Although the two great commandments to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves are central to Christianity, few theologians or spiritual writers have undertaken an extensive account of the meaning and forms of these loves. Most accounts, in fact, make love of God and love of self either impossible or immoral. Integrating these two commandments, Edward Vacek, SJ, develops an original account of love as the theological foundation for Christian ethics.
Vacek criticizes common understandings of agape, eros, and philia, examining the arguments of Aquinas, Nygren, Outka, Rahner, Scheler, and other theologians and philosophers. He defines love as an emotional, affirmative participation in the beloved's real and ideal goodness, and he extends this definition to the love between God and self. Vacek proposes that the heart of Christian moral life is loving cooperation with God in a mutually perfecting friendship.
On some levels, the accepted role of development aid has been supplanted by the increase of individual remittances and foreign direct investment, as well as by policies that focus on issues such as climate, migration, financial stability, knowledge, trade, and security in order to increase opportunities in struggling countries. This study considers such changes and examines the effectiveness of aid and its role in international power relations. The editors and contributors close the book by proposing new strategies for development aid in the era of globalization.
Land and Sea was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Although Philip Freneau is best known as the poet of the American Revolution, half his poems had nothing to do with the war, Professor Vitzthum points out, and this, the first systematic, in-depth study of Freneau's lyric poetry, provides a fresh perspective on the poet's non-political work. Demonstrating that there is a heretofore unrecognized pattern of land-sea imagery and symbolism in Freneau's best work. Professor Vitzthum traces changes reflected in this imagery to developments in the poet's thought, which in turn related to major intellectual and literary trends in revolutionary and early republican America. An introductory chapter assesses twentieth century biographical and critical estimates of Freneau, outlines the key themes in his work, and links his thirty-year career as sailor and ship captain to his creation of a covert, symbolistic poetic method. The following five chapters chronologically discuss Freneau's non-political poems from 1772 through 1815. Professor Vitzthum concludes that Freneau was not the derivative and unsuccessful artist he is currently thought to have been but, rather, one of America's genuinely important poets.
Le Capital de Sergueï Eisenstein (1927-1928) est un fantôme à plus d’un titre: bien que le film n’ait jamais été réalisé, il a néanmoins hanté l'imagination de nombreux cinéastes, historiens et écrivains jusqu’à aujourd’hui et même récemment avec les Nouvelles de l’Antiquité idéologique : Marx – Eisenstein – Le Capital d’Alexander Kluge. De plus, sa première matérialisation publique – un fragment d’une dizaine de pages issu des carnets du réalisateur – était marquée par ce qui demeurait absent : les images et le matériau de travail d’Eisenstein.
La Danse des valeurs ambitionne d’invoquer à nouveaux frais le fantôme du Capital mais en se fondant cette fois-ci sur l’ensemble de son corps d’archives. Cette « instruction visuelle à la méthode dialectique », selon les mots-mêmes d’Eisenstein, comprend plus de 500 pages de notes, de dessins, de coupures de presse, de diagrammes d’expression, de plans d’articles, de négatifs d’Octobre, de réflexions théoriques et de longues citations. La Danse des valeurs explore la nécessité formelle qui sous-tend les choix d’Eisenstein dans le Capital. Sa lecture fait valoir que sa complexité visuelle ainsi que son efficacité épistémique résident précisément dans l’état de son matériau : une danse de thèmes hétérogènes et de fragments disparates, un flux non-linéaire, provisoire et inarticulé.
Les séquences visuelles d’archives, publiées ici pour la première fois en France, ne sont pas bâties à titre de simples illustrations, mais en tant qu’arguments à part entière, donnant à voir ce qui se joue pour Eisenstein dans le Capital : une théorisation visuelle de la valeur. Une lecture des archives d’Eisenstein, dans leur logique interne, permet non seulement de reconstituer des éléments morphologiques présents dans le concept de valeur chez Marx, mais également de théoriser une crise plus fondamentale de la représentation politique, un présent qui s’étend de son contexte contemporain jusqu’à nos jours. Mettant en œuvre un procédé morphologique sans équivoque, les séquences de montage d’Eisenstein produisent une sorte de plus-value qui leur est propre, un excès sémiotique qui brasse les matériaux et présente les corps dans une danse analogue à la « danse » des « conditions pétrifiées » de Marx. C’est dans ce langage polymorphe et « diffus » – associé au stream of consciousness de l’Ulysse de Joyce – qu’Eisenstein perçoit le potentiel critique et affectif d’un cinéma à venir.
