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Originally published in 1970. This book is a collection of lectures and papers given by Professor Findlay in the 1960s. The theme is an argument for a metaphysical Absolute, in the sense of post-Hegelian Idealism. Findlay’s word for the Absolute process is ‘Enterprise’, which must be necessary in thought and reality. This ontological argument goes further that previous cosmological arguments and addresses both traditions from ancient philosophy and the modern Anglo-American school of philosophy. The book discusses the case for a Perfect Being, a Necessary Being and, in a change to Findlay’s previous published thought, presents a case for mysticism.
For the first time, this volume presents a series of critical and constructive studies in the philosophy of J. N. Findlay. His contributions to both historical and systematic philosophy are examined by outstanding authors in the field, many of whom are his former students and colleagues. The value of these essays is heightened by Findlay's own contributions: two autobiographical chapters detail the evolution of his thought and relationships, and in a final section of comments, he evaluates and responds to the studies in this collection.
"The central aim of The Parmenidean Ascent is to reveal the power of an extreme monism of a Parmenidean variety in a more uncompromising manner than has been attempted for many a year. For the Parmenidean monist, there are no distinctions whatsoever, and indeed distinctions are unintelligible. The book not only defends-against the tide of much recent scholarship-the attribution of such a sweeping monism to Parmenides, it also embraces this monism in its own right and expands these monistic results to many of the most crucial areas of philosophy. The topics that come in for this rationalistic, monistic, treatment include being, action, knowledge, meaning, truth, and metaphysical explanation. There is thus no differentiated being, no differentiated action, knowledge, etc. Rather all is being, just as all is action, knowledge, etc. The motive force behind this argument is a combination of a detailed survey of the failures of leading positions (both historical and contemporary) to meet a demand for the explanation of a given phenomenon, and a powerful rationalist, Bradleyan argument against the reality of relations. The result is a rationalist rejection of all distinctions and a skeptical denial of the intelligibility of ordinary, relational notions of being, action, knowledge, etc. A further significant upshot is the rejection of any distinction between philosophy itself and the study of its history. Throughout the book, attention is paid to philosophical methods systems, including especially the method, so popular today, of relying on intuitions and common sense. The historically-minded and rationalist approach throughout this book goes a long way toward demonstrating the ultimate bankruptcy of this prevalent methodology"--
“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.
The author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self Our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse. Fortunately, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth pangs of an earth in crisis. Our journey of separation hasn't been a terrible mistake but an evolutionary process and an adventure in self-discovery. Even in our darkest hour, Eisenstein sees the possibility of a more beautiful world—not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control but by fundamentally reimagining ourselves and our systems. We must shift away from our Babelian efforts to build ever-higher towers to heaven and instead turn out attention to creating a new kind of civilization—one designed for beauty rather than height.
Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi (1863-1920), one of Russia's great philosophers, exemplified what was best in the Russian religious-philosophical tradition. His lifelong pursuit was "integral knowledge." This ideal affirmed that faith was integral to reason and that inner experience (moral, religious, aesthetic), and not just external sensory experience, offered truthful testimony to the nature of reality--precisely contrary to the reductive positivism and scientism of Trubetskoi's day and ours. Following Vladimir Soloviev he developed the concept of Bogochelovechestvo (divine humanity)--the free human realization of the divine principle in ourselves and in the world (deification)--and found in it the very meaning of life. Trubetskoi strikingly combined religious philosophy with an unwavering commitment to the main principles of liberalism: human dignity, freedom of conscience, the rule of law (based ultimately on natural law), and human perfectibility (progress). He worked tirelessly for a liberal, constitutional Russia. This is the first book in English devoted to Evgenii Trubetskoi's life and thought. It includes a comprehensive introduction, six chapters on his religious-philosophical worldview, and six chapters on an area of religious studies that he inspired--the philosophy of the icon.
Originally published: Germany: S. Fischer Verlag.
A milestone in Japan's post-war philosophical thought and a dramatic turning point in Tanabe's own philosophy, "Philosophy as Metanoetics" calls for nothing less than a complete and radical rethinking of the philosophical task itself. It is a powerful, original work, showing vast erudition in all areas of both Eastern and Western thought.
This book was written in 1968, and defended as a doctoral dissertation before the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1969. It treats of the systematic views of Hegel which led him to give to the princi ple of non-contradiction, the principle of double negation, and the principle of excluded middle, meanings which are difficult to understand. The reader will look in vain for the philosophical position of the author. A few words about the intentions which motivated the author to study and clarify Hegel's thought are therefore not out of place. In the early sixties, when occupying myself with the history of Marxist philosophy, I discovered that the representatives of the logical-positivist tra dition were not alone in employing a principle of demarcation; that those of the dialectical Marxist tradition were also using such a principle ('self-move ment') as a foundation of a scientific philosophy and as a means to delimit unscientific ideas. I aimed at a clear conception of this principle in order to be able to judge whether, and to what extent, it accords with the foundations of the analytical method. In this endeavor I encountered two problems: (1) What is to be understood by 'analytical method' cannot be ascertained un equivocally.
A groundbreaking account of the meaning of abstract painting From Mondrian's bold geometric forms to Kandinsky's use of symbols to Pollock's "dripped paintings," the richly diverse movement of abstract painting challenges anyone trying to make sense of either individual works or the phenomenon as a whole. Applying his insights as an art historian and a painter, John Golding offers a unique approach to understanding the evolution of abstractionism by looking at the personal artistic development of seven of its greatest practitioners. He re-creates the journey undertaken by each painter in his move from representational art to the abstract—a journey that in most cases began with cubism but led variously to symbolism, futurism, surrealism, theosophy, anthropology, Jungian analysis, and beyond. For each artist, spiritual quest and artistic experimentation became inseparable. And despite their different techniques and philosophies, these artists shared one goal: to break a path to a new, ultimate pictorial truth. The book first explores the works and concerns of three pioneering European abstract painters—Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky—and then those of their American successors—Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Golding shows how each painter sought to see the world and communicate his vision in the purest or most expressive form possible. For example, Mondrian found his way into abstraction through a spiritual response to the landscape of his native Holland, Malevich through his apprehension of the human body, Kandinsky through a blend of religious mysticism and symbolism. Line and color became the focus for many of their creative endeavors. In the 1940s and 50s, the Americans raised the level of pictorial innovation, beginning most notably with Pollock and his Jung-inspired concept of action. Golding makes a powerful case that at its best and most profound, abstract painting is heavily imbued with meaning and content. Through a blend of biography, art analysis, and cultural history, Paths to the Absolute offers remarkable insights into how a sense of purpose is achieved in painting, and how abstractionism engaged with the intellectual currents of its time. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.