BiblioVault - Books about Philosophy

Quaestiones super Secundum et Tertium De Anima Aristotelis (B. Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Philosophica, Volume 5)

John Duns Scotus

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

Quantum Anthropologies

Life at Large

Vicki Kirby

Duke University Press, 2011

In Quantum Anthropologies, the renowned feminist theorist Vicki Kirby contends that some of the most provocative aspects of deconstruction have yet to be explored. Deconstruction’s implications have been curtailed by the assumption that issues of textuality and representation are specific to the domain of culture. Revisiting Derrida’s claim that there is “no outside of text,” Kirby argues that theories of cultural construction developed since the linguistic turn have inadvertently reproduced the very binaries they intended to question, such as those between nature and culture, matter and ideation, and fact and value. Through new readings of Derrida, Husserl, Saussure, Butler, Irigaray, and Merleau-Ponty, Kirby exposes the limitations of theories that regard culture as a second-order system that cannot access—much less be—nature, body, and materiality. She suggests ways of reconceiving language and culture to enable a more materially implicated outcome, one that keeps alive the more counterintuitive and challenging aspects of poststructural criticism. By demonstrating how fields, including cybernetics, biology, forensics, mathematics, and physics, can be conceptualized in deconstructive terms, Kirby fundamentally rethinks deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment, materialism, and science.

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Quantum Dialogue

The Making of a Revolution

Mara Beller

University of Chicago Press, 1999

"Science is rooted in conversations," wrote Werner Heisenberg, one of the twentieth century's great physicists. In Quantum Dialogue, Mara Beller shows that science is rooted not just in conversation but in disagreement, doubt, and uncertainty. She argues that it is precisely this culture of dialogue and controversy within the scientific community that fuels creativity.

Beller draws her argument from her radical new reading of the history of the quantum revolution, especially the development of the Copenhagen interpretation. One of several competing approaches, this version succeeded largely due to the rhetorical skills of Niels Bohr and his colleagues. Using extensive archival research, Beller shows how Bohr and others marketed their views, misrepresenting and dismissing their opponents as "unreasonable" and championing their own not always coherent or well-supported position as "inevitable."

Quantum Dialogue, winner of the 1999 Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the Journal of the History of Ideas, will fascinate everyone interested in how stories of "scientific revolutions" are constructed and "scientific consensus" achieved.

"[A]n intellectually stimulating piece of work, energised by a distinct point of view."—Dipankar Home, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[R]emarkable and original. . . . [Beller's] arguments are thoroughly supported and her conclusions are meticulously argued. . . . This is an important book that all who are interested in the emergence of quantum mechanics will want to read."—William Evenson, History of Physics Newsletter

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Qu'appelons-nous penser?

Jean-Luc Nancy and Daniel Tyradellis

Diaphanes, 2013

Jean-Luc Nancy et Daniel Tyradellis, philosophes, questionnant tous deux la nature même de la pensée, se sont rencontrés un soir de novembre 2012 à Berlin. En a résulté un dialogue sur les représentations que nous nous faisons de la pensée, sur ce qui nous y amène, nous y force ou nous y incite ; mais également sur les bonnes et les mauvaises raisons de penser, sur la philosophie et la misosophie.

Cet échange rare et singulier traite de la précarité de toute pensée, qu’elle s’établisse dans la langue, dans l’image, dans le corps ou dans l’espace ; du nous et de la pensée partagée qui ouvre les possibilités du sens. Il dessine une pensée qui s’épuise, mais qui aime aussi, et nous redonne foi en l’existence.

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Queer Frontiers

Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations

Edited by Joseph A. Boone, et.al.

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

In the first collection of its kind, twenty-three scholars, artists, and critics forecast the impact of queer theory on the future of sexuality. Arguing that queer theory is poised to transform society’s perception of gender itself, this thoroughly interdisciplinary anthology locates itself at the forefront of various debates both inside and outside the academy.
From the history of gay and lesbian studies to the emergence of video bars, from an interview with playwright Cherrie Moraga to a photo record of 1950s gay Los Angeles, these original essays tackle the past, present, and future of queer sexuality from all directions. Queer Frontiers brings together the most vital and energetic voices around; whether promising young scholar or veteran of gay activism, each contributor is helping to move the debate into uncharted territory.

