Everyone is talking about the environment. But what do we mean by it? This is the subject of this perceptive and provocative book. The author argues that the environmental crisis is engrained in the language of our political, social and econpomic structures. In his search foer the hidden agenda of the Green movement, he shows the need for us to include the reality of the spirit. Only by doing so, and re-establishing the importance of local life, may be hope to (...) maintain the fabric of the world, and cease exploiting it for our own ends. (shrink)

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers—among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature , first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of (...) reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarme;, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language. (shrink)

Following an approach that is empirical but not psychological, and dialectical but not dialogical, in this book Maurice Finocchiaro defines concepts such as reasoning, argument, argument analysis, critical reasoning, methodological reflection, judgment, critical thinking, and informal logic. Including extended critiques of the views of many contemporary scholars, he also integrates into the discussion Arnauld's Port-Royal Logic, Gramsci's theory of intellectuals, and case studies from the history of science, particularly the work of Galileo, Newton, Huygens, and Lavoisier.

Mandelbaum believes that views regarding history and man and reason pose problems for philosophy, and he offers critical discussions of some of those problems at the conclusions of parts 2, 3, and 4.

This essay, in the form of a letter written to director László Nemes in the immediate aftermath of viewing Son of Saul, is at once a critical reading of the film within a larger theoretical framework and a subjective emotional response to seeing on the screen something of the author’s own “most harrowing nightmares.” While bringing Nemes’s film into conversation with Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the Hassidic tale and ancient myths, Georges Didi-Huberman returns to his reflections in (...) Images in Spite of All (2008) on the four photographs taken clandestinely of the gas chambers in Auschwitz by one of the Sonderkommando. Son of Saul presents the allegory of Saul whose job as a Sonderkommando is to drag countless corpses to the crematorium where they will be reduced to ashes but who sets out on a mad, single-minded quest to give a proper burial, complete with the recitation of kaddish, to the body of one boy. According to the author, the film marks the invention of the “documentary tale” genre, combining Benjamin’s notions of montage based on the document, as manifested in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Alfred Döblin, and that of the dying art of storytelling, intimately bound up as it is with the authority of the dying. Thus, the dead child drowning at the end of the film stands as an inversion of the story of Moses, a living child saved from drowning, just as the real historic death of the Jewish people reverses the mythical Biblical birth of the Jewish people. (shrink)

This article explores the integration of the seemingly disparate notions of care ethics and design thinking. The business community has adapted “design thinking” from engineering and architecture to facilitate innovation and problem solving through participatory processes. “Care ethics” is a relational approach to morality characterized by a concern for context, empathy, and action. Although design thinking is receiving significant attention and application in business practices, care ethics has only achieved limited traction among business ethicists in academia. “Caring design” is offered (...) as a mutually beneficial integration of the two ideas. Care ethics and design thinking have much in common. For example, the relational and responsive dimension of design thinking is analogous in some important ways, namely empathy and inquiry, to the relational and responsive approach of care ethics. The shared themes in care ethics and design thinking make the integration of the two plausible and reciprocal advantages make the combination compelling. Explicit ethical language can shape design thinking as more than a tool of productivity while the participatory processes of design thinking can aid in expanding the circle of care ethics as a social and political ethic. Furthermore, caring design may provide a palatable path for greater acceptance of care ethics among business professionals. An overview of design thinking and care ethics is offered prior to exploring how the synergies are mutually beneficial. The article concludes with a focus on how to educate the next generation of business students for caring design. (shrink)

"This book tries to assess Galileo's work in its historical singularity. It is constructed around a precise question: How did Galileo create the modern science of motion? Starting from this question, I shall go on to determine as accurately as I can what concepts and methods helped classical mechanics to take shape." [Preface].

Applying Care Ethics to Business is the first book-length analysis of business and economic cases and theories from the perspective of care theory.

Originally published in 1964. In four essays, Professor Mandelbaum challenges some of the most common assumptions of contemporary epistemology. Through historical analyses and critical argument, he attempts to show that one cannot successfully sever the connections between philosophic and scientific accounts of sense perception. While each essay is independent of the others, and the argument of each must therefore be judged on its own merits, one theme is common to all: that critical realism, as Mandelbaum calls it, is a viable (...) epistemological position, even though some schools of thought hold it in low esteem. (shrink)

He focuses on Hegel and Nietzche, perhaps to give Mallarme and Kafka a breathing spell. Paper edition (unseen), $10.95. No index or bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

A sustained analysis of how Addams gave American pragmatism a radical, revolutionary edge.