It has become a truism that “leadership depends upon the situation,” but few behavioral scientists have attempted to go beyond that statement to examine the specific ways in which leaders should and do vary their behavior with situational demands. Vroom and Yetton select a critical aspect of leadership style-the extent to which the leader encourages the participation of his subordinates in decision-making. They describe a normative model which shows the specific leadership style called for in different classes of situations. The model is expressed in terms of a “decision tree” and requires the leader to analyze the dimensions of the particular problem or decision with which he is confronted in order to determine how much and in what way to share his decision-making power with his subordinates.
Other chapters discuss how leaders behave in different situations. They look at differences in leadership styles, and what situations induce people to display autocratic or participative behavior.
The full extent of Plutarch’s moral educational program remains largely understudied, at least in those aspects pertaining to women and the gendered other. As a result, scholarship on his views on women have differed significantly in their conclusions, with some scholars suggesting that he is overwhelmingly positive towards women and marriage and perhaps even a “precursor to feminism,” and others arguing that he was rather negative on the issue. Like a Captive Bird: Gender and Virtue in Plutarch is an examination of these educational methods employed in Plutarch’s work to regulate the expression of gender identity in women and men. In six chapters, author Lunette Warren analyzes Plutarch’s ideas about women and gender in Moralia and Lives. The book examines the divergences between real and ideal, the aims and methods of moral philosophy and psychagogic practice as they relate to identity formation, and Plutarch’s theoretical philosophy and metaphysics.
Warren argues that gender is a flexible mode of being that expresses a relation between body and soul, and that gender and virtue are inextricably entwined. Plutarch’s expression of gender is also an expression of a moral condition that signifies relationships of power, Warren claims, especially power relationships between the husband and wife. Uncovered in these texts is evidence of a redistribution of power, which allows some women to dominate other women and, in rare cases, men too. Like a Captive Bird offers a unique and fresh interpretation of Plutarch’s metaphysics which centers gender as one of the organizational principles of nature. It is aimed at scholars of Plutarch, ancient philosophy, and ancient gender studies, especially those who are interested in feminist studies of antiquity.
Little Magazines - American Writers 32 was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A welcome link to the chain connecting the early masters of detective fiction.... The collection offers a window into the early days of American detective fiction and the power of deductive thinking."—Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Times
"This story collection featuring New York City private detective James Brampton will intrigue Sherlock Holmes fans, given the number of eerie parallels between the two characters."—Publishers Weekly
"It is the observation of small things that makes a good detective, for it is often the most trivial circumstance which supplies the first link in the chain." —James Brampton
Twenty years before the Sherlock Holmes mysteries were written, a fictional New York private investigator was celebrated for his ability to solve crimes based on the principles of observation and deductive reasoning that later became Holmes' hallmark. Originally published in 1864 and never before reprinted, Leaves from the Note-Book of a New York Detective features twenty-nine cases of James Brampton, the first American detective hero to appear in fiction. The book opens with a chance meeting between a medical doctor, John Babbington Williams (the actual author of the stories), and detective James Brampton. They become acquaintances, and after Brampton has retired after twenty years of service, he sends his case notebooks to Dr. Williams to be edited and published. The result is a stunning collection of intriguing mysteries, including "The Defrauded Heir," "The Phantom Face," "A Satanic Compact," and "The Walker Street Tragedy." In case after case, using his power of observation, detective Brampton is able prove the innocence of the wrongly accused. Never before reprinted, this first modern edition of this important work now takes its place once more in the development of detective fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the casebook of the original American detective hero.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
Living in the Future reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement.
Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical—in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States’ bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven’t yet been fully understood or appreciated.
Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.
On the morning of December 4, 1972, the small north Alabama town of Scottsboro was shaken when a bomb ripped through the car of a prominent attorney. What followed were two years of unyielding
investigation resulting in the arrest of the town's wealthiest landowner. The trial that followed pitted Bill Baxley, a young, ambitious Alabama attorney general, against the state's most prominent lawyers.
Lay Down with Dogs is the story of a small southern town as it makes the transition from an agrarian hamlet to progressive New South suburbia. It is also the story of a twisted but powerful character, bent on revenge, whose motive was as enigmatic as the man himself. And it is the story of a young prosecutor, willing to risk a promising political future in order to pursue his sense of justice.
This book is not only a well-researched account but also a fascinating story of crime, the court, and the many characters brought together at one time and in one place to participate--for good or evil--in an unforgettable drama.
A Christian Science Monitor Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
“In his masterful new biography, Randall B. Woods convincingly makes the case for Johnson’s greatness—as the last American president whose leadership achieved truly revolutionary breakthroughs in progressive domestic legislation, bringing changes that have improved the lives of most Americans. In this compelling, massive narrative, Woods portrays Johnson fairly and fully in all his complexity, with adequate attention to flaws in his character and his tragic miscalculations in Vietnam.”—Nick Kotz, Washington Post Book World
“In writing LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, Woods has produced an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the best of the Johnson studies yet to appear…Even readers familiar with the many other fine books on Johnson will learn a great deal from Woods…Among Woods’s many achievements in this fine biography is to allow us to see not only the enormous, tragic flaws in this extraordinary man, but also the greatness.”—Alan Brinkley, New York Times Book Review
A distinguished historian of twentieth-century America, Randall B. Woods offers a wholesale reappraisal and sweeping, authoritative account of the life of one of the most fascinating and complex U.S. presidents.
Late Quaternary Environments of the United States was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In the late 1970s American and Russian scientists met twice in conferences on Quaternary paleoclimates sponsored by the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Bilateral Agreement on the Environment. The conferees agreed to prepare volumes summarizing the current status of research in the two countries. Late-Quaternary Environments of the United States provides a two-volume overview of new and significant information on research of the last fifteen years, since the 1965 publication of Quaternary of the United States,edited by H E. Wright, Jr., and D. G. Frey. The volume on the late Quaternary in the Soviet Union will also be published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Volume 1 of Late-Quaternary Environments of the United States covers the Late Pleistocene, the interval between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago—a time of extreme environmental stress as the world passed from full-glacial conditions of the last ice age into the present interglacial age. The interval of geologic time since the last glacial period—termed the Holocene—is the subject of Volume 2. The complexity of the natural changes occurring in the late Quaternary, and their interrelationships, make it impossible for a single scientific discipline to encompass them. Thus the papers in both volumes come from authors in many research fields—geology, ecology, physical geography, archaeology, geochemistry, geophysics, limnology, soil science, paleontology, and climatology. Many of the hypotheses presented—especially on the dynamic Late Pleistocene environments—are still hotly debated and will require additional testing as scientists strive to reconstruct the changing world of the glacial and postglacial ages.
A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous.
In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.
Planned and designed by a leading Tokyo lawyer and several American practitioners and scholars, Law and Investment in Japan introduces both Japanese law and the strategic issues that arise in cross-border transactions. Centered around the details of an actual joint venture between the U.S. and Japan, the book combines materials from the transaction itself with cases, statutes, and background data.
This new second edition reflects recent changes in the law and new directions in scholarly research.
What was it that flew over with such a terrifying roar? Was it, as many said, the devil, or was it that thing a few had heard of, a flying machine? And those electric lights at Jacob Gallo’s farm, were they witchcraft or were they science?