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Queer Phenomenology

Orientations, Objects, Others

Sara Ahmed

Duke University Press, 2006

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

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Queer Social Philosophy

CRITICAL READINGS FROM KANT TO ADORNO

Randall Halle

University of Illinois Press, 2004

In Queer Social Philosophy, Randall Halle analyzes key texts in the tradition of German critical theory from the perspective of contemporary queer theory, exposing gender and sexuality restrictions that undermine those texts' claims of universal truth. Addressing such figures as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Habermas, Halle offers a unique contribution to contemporary debates about sexuality, civil society, and politics.

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Queer/Early/Modern

Carla Freccero

Duke University Press, 2006

In Queer/Early/Modern, Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and she encourages us to read differently the relation between history and literature. Contending that the term “queer,” in its indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading practices that do justice to the aftereffects of the past as they live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of “fantasmatic historiography” that brings together history and fantasy, past and present, event and affect.

Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts, discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labé, and Melissa Ethridge; David Halperin’s take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Boccaccio’s Decameron; and France’s domestic partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. Turning to French cleric Jean de Léry’s account, published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.

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Querying Consent

Beyond Permission and Refusal

Jordana Greenblatt, Keja Valens

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Querying Consent examines the ways in which the concept of consent is used to map and regulate sexual desire, gender relationships, global positions, technological interfaces, relationships of production and consumption, and literary and artistic interactions. From philosophy to literature, psychoanalysis to the art world, the contributors to Querying Consent address the most uncomfortable questions about consent today. Grounded in theoretical explorations of the entanglement of consent and subjectivity across a range of textual, visual, multi- and digital media, Querying Consent considers the relationships between consent and agency before moving on to trace the concept’s outcomes through a range of investigations of the mutual implication of personhood and self-ownership.

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The Quest for Moral Foundations

An Introduction to Ethics

Montague Brown

Georgetown University Press

A concise, yet engaging introduction to the field of ethics, this volume offers a systematic study of the foundations of moral responsibility. Montague Brown guides the reader on an examination of a wide range of ethical positions, including relativism, emotivism, egoism, utilitarianism, Kantian formalism, and natural law.

Brown explains not only the history behind the development of each position, but also the roles science, democracy, and religion play in moral thinking today.

Students and teachers of philosophy, ethics, and religion, as well as the general reader, will find that this book tackles the serious issues and offers an insightful, accessible introduction to major ethical positions and the great moral philosophers.

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Qu’est-ce que le sexe ?

Alenka Zupancic

Diaphanes, 2019

La satisfaction de parler contient en soi une clé de la satisfaction sexuelle (et non l‘inverse) – une clé de la sexualité et de ses propres contradictions. Alenka Zupancic aborde la question de la sexualité comme un problème proprement philosophique de la psychanalyse – celle de Freud et de Lacan – et non celle des praticiens cliniciens tels que décrits par Lacan « orthopédistes de l‘inconscient ». Que se passe-t-il, comme l’affirme Lacan, si nous pouvons obtenir exactement la même satisfaction que le sexe par la parole, l’écriture, la peinture, la prière ou autres activités) ? Il ne s’agit pas d‘expliquer la satisfaction que procure la parole en indiquant son origine sexuelle, mais bien de souligner que la satisfaction de parler est elle-même sexuelle. Alenka Zupancic soutient que la sexualité est à la limite d’un « circuit court » entre ontologie et épistémologie. La sexualité et le savoir sont structurés autour d‘une négativité fondamentale qui les unit au point de l’inconscient. L’inconscient (en tant que lien avec la sexualité) est le concept d‘un lien inhérent entre l’être et la connaissance dans leur négativité même.

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The Question of God in Heidegger's Phenomenology

George Kovacs

Northwestern University Press, 1990

Several philosophers have developed theological perspectives out of Heidegger's ontology. Yet the question of God in Heidegger's thought itself has never received full elucidation. In this revealing new study, George Kovacs poses the problem of analyzing the idea of God as a process of questioning and thus subjects Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism to a process of exposition Heidegger himself employed.