The history of ideas deals with the elemental unit-ideas which for Lovejoy are components of systems distinguished by their patterns. Special histories explain how a particular form of human history developed. General histories draw on special histories to document or explain social contexts. Since patterns influence philosophers, the history of ideas contributes little to the history of philosophy, a discontinuous strand within a period's continuous intellectual history. By accepting cultural pluralism, denying the monistic position that there always are internal connections (...) among all or some strands of intellectual and cultural history, both continuity and change in philosophy can be best understood. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

There have been a number of publications in recent years on generalising the AGM paradigm to the Horn fragment of propositional logic. Most of them focused on adapting AGM contraction and revision to the Horn setting. It remains an open question whether the adapted Horn contraction and Horn revision are inter-definable as in the AGM case through the Levi and Harper identities. In this paper, we give a positive answer by providing methods for generating contraction and revision from their dual (...) operations. Noticeably, we cannot apply the Levi and Harper identities directly in such methods as the Horn fragment does not fully support negation. To overcome this difficulty, a Horn approximation technique called Horn strengthening is used. We show that Horn contraction generated from Horn revision is always plausible whereas Horn revision generated from Horn contraction is, in general, implausible and, to regain plausibility, the generating contraction has to be properly restricted. (shrink)

This comprehensive encyclopedia entry discusses the life and works of Jane Addams (1860-1935) who influenced contemporaries John Dewey, William James, and George Herbert Mead. Although not traditionally categorized as a philosopher, Addams was a prolific writer who developed a social philosophy of attentiveness and sympathetic knowledge that prefigures contemporary feminist care ethics.

Contributors to this volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices or settings, as a framework that should (...) guide thinking. (shrink)

Originally published in 1971. The purpose of this book is to draw attention to important aspects of thought in the nineteenth century. While its central concerns lie within the philosophic tradition, materials drawn from the social sciences and elsewhere provide important illustrations of the intellectual movements that the author attempts to trace. This book aims at examining philosophic modes of thought as well as sifting presuppositions held in common by a diverse group of thinkers whose antecedents and whose intentions often (...) had little in common. After a preliminary tracing of the main strands of continuity within philosophy itself, the author concentrates on how, out of diverse and disparate sources, certain common beliefs and attitudes regarding history, man, and reason came to pervade a great deal of nineteenth-century thought. Geographically, this book focuses on English, French, and German thought. Mandelbaum believes that views regarding history and man and reason pose problems for philosophy, and he offers critical discussions of some of those problems at the conclusions of parts 2, 3, and 4. (shrink)

This article suggests that one means for empathetically and imaginatively engaging the intersectional differences of otherness to find commonality while still honoring, recognizing, and celebrating those differences is found in the notion of embodied care—the framing of feminist care ethics in terms of its physical elements. Because embodiment remains a common denominator among humans despite the strength of intersectional differences, the body is an important means of connectivity and thus a basis for at least partial understanding between embodied beings. However, (...) this is a humble commonality born out of responsiveness and listening because the body is also the site of inscribed differences. Authentic care is always responsive and thus respectful of the one cared for. Framing care as performed bodily actions is an effort to capture a corporal basis for morality that has the potential to help us negotiate powerful narratives of socially constructed otherness in order to engage identity-based injustice without silencing the voices and experiences of difference and dissent. Care is described as a performance of the body/self, and how such performances of the body can spark understanding across intersectional differences. The article suggests dramaturgical exercises for developing skills of caring for unfamiliar others. (shrink)

Laws through which we explain particular events need not be laws which describe uniform sequences of events; they may be laws stating uniform connections between two types of factor contained within a complex event. Hempel's apparent insistence that laws state the conditions invariably accompanying a type of complex event, that the event be an instance of the laws "covering" it, results from the Humean analysis in which causation obtains between types of events and "the cause" means necessary conditions. But historians (...) often depict sufficient conditions. On the other hand, some knowledge of general laws is a presupposition of Dray's "continuous series" model of historical explanation. (shrink)

