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This book presents an original and creative enactment of a confrontation between Heidegger and Plato. Gregory Fried outlines a new approach to ethics and politics combining skeptical idealism and what he calls polemical ethics, and goes on to apply polemical ethics to the crucial questions around fascism and racism.
Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger’s critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger’s analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger’s disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency. Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.
It is evident from recent political campaigns, such as that of Donald Trump, that the deployment of attention is crucial for political outcomes. Indeed, Trump’s presidency came about in part due to realities that were produced by the media themselves, which required in turn the engagement of public attention. The implication is that the instability and capriciousness that is often associated with attention can be an important influence on the outcomes that are so produced. Drawing on the thought of Martin Heidegger, Lawrence Berger puts forward a new conception of attention as human presence, showing how its state determines the efficacy of public spaces in articulating and achieving visions of the common good. As politicians seek to amass power by capturing attention, citizens can engage in disciplines of attention such as mindfulness in producing a public power that is more appropriately oriented to the welfare of all. Berger argues that the practice of mindfulness can enable enhanced ontological bonds to form between individuals, which can be the basis for more stable and effective political realities. Such bonds are not given structures, but are rather contingent upon the state of attention, which comes about holistically by way of a hermeneutical circle of attention, language, and bodily understanding. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of philosophy of mind, political philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive science.
A brilliant and witty postmodern critique of ethics, framed as a contemporary restaging of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. John D. Caputo undertakes a passionate, poetic, and satiric search for the basis of an ethics in the postmodern situation. Restaging Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Caputo defends the notion of obligation without ethics, of responsibility without the support of ethical foundations. Retelling the story of Abraham and Isaac, he strikes the pose of a postmodern-day Johannes de Silentio, accompanied by communications from such startling figures as Johanna de Silentio, Felix Sineculpa, and Magdalena de la Cruz. In dialogue with the thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Lyotard, Caputo forges a challenging, original account of what is possible and what is not possible for a continentalist ethics today. “Against Ethics is a bold work. . . . A counterethics whose multiple voices will be heard long after the trivializing arguments of many analytic ethicists have vanished and the arcane formulations of many postmoderns have been jettisoned.” —Edith Wyschogrod “Caputo provides a brilliant new analysis of the limits of ethics. . . . Essential reading for anyone concerned with the philosophical issues raised in postmodernity.” —Drucilla Cornell “One of the most important works on philosophical ethics written in recent years. . . . Caputo speaks with a passion and concern that are rare in academic philosophy.” —Mark C. Taylor “Against Ethics is beautifully written, clever, learned, thought-provoking, and even inspiring.” —Theological Studies “Writing in the form of his ideas, Caputo offers the reader a truly exquisite reading experience. . . . His iconic style mirrors a truly refreshing honesty that draws the reader in to play.” —Quarterly Journal of Speech
"... remarkable account of the impact of postmodern philosophy on the question of ethics and politics... commendable also for its balanced view of Heidegger's relationship to politics and ethics.... an excellent account of Heidegger's philosophical understanding of technology..." -- Choice This book takes as its point of departure the question of ethics: that values and their pursuit in the West often perpetuate their own worst enemies. At issue are the dangers in the structures and movements of images, values, and ways of knowing that are most intimately a part of our lives.
Peperzak (philosophy, Loyola U.) reflects on key concepts of a postmodern ethics that is neither utilitarian nor deontological, addressing aspects such as freedom, value, obligation, and culture. He draws on sources including Plato, Kant, French phenomenology, and especially Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Typically, when utilised in the general terms of a post-metaphysics, the `Post' is seen as unsympathetic to ethics. In contrast, this author proposes that the trajectory for a post-metaphysical ethics can be traced from the work of Martin Heidegger. Despite demonstrating that certain projects of the `Post' have reached an impasse, she argues that other such possibilities do develop an outline for an ethical `Post' that does not collapse into paradox or remain at an impasse, further suggesting that this vision of the `Post' holds positive significance and implications for our conceptions of ethics and ethical practice in the 21st century. Drawing in detail on both Heidegger's oeuvre and a wide range of associated projects in contemporary continental philosophy, including phenomenology, deconstruction, pragmatism, the newer French liberalism and post-structuralist aesthetics and theology, this book delivers a convincing-rebuttal of one of the more persistent arguments about post-Heideggerian philosophy and its relations to the ethical.