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A Question of Voice

Philosophy and the Search for Legitimacy

Ron Scapp

University of Michigan Press, 2020

A Question of Voice: Philosophy and the Search for Legitimacy offers an explicit and comprehensive consideration of voice as a complex of rethinking aspects of the history of philosophy through issues of power, as well as contemporary issues that include and involve the desire for and the dynamics of legitimacy, for individuals and communities. By identifying voice as a significant theme and means by which and through which we might better engage some important philosophical questions, Ron Scapp hopes to expand traditional philosophical discussion and discourse regarding questions about validity, legitimacy, empathy, and solidarity. He offers an innovative perspective that is informed and guided by multiculturalism, ethnic studies, queer studies, feminism, and thinkers and critics such as bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, among others. A Question of Voice is an American investigation, but also suggests questions that emanate from contemporary continental thought as well as issues that arise from transnational perspectives—an approach that is motived by doing philosophy in an age of multiculturalism.

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Questioning the Millennium

A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown, Revised Edition

Stephen Jay Gould

Harvard University Press, 2011

Gould addresses three questions about the millennium with his typical erudition, warmth, and whimsy: What is the concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted over time? How did the projection of Christ’s 1,000-year reign become a secular measure? And when exactly does the millennium begin—January 1, 2000, or January 2, 2001?

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Questions of Form

Logic and Analytic Proposition from Kant to Carnap

Joelle ProustTranslated by Anastasios Albert Brenner

University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Questions of Form was first published in 1989. 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 Questions on Form, Joelle Proust traces the concept of the analytic proposition from Kant's development of the notion down to its place in the work of Rudolf Carnap, a founder of logical empiricism and a key figure in contemporary analytic philosophy. Using a method known in France as topique comparative,she provides a rigorous exposition of analyticity, situating it within four major philosophical systems—those of Kant, Bolzano, Frege, and Carnap—and clearly delineating its development from one system to the next.

Proust takes as her point of departure Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. Though she makes clear that Kant drew on Locke, Hume, and Leibniz, she argues that his notion of analyticity was innovative, not simply an elaboration of something already found in their work. She shows that the analytic proposition unexpectedly (given its modest status in Kant) came to play an important part in efforts to convert problems considered "transcendental" into questions of belonging to formal logic.

Ultimately, her comparison of their systems reveals that the concept of the analytic, however specific its rile in each, remains linked to a foundationalist strategy—in effect, to the transcendentalist questions Kant used when he reinterpreted the findings of his empiricist predecessors. Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.

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Quiddities

An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary

W. V. Quine

Harvard University Press, 1987

The appellation “polymath” is often lightly bestowed, but it can be applied with confidence to the celebrated philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine’s areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.

Moving from A (alphabet) to Z (zero), Quiddities roams through more than eighty topics, each providing a full measure of piquant thought, wordplay, and wisdom, couched in easy and elegant prose—“Quine at his unbuttoned best,” in Donald Davidson’s words. Philosophy, language, and mathematics are the subjects most fully represented; tides of entries include belief, communication, free will, idiotisms, longitude and latitude, marks, prizes, Latin pronunciation, tolerance, trinity. Even the more technical entries are larded with homely lore, anecdote, and whimsical humor.

Quiddities will be a treat for admirers of Quine and for others who like to think, who care about language, and who enjoy the free play of intellect on topics large and small. For this select audience, it is an ideal book for browsing.

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The Quill and the Scalpel

Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science

Stephen H. Blackwell

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science,by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov’s scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions.

Nabokov’s attention to holistic study and inductive empirical work gradually reinforced his underlying suspicion of mechanistic explanations of nature. He perceived chilling parallels between the overconfidence of scientific progress and the dogmatic certainty of the Soviet regime. His scientific work and his artistic transfigurations of science underscore the limitations of human knowledge as a defining element of life. In provocative novels like Lolita,Pale Fire,The Gift,Ada, and others, Nabokov advances a surprisingly modest epistemology, urging skepticism toward all portrayals of nature, artistic and scientific. Simultaneously, he challenges his readers to recognize in the arts a vital branch of human discovery, one that both complements and informs traditional scientific research.

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Quine in Dialogue

W. V. Quine

Harvard University Press, 2008

Over the course of his life, W. V. Quine, one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers, engaged and inspired, interviewed and critiqued countless scholars, critics, and students. The qualities that distinguished him in any discussion are on clear display in this volume, which features him in dialogue with his predecessors and peers, his critics and students.

