protected at the cost of larger community concerns. Said suggests a recasting of the intellectual's vision to resist the lures of power, money, and specialization. in these powerful pieces, Said eloquently illustrates his arguments by drawing on such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Regis Debray, Julien Benda, and Adorno, and by discussing current events and celebrated figures in the world of science and politics: Robert Oppenheimer, Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Said sees the modern intellectual as an editor, journalist, academic, or political adviser - in other words, a highly specialized professional - who has moved from a position of independence to an alliance with powerful institutional organizations. He concludes that it is the exile-immigrant, the expatriate, and the amateur who must uphold the traditional role of the intellectual as the voice of integrity and courage, able to speak out against those in power.

Georg Simmel - The Philosophy of Money

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The Philosophy of Money

by Georg Simmel

In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel provides us with a remarkably wide-ranging discussion of the social, psychological and philosophical aspects of the money economy, full of brilliant insights into the forms that social relationships take. He analyzes the relationships of money to exchange, the human personality, the position of women, individual freedom and many other areas of human existence. Later he provides us with an account of the consequences of the modern money economy and the division of labor, which examines the processes of alienation and reification in work, urban life and elsewhere. Perhaps, more than any of his other sociological works, The Philosophy of Money gives us an example of his comprehensive analysis of the interrelationships between the most diverse and seemingly connected social phenomena.

Hans-Georg Gadamer - Truth And Method

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Truth And Method (Continuum Impacts)

by Hans-Georg Gadamer

This is Gadamer's most influential work, his magnum opus. An astonishing synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, theology, the theory of law and classical scholarship, it is undoubtedly one of the most important texts in twentieth century philosophy.

Jean-Luc Nancy - The Creation of the World or Globalization

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The Creation of the World or Globalization (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought)

by Jean-Luc Nancy

Appearing in English for the first time, Jean-Luc Nancy's 2002 book reflects on globalization and its impact on our being-in-the-world. Developing a contrast in the French language between two terms that are usually synonymous, or that are used interchangeably, namely globalisation (globalization) and mondialisation (world-forming), Nancy undertakes a rethinking of what "world-forming" might mean. At stake in this distinction is for him nothing less than two possible destinies of our humanity, and of our time. On the one hand, with globalization, there is the uniformity produced by a global economical and technological logic leading to the contrary of an inhabitable world, "the un-world" (l'im-monde)-as Nancy refers to it-an un-world that entails social disintegration, misery, and injustice. And, on the other hand, there is the possibility of an authentic world-forming, that is, of a making of the world and of a making sense that Nancy calls a "creation" of the world. Nancy understands such world-forming in terms of an inexhaustible struggle for justice. This book is an important contribution by Nancy to a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of globalization and a further development on his earlier works on our being-in-common, justice, and a-theological existence.

Jacques Derrida - The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

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The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

by Jacques Derrida

You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably. What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you. On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path. The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a "fortune-telling book" watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean to happen, to arrive, to have to happen or arrive, to let or to make happen or arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, da und fort, the one or the other. You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself.J. D."With The Post Card, as with Glas, Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel (the long section is called "Envois," roughly, "dispatches" ), he stages his writing more overtly than in the scholarly works. . . . The Post Card also contains a series of self-reflective essays, largely focused on Freud, in which Derrida is beautifully lucid and direct."—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal

Euripides and the Poetics of Nostalgia

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Euripides and the Poetics of Nostalgia

by Gary S. Meltzer

Branded by critics from Aristophanes to Nietzsche as sophistic, iconoclastic, and sensationalistic, Euripides has long been held responsible for the demise of Greek tragedy. Despite this reputation, his drama has a fundamentally conservative character. It conveys nostalgia for an idealized age that still respected the gods and traditional codes of conduct. Using deconstructionist and feminist theory, this book investigates the theme of the lost voice of truth and justice in four Euripidean tragedies. The plays' unstable mix of longing for a transcendent voice of truth and skeptical analysis not only epitomizes the discursive practice of Euripides' era but also speaks to our postmodern condition. The book sheds new light on the source of the playwright's tragic power and enduring appeal, revealing the surprising relevance of his works for our own day.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism

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The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

by Steven Connor (Editor)

Offering a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism, this Companion features examinations of the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant effect on contemporary critical thought. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, and modern cultural studies. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology.

Reading Ancient Texts, Aristotle and Neoplatonism

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Reading Ancient Texts, Aristotle and Neoplatonism: Essays in Honour of Denis O'brien (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History; Reading Ancient Texts)

by Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Kevin Corrigan (Editors)

What is the history of philosophy? Is it history or is it philosophy or is it by some strange alchemy a confluence of the two? The contributors to the present volume of essays have tackled this seemingly simple, but in reality difficult and controversial, question, by drawing on their specialised knowledge of the surviving texts of leading ancient philosophers, from the Presocratics to Augustine, through Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. These contributions, which reflect the range of methods and approaches currently used in the study of ancient texts, are offered as a tribute to the scholarship of Denis O'Brien, one of the most original and penetrating students of the thousand-year period of intense philosophical activity that constitutes ancient philosophy. The contributors include: T. Buchheim, J. Cleary, K. Corrigan, D. Evans, G. Gurtler S.J., C. Horn, J.-M. Narbonne, C. Natali, G. O'Daly, F. Schroeder, S. Stern-Gillet, P. Thillet, and C. Viano.