The theme of this harshly powerful novel is the impact of modern technology and ideas on a few isolated, tradition-bound hamlets in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The old ways are represented by Epifanio Trujillo, the cacique of the region, now ailing and losing his grip on things; by ancient Madre Matiana, the region’s midwife, healer, counselor, and oracle; by penniless Rómulo and his wife Merced. “Progress” is represented by Don Epifanio’s bastard son Jacob, who acquired money and influence elsewhere during the Revolution and who now, against his father’s will, brings electricity, irrigation, fertilizers, and other modernities to the lean lands—together with armed henchmen. The conflict between the old and the new builds slowly and inexorably to a violent climax that will long remain in the reader’s memory.
The author has given psychological and historical depth to his story by alternating the passages of narrative and dialogue with others in which several of the major characters brood on the past, the present, and the future. For instance, Matiana, now in her eighties, touchingly remembers how she was married and widowed before she had reached her seventeenth birthday. This dual technique is superbly handled, so that people and events have both a vivid actuality and an inner richness of meaning. The impact of the narrative is intensified by the twenty-one striking illustrations by Alberto Beltrán.
Here is an entertaining and educational activity book for children from six to twelve on the always-popular topic of American Indians—except that the subject has been narrowed to only those Native Americans known to have lived in the Lone Star State.
Eye-catching line drawings invite children to color a wide assortment of scenes from the diverse lives of the many different groups of Indians native to Texas. The settings in the first part of the book range from the mammoth- and bison-hunting Paleo-Indians of over 11,000 years ago to the various nomadic and agricultural groups encountered by sixteenth-century Spanish explorers. Further drawings reflect changes over the centuries as Indian lifeways were forever altered and often destroyed due to contact with white newcomers who all claimed their land. In addition to the many drawings, a number of fun-filled and challenging games help build youngsters' Indian knowledge.
For this first English edition of his distinguished study of Pythagoreanism, Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon, Walter Burkert has carefully revised text and notes, taking account of additional literature on the subject which appeared between 1962 and 1969.
By a thorough critical sifting of all the available evidence, the author lays a new foundation for the understanding of ancient Pythagoreanism and in particular of the relationship within it of “lore” and “science.” He shows that in the twilight zone when the Greeks were discovering the rational interpretation of the world and quantitative natural science, Pythagoras represented not the origin of the new, but the survival or revival of ancient, pre-scientific lore or wisdom, based on superhuman authority and expressed in ritual obligation.
Platonic forms of love.
Plato of Athens, who laid the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition and in range and depth ranks among its greatest practitioners, was born to a prosperous and politically active family circa 427 BC. In early life an admirer of Socrates, Plato later founded the first institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, among whose many notable alumni was Aristotle. Traditionally ascribed to Plato are thirty-five dialogues developing Socrates’ dialectic method and composed with great stylistic virtuosity, together with the Apology and thirteen letters.
The three works in this volume, though written at different stages of Plato’s career, are set toward the end of Socrates’ life (from 416) and explore the relationship between two people known as love (erōs) or friendship (philia). In Lysis, Socrates meets two young men exercising in a wrestling school during a religious festival. In Symposium, Socrates attends a drinking party along with several accomplished friends to celebrate the young tragedian Agathon’s victory in the Lenaia festival of 416: the topic of conversation is love. And in Phaedrus, Socrates and his eponymous interlocutor escape the midsummer heat of the city to the banks of the river Ilissus, where speeches by both on the subject of love lead to a critical discussion of the current state of the theory and practice of rhetoric.
This edition, which replaces the original Loeb editions by Sir Walter R. M. Lamb and by Harold North Fowler, offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.
This volume presents a penetrating interview and sixteen essays that explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. With characteristic erudition and insight, RémiBrague focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another. Their disparate philosophical worlds, Brague shows, were grounded in different models of revelation that engendered divergent interpretations of the ancient Greek sources they held in common. So, despite striking similarities in their solutions for the philosophical problems they all faced, intellectuals in each theological tradition often viewed the others’ ideas with skepticism, if not disdain. Brague’s portrayal of this misunderstood age brings to life not only its philosophical and theological nuances, but also lessons for our own time.
In The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s (medieval) theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career.