The volume begins with a number of interviews Quine gave about his perspectives on twentieth-century logic, science and philosophy, the ideas of others, and philosophy generally. Also included are his most important articles, reviews, and comments on other philosophers, from Rudolf Carnap to P. F. Strawson. The book, which contains many previously unpublished manuscripts, concludes with a selection of small pieces, written for a broader public, that give a glimpse of the philosopher’s wide interests, his sense of humor, and his warm relations to friends. The result is a wide-ranging, in-depth, and finely nuanced portrait of the humanity underlying this great twentieth-century thinker’s philosophy.

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Quintessence

Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine

W. V. Quine

Harvard University Press, 2008

Through the first half of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy was dominated by Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap. Influenced by Russell and especially by Carnap, another towering figure, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) emerged as the most important proponent of analytic philosophy during the second half of the century. Yet with twenty-three books and countless articles to his credit—including, most famously, Word and Object and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"—Quine remained a philosopher's philosopher, largely unknown to the general public.

Quintessence for the first time collects Quine's classic essays (such as "Two Dogmas" and "On What There Is") in one volume—and thus offers readers a much-needed introduction to his general philosophy. Divided into six parts, the thirty-five selections take up analyticity and reductionism; the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences and the inscrutability of reference; ontology; naturalized epistemology; philosophy of mind; and extensionalism. Representative of Quine at his best, these readings are fundamental not only to an appreciation of the philosopher and his work, but also to an understanding of the philosophical tradition that he so materially advanced.

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The Quotable Abigail Adams

Abigail Adams

Harvard University Press, 2009

John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that her letters “give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There is more good Thoughts, fine strokes and Mother Wit in them than I hear in the whole Week. An Ounce of Mother Wit is worth a Pound of Clergy.” The Quotable Abigail Adams invites you to enjoy Abigail Adams’s wit and wisdom on a wide range of subjects, drawn from writings throughout her lifetime. Abigail shared her penetrating and often humorous observations with correspondents ranging from friends and neighbors to family members to heads of state, offering lively opinions on human nature, politics, culture, and family life. Selected and arranged by topic, these quotations provide an entertaining introduction to the thought and character of America’s founding mother. They are accompanied by a biographical introduction, source notes, chronology, and a comprehensive index, making this book the primary resource for those meeting this remarkable woman for the first time as well as for her longtime admirers.

“The Service of this Government is not a Bed of Roses, in any department of it.”

“A Nation which does not respect itself, cannot expect to receive it from others.”

“Gentlemen are not half as particular as the Ladies are in their details.”

“No woman of sense will ever make her Husband an object of Ridicule; for in proportion as she lowers him she lessens herself.”

“A woman may forgive the man she loves an indiscretion, but never a neglect.”

“There is no musick sweeter in the Ears of parents, than the well earned praises of their children.”

“Better is a little contentment than great Treasure; and trouble therewith.”

“Time, which improves youth, every year furrows the brow of age."

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The Quotable Voltaire

Garry Apgar

Bucknell University Press, 2021

The author of more than 2,000 books and pamphlets, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) was one of the most prolific writers of the eighteenth century, and also one of the wittiest and most insightful. This unique collection of over 800 of Voltaire’s wisest passages and choicest bons mots runs the gamut on topics from adultery to Zoroaster, in both English and French.

Drawing from a wide range of his publications, private letters, and remarks recorded by his contemporaries, The Quotable Voltaire includes material never before gathered in a single volume. English translations appear alongside the original French, and each quote is thoroughly indexed and referenced, with page numbers for both the first known publication edition of each entry and the most recent edition of Voltaire’s works. The book also features over 400 quotes about Voltaire, including commentary by eighteenth-century luminaries like Samuel Johnson, Catherine the Great, Casanova, and John Adams, as well as an eclectic assortment of modern-day personages ranging from Winston Churchill and Jorge Luis Borges to Mae West and Mike Tyson.

Lavishly illustrated with nearly three dozen images of Voltaire-related art, this collection opens with a scholarly essay that recounts the great man’s life and reflects on his outsized influence on Western culture. Whether you are a Voltaire scholar or a neophyte, The Quotable Voltaire is the perfect introduction to a brilliant mind.

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