Reading Ancient Texts, Presocratics and Plato

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Reading Ancient Texts, Presocratics and Plato: Essays in Honour of Denis O'brien (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History; Reading Ancient Texts)

by Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Kevin Corrigan (Editors)

What is the history of philosophy? Is it history or is it philosophy or is it by some strange alchemy a confluence of the two? The contributors to the present volume of essays have tackled this seemingly simple, but in reality difficult and controversial, question, by drawing on their specialised knowledge of the surviving texts of leading ancient philosophers, from the Presocratics to Augustine, through Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. These contributions, which reflect the range of methods and approaches currently used in the study of ancient texts, are offered as a tribute to the scholarship of Denis O'Brien, one of the most original and penetrating students of the thousand-year period of intense philosophical activity that constitutes ancient philosophy. Contributors include: T. Ebert, F. Fronterrota, C.J. Gill, C. Huffman, N. Notomi, J.-C. Picot, J.-F. Pradeau, M. Rashed, K. Sayre, R.K. Sprague, and J.G.C. Strachan.

A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography

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A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy)

by Aviezer Tucker (Editor)

The philosophy of historiography examines our representations and knowledge of the past, the relation between evidence, inference, explanation and narrative. Do we possess knowledge of the past? Do we just have probable beliefs about the past, or is historiography a piece of convincing fiction? The philosophy of history is the direct philosophical examination of history, whether it is necessary or contingent, whether it has a direction or whether it is coincidental, and if it has a direction, what it is, and how and why it is unfolding?
The fifty entries in this Companion cover the main issues in the philosophies of historiography and history, including natural history and the practices of historians. Written by an international and multi-disciplinary group of experts, these clearly written entries present a cutting-edge updated picture of current research in the philosophies of historiography and history.
This Companion will be of interest to philosophers, historians, natural historians, and social scientists.

Fredric Jameson - A Singular Modernity

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A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present

by Fredric Jameson

The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new, muscular, intervention Fredric Jameson—perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity—explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner. The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the provisional disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive 'modernity' as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well. In this major new interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both terms—which can probably not be banished at this late date—helps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.

Fredric Jameson The Modernist Papers

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The Modernist Papers

by Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson, one of America's finest cultural critics, offers his dynamic insight into modernist literature and art. A companion to the classic A Singular Modernity, this stunning tour de force looks at the innovative literary experiments of Joyce and Proust, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein and the writing of Kafka, Mann and Mallarmé, to provide a distinct perspective on the culture of new beginnings and avant-garde endeavors.

Philosophical Hermeneutics

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Philosophical Hermeneutics [SPECIAL EDITION]

by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Author), David E. Linge (Editor, Translator)

This excellent collection contains 13 essays from Gadamer's Kleine Schriften, dealing with hermeneutical reflection, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer applies hermeneutical analysis to Heidegger and Husserl's phenomenology, an approach that proves critical and instructive.

Plato, VII, Theaetetus. Sophist

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Plato, VII, Theaetetus. Sophist (Loeb Classical Library)

by Plato (Author), H. N. Fowler (Translator)

C.G. Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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Memories, Dreams, Reflections

by C.G. Jung

An autobiography put together from conversations, writings and lectures with Jung's cooperation, at the end of his life.

Boethius - Consolation of Philosophy

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Consolation of Philosophy

by Boethius (Author), Joel C. Relihan (Translator)

Joel Relihan's translation highlights the poetry of the Consolation while remaining faithful to Boethius' Latin.Unjustly imprisoned and waiting to die, Boethius penned his last and greatest work, Consolation of Philosophy, an imaginary dialogue between himself and Philosophy, personified as a woman. Reminiscent of Dante in places, Boethius's fiction is an ode-to-philosophy-cum-Socratic-dialogue. Joel Relihan's skillful rendering, smoother to the modern ear than previous translations, preserves the book's heart-rending clarity and Boethius's knack for getting it just right. Listen to him on fortune: "We spin in an ever-turning circle, and it is our delight to change the bottom for the top and the top for the bottom. You may climb up if you wish, but on this condition: Don't think it an injustice when the rules of the game require you to go back down."Consolation of Philosophy recalls the transience of the material world, the eternality of wisdom, and the life of the philosopher. Boethius was deeply influenced by the Platonist tradition, and this piece is one of the more powerful and artful defenses of a detachment that feels almost Buddhist. For anyone who's felt at odds with the world, Consolation is a reminder that the best things in life are eternal. Boethius must be right: the book is just as meaningful today as it was in the sixth century when he wrote it. --Eric de Place