Contributors: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel
Logical empiricism, a program for the study of science that attempted to provide logical analyses of the nature of scientific concepts, the relation between evidence and theory, and the nature of scientific explanation, formed among the famed Vienna and Berlin Circles of the 1920s and '30s and dominated the philosophy of science throughout much of the twentieth century. In recent decades, a "post-positivist" philosophy, deriding empiricism and its claims in light of more recent historical and sociological discoveries, has been the ascendant mode of philosophy and other disciplines in the arts and sciences.
This book features original research that challenges such broad oppositions. In eleven essays, leading scholars from many nations construct a more nuanced understanding of logical empiricism, its history, and development, offering promising implications for current philosophy of science debates.
Tapping rich resources of unpublished material from archives in Haarlem, Konstanz, Pittsburgh, and Vienna, contributors conduct a deep investigation into the origins and development of the Vienna and Berlin Circles. They expose the roots of the philosophy in such varied sources as Cassirer, Poincaire, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Important connections between the empiricists and other movements--neo-empiricism, British empiricism--are vigorously explored.
Building on these historical studies, a critical reevaluation emerges that shrinks the distance between old and new philosophers of science, between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy. A number of compelling recent debates, including those involving Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hesse, Glymour, and Hanson, are reopened to show the ways in which logical empiricist theory can still be validly applied.
Logical Empiricism is the result of a remarkable conference, convened in the spirit of reflection and international cooperation, that took place in Florence, Italy, in 1999.
The Limits of Utilitarianism was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Many philosophers have argued that utilitarianism is an unacceptable moral theory and that promoting the general welfare is at best only one of the legitimate goals of public policy. Utilitarian principles seem to place no limits on the extent to which society may legitimately interfere with a person's liberties - provided that such actions can be shown to promote the long-term welfare of its members. These issues have played a central role in discussions of utilitarianism since the time of Bentham and Mill. Despite criticisms, utilitarianism remains the most influential and widely accepted moral theory of recent times.
In this volume contemporary philosophers address four aspects of utilitarianism: the principle of utility; utilitarianism vis-à-vis contractarianism; welfare; and voluntary cooperation and helping others. The editors provide an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that covers all books and articles published in utilitarianism since 1930.
John Dewey’s Experience and Nature has been considered the fullest expression of his mature philosophy since its eagerly awaited publication in 1925.Irwin Edman wrote at that time that “with monumental care, detail and completeness, Professor Dewey has in this volume revealed the metaphysical heart that beats its unvarying alert tempo through all his writings, whatever their explicit themes.” In his introduction to this volume, Sidney Hook points out that “Dewey’s Experience and Nature is both the most suggestive and most difficult of his writings.”
The meticulously edited text published here as the first volume in the series The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953spans that entire period in Dewey’s thought by including two important and previously unpublished documents from the book’s history: Dewey’s unfinished new introduction written between 1947and 1949,edited by the late Joseph Ratner, and Dewey’s unedited final draft of that introduction written the year before his death. In the intervening years Dewey realized the impossibility of making his use of the word “experience” understood. He wrote in his 1951draft for a new introduction: “Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treatment of specific subject-matters would be correspondingly modified. I would abandon the term ‘experience’ because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of ‘experience’ are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term ‘culture’ because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my philosophy of experience.”
In Lectures on Ethics, 1900–1901,Donald F. Koch supplies the only extant complete transcription of the annual three-course sequence on ethics John Dewey gave at the University of Chicago.
In his introduction Koch argues that these lectures offer the best systematic, overall introduction to Dewey’s approach to moral philosophy and are the only account showing the unity of his views in nearly all phases of ethical inquiry. These lectures are the only work by Dewey to set forth a complete theory of moral language. They offer a clear illustration of the central methodological questions in the development of a pragmatic instrumentalist ethic and the actual working out of the instrumentalist approach as distinct from simply presenting it as a conclusion.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Albert Camus declared that a writer's duty is twofold: "the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance against oppression." These twin obsessions help explain something of Camus' remarkable character, which is the overarching subject of this sympathetic and lively book. Through an exploration of themes that preoccupied Camus--absurdity, silence, revolt, fidelity, and moderation--Robert Zaretsky portrays a moralist who refused to be fooled by the nobler names we assign to our actions, and who pushed himself, and those about him, to challenge the status quo.