Sport and game metaphors are ubiquitous in the culture and language of business. As evocative linguistic devices, such metaphors are morally neutral; however, if they are indicative of a deep structure of understanding that filters experience, then they have the potential to be ethically problematic. This article argues that there exists a danger for those who forget or confuse metaphor with definition: the metaphoric fallacy. Accordingly, business is like a game, but it is not the equivalent of a game. If (...) business is equated to a game, then the potentially negative implications for ethical content and the application of ethical theories are numerous. This article suggests a fresh approach to issues of contemporary business ethics discourse, by attending to the business-as-game metaphor. (shrink)

Maurice Blanchot’s “The Strange and the Stranger” (1958) is an essential text for understanding Blanchot’s thought, its development, and its enduring importance. He presents an early account of the impersonal “neuter” in subject-less experiences like “alienation,” “alteration,” “dispersion,” “disappearance,” and “absence.” These experiences of strangeness threaten thought, which is only “itself and for-itself its own experience.” Relatedly, they also reveal “the neutrality of being or neutrality as being.” With reference to both Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, Blanchot clarifies the (...) meaning and exigency of a neuter that can take “upon itself the reality of alienation.”. (shrink)

The notion of "feminist pragmatism" or "pragmatist feminism" has been around since Charlene Haddock Seigfried introduced it two decades ago. However, the bulk of the work in this field has been directed toward recovering the feminist strain of classical American philosophy, largely through renewed interest in the work of Jane Addams. This exploration of the origins of feminism and pragmatism has been fruitful in building a foundation for theoretical considerations. The editors of this volume believe the next logical step is (...) the contemporary application to both theory and experience. Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism is the first book to address the modern significance of the nexus of feminism and pragmatism. The issues explored here include the relationship between community and identity, particularly around the impact of gender and race; reframing political practice regarding feminist pragmatist commitments including education, sustainability movements, and local efforts like community gardens; and the association between ethics and inquiry including explorations of Buddhism, hospitality, and animal-human relationships. (shrink)

Frequently, throughout the history of modern philosophy, it has been held that although claims to knowledge can be adequately defended against relativistic arguments, judgments of value cannot. Positions of this type were widely accepted in Anglo-American philosophy during the last half-century. To be sure, some philosophers have at all times attacked such a dichotomy, holding that arguments similar to those which justify a rejection of relativism is mistaken in both spheres. Recently, however, there has been an attack on the same (...) dichotomy from the opposite direction. An increasing number of philosophers have accepted positions that lead to a relativization of judgments of fact as well as of judgments of value. This tendency has many independent roots, and those who accept it in one form or another may hold antithetical positions on a variety of other issues. I shall therefore not attempt to disentangle the presuppositions which underlie contemporary relativistic theories of knowledge, though I shall indicate some of them in passing; rather, I shall confine myself to showing that an acceptance of relativism in the theory of knowledge frequently—and perhaps always—involves a prior commitment to non-relativistic interpretations of at least some judgments concerning matters of fact. Consequently, whatever may be the case with respect to judgments of value, epistemological relativism may be said to be self-limiting. (shrink)

The majority of animal advocacy discourse is unidirectional: Humans are regarded as stewards of animal welfare, and humans control the bestowal of rights and protections upon animals. This article offers a reversal of the typical moral reflection used in animal advocacy. I suggest that our relationship with animals participates in the development of moral faculties requisite for ethical behavior. In other words, we have a lot to learn from animals, not in this instance by documenting their behavior, but from having (...) meaningful relationships with particular animals. Quality interactions with animals can stimulate the imaginative basis for the care and empathy that are crucial for social morality. To accomplish this task, I describe “embodied care” as an extension of feminist care ethics that addresses the body’s role in morality, and argue that our relationships with animals can provide the imaginative foundation for improving human-to-human morality. (shrink)

Practically every development in medicine in the post–World War II period distanced the physician and the hospital from the patient and the community, disrupting personal connections and severing bonds of trust. We need an ethics that include bodily mediated knowledge as a complement to intellectual knowledge. Care is a challenging concept to explore, in part because it is employed widely and often without thoughtful parsing. Moreover, it has gained increasing significance in ethical discourse.1 Since the 1980s, feminist theorists have used (...) the term care ethics to describe a relational approach to morality that does not rely on rubrics of adjudication such as rules or consequences. The.. (shrink)

... A Contemporary History of African Philosophy, Owerri: Amamihe Publications, 1999. PARRINDER, GEOFFREY, African Traditional Religion, London: Sheldon, ...