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These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.
In this systematic and scathing attack on the dominant contemporary version of liberalism, John Kekes challenges political assumptions shared by the majority of people in Western societies. Egalitarianism, as it's widely known, holds that a government ought to treat all citizens with equal consideration. Kekes charges that belief in egalitarianism rests on illusions that prevent people from facing unpleasant truths.Kekes, a major voice in modern political thought, argues that differences among human beings in the areas of morality, reasonability, legality, and citizenship are too important for governance to ignore. In a rigorous criticism of prominent egalitarian thinkers, including Dworkin, Nagel, Nussbaum, Rawls, Raz, and Singer, Kekes charges that their views present a serious threat to both morality and reason. For Kekes, certain "inegalitarian truths" are obvious: people should get what they deserve, those who are good and those who are evil should not be treated as if they had the same moral worth, people should not be denied what they have earned in order to benefit those who have not earned it, and individuals should be held responsible for their actions. His provocative book will compel many readers to question their faith in liberalism.
A rich assortment of visual mind-bogglers, including "impossible objects" — constructions that look fine on paper but can't possibly exist in reality — as well as pulsating patterns, vanishing spots, pictures that suddenly change into other configurations as you're looking at them, and much more. 60 black-and-white illustrations.
Cities are conspicuous among settlements because of their bulk and pace: Venice, Paris, or New York. Each is distinctive, but all share a social structure that mixes systems (families, businesses, and schools), their members, and a public regulator. Cities alter this structure in ways specific to themselves: orchestras play music too elaborate for a quartet; city densities promote collaborations unachievable in simpler towns. Cities, Real and Ideal avers with von Bertalanffy, Parsons, Simmel, and Wirth that a theory of social structure is empirically testable and confirmed. It proposes a version of social justice appropriate to this structure, thereby updating Marx’s claim that justice is realizable without the intervention of factors additional to society’s material conditions.
I was very happy when in 1997 Fiachra Long came to spend part of his sabbatical leave at the Archives Maurice Blondel at Louvain-Ia-Neuve. This allowed him to bring together and complete his translation of three important articles from Maurice Blondel, known as the philosopher of Aix-en-Province. These three articles fonn a unity: they make explicit certain aspects of the method used in the great thesis of 1893, Action. This thesis, it is well known, aroused many polemic debates after its appearance. Thomist theologians accused Blondel of turning back towards Kantian idealism whereas the philosophers of the Revue de metaphysique et de morale accused him on the contrary of falling back on a pre-critical realism. The three articles translated here, each in its own way, attempt to pass beyond these two opposite charges. The Idealist Illusion (1898) underlines the fact that the content of consciousness should be unfurled as it appears, by withdrawing from any idealist or realist prejudice, before judging the consistency of its content as a whole. In this way Blondel supports the "phenomenological" method used in his thesis. The Elementary Principle of a Logic of the Moral Life (1903) is a very well-worked text which shows that "the logic of possession and privation" is broader than "the logic of amnnation and negation. " Using these words, Blondel develops certain striking laws of action such as that of the "parallelogram of contrary forces.
This volume is a collection of articles, essays, notes and posts in response to the most often asked questions and issues the author encountered in his career as an astrologer and consultant beginning in the 1970s to the present as of this printing. This text is a blending of science, metaphysics, philosophy, astrology and psychology on an array of popular topics. 553 pages, 71 articles, and 16 pieces of artwork, all in one place.
New media, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybernetics: are the latest technologies push back the very limits of 'reality'. The nature of the real in the digital age is ever more hotly debated and the place of these debates in visual culture can hardly be overstated. Innovative and provocative, this book brings together the latest research on 'the state of the real' by practitioners and commentators across the disciplines of photography, film, media studies, critical theory and fine art. Engaging with the work of critics and thinkers as varied as Linda Nochlin, Lev Manovich and Donna Harroway, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Barthes, "The State of the Real" looks first at the different ways in which 'realism' and reality have been understood in recent art history, with a particular focus on debates about the real within photography. Emphasising the role of art in shaping, as well as reflecting, notions of the real, the book features contributions from a number of contemporary artists and showcases a new photoessay by artist Andrew Lee. The collection looks finally towards advanced technologies and the virtual world in a section which concludes with a specially commissioned contribution by acclaimed thinker Slavoj Zizek. This is an indispensable volume for students of 'the digital age' across the fields of art and photography, film, media studies and critical and visual theory.