Though we do not face the same dangers that threatened Europe when Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, we confront other alarms. Herein lies Camus' abiding significance. Reading his work, we become more thoughtful observers of our own lives. For Camus, rebellion is an eternal human condition, a timeless struggle against injustice that makes life worth living. But rebellion is also bounded by self-imposed constraints--it is a noble if impossible ideal. Such a contradiction suggests that if there is no reason for hope, there is also no occasion for despair--a sentiment perhaps better suited for the ancient tragedians than modern political theorists but one whose wisdom abides. Yet we must not venerate suffering, Camus cautions: the world's beauty demands our attention no less than life's train of injustices. That recognition permits him to declare: "It was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable."
The rubric “The Late Derrida,” with all puns and ambiguities cheerfully intended, points to the late work of Jacques Derrida, the vast outpouring of new writing by and about him in the period roughly from 1994 to 2004. In this period Derrida published more than he had produced during his entire career up to that point. At the same time, this volume deconstructs the whole question of lateness and the usefulness of periodization. It calls into question the “fact” of his turn to politics, law, and ethics and highlights continuities throughout his oeuvre.
The scholars included here write of their understandings of Derrida’s newest work and how it impacts their earlier understandings of such classic texts as Glas and Of Grammatology. Some have been closely associated with Derrida since the beginning—both in France and in the United States—but none are Derrideans. That is, this volume is a work of critique and a deep and continued engagement with the thought of one of the most significant philosophers of our time. It represents a recognition that Derrida’s work has yet to be addressed—and perhaps can never be addressed—in its totality.
Distinguished Book Award, Philosophy of Communication Division, National Communication Association, 2017
Top Book Award, Communication Ethics Division, National Communication Association, 2017
Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy explicates a human obligation and responsibility to and for the Other that is an unending and imperfect commitment. In Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics, Ronald C. Arnett underscores the profundity of Levinas’s insights for communication ethics.When French philosopher Paul Ricoeur died in 2005, he bequeathed to the world a highly regarded, widely influential body of work which established him as one of the greatest thinkers of our time. He also left behind a number of unfinished projects that are gathered here and translated into English for the first time.
Living Up to Death consists of one major essay and nine fragments. Composed in 1996, the essay is the kernel of an unrealized book on the subject of mortality. Likely inspired by his wife’s approaching death, it examines not one’s own passing but one’s experience of others dying. Ricoeur notes that when thinking about death the imagination is paramount, since we cannot truly experience our own passing. But those we leave behind do, and Ricoeur posits that the idea of life after death originated in the awareness of our own end posthumously resonating with our survivors.
The fragments in this volume were written over the course of the last few months of Ricoeur’s life as his health failed, and they represent his very last work. They cover a range of topics, touching on biblical scholarship, the philosophy of language, and the idea of selfhood he first addressed in Oneself as Another. And while they contain numerous philosophical insights, these fragments are perhaps most significant for providing an invaluable look at Ricoeur’s mind at work.
As poignant as it is perceptive, Living Up to Death is a moving testimony to Ricoeur’s willingness to confront his own mortality with serious questions, a touching insouciance, and hope for the future.
The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English.
Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays.
The first complete collection of Weil’s missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences. The letters abound with vivid illustrations of a life marked by wisdom as much as seeking. The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. An extraordinary scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. Weil paired teaching with poetry and even dabbled in mathematics, as evidenced by her correspondence with her brother, André, who won the Kyoto Prize in 1994 for the famed Weil Conjectures.
A Life in Letters depicts Simone Weil’s thought taking shape amid political turmoil, as she describes her participation in the Spanish struggle against fascism and in the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes by Robert Chenavier contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, relating Weil’s letters to her general body of writing. This book is an ideal entryway into Weil’s philosophical insights, one for both neophytes and acolytes to treasure.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press