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The Sermon on the Mount never ceases to challenge readers in every generation. New methods and new insights into new surroundings have to be applied to the most influential speech ever given. In this study, Ernst Baasland takes a fresh look at the history of research done on it, both on its broad influence and on the variety of interpretations. The historical questions are seen from new perspectives. Is orality the key to a better understanding? To what extent can we reconstruct a pre-text and the question of authenticity be answered? These questions are seen through historiographical lenses. The author argues in favour of a universal addressee and maintains that the speech contains radical philosophical thinking. The first audience consisted of Jews, and the religiously based understanding of life is conceived within Judaism. However, its ethics of wisdom is developed in a Hellenistic setting and provides a radical philosophy of life.
After 1989 human rights have expanded into a vernacular touching every aspect of social life. They are seen as the key concept in morals and politics and a main tool for forging individual and collective identities. They are the ideology after ‘the end of ideologies’ – the only values left after ‘the end of history’. The response of the left to the rights revolution has been muted and unsure. Classical Marxist critiques of (natural) rights have made the left justly suspicious, and this is still the case today. Elaborating and addressing a series of foundational paradoxes of rights, this book – the third in Costas Douzinas’s human rights trilogy, following The End of Human Rights and Human Rights and Empire – provides a long-overdue re-evaluation of the history and political uses of rights for the left. The book examines the history and philosophy of the (legal) person, the subject, the human and dignity from classical Rome to postmodern Brussels. It traces the gradual abandonment of right, virtue and the common good for individual rights and self-interest. The limited and distorted conception of rights of liberal jurisprudence is contrasted with an alternative that sees rights as a relation involved in the struggle for recognition and an everyday utopia. The right to resistance and revolution, prohibited but regularly returning like the repressed, rescues law from sclerosis and presents a case study of the paradoxical nature of rights. Finally, the book offers a brief examination of law’s encounter with radical politics informed by the author’s strange experience as an ‘accidental’ politician in the first radical left government in Europe. The book’s radical concept of legal philosophy and public law will be of considerable value to legal theorists, political philosophers and anyone with an interest in thinking and acting in ways that go beyond the limits of liberal, and neoliberal, ideology.
"In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--
Radical Atheism challenges the religious appropriation of Derrida's work and offers a compelling new account of his thinking on time and space, life and death, good and evil, self and other.
Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.
In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.
Presents the story of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation. This title contains a philosophical and ethical inquiry into a people faced with the end of their way of life.
In this concise introduction, Chad Kautzer demonstrates the shared emancipatory goals and methods of several radical philosophies, from Marxism and feminism to critical race and queer theory. Radical Philosophy examines the relations of theory and practice, knowledge and power, as well as the function of law in creating extralegal forms of domination. Through a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, Kautzer reconstructs important counter-traditions of historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique relevant to contemporary social struggles. The result is an innovative, systematic guide to radical theory and critical resistance.
Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt brings something new to epistemology both in content and style. At the outset we are asked to imagine a person named Vatol who grows up in a world containing numerous people who are brains-in-vats and who hallucinate their entire lives. Would Vatol have reason to doubt whether he himself is in contact with reality? If he does have reason to doubt, would he doubt, or is it impossible for a person to have such doubts? And how do we ourselves compare to Vatol? After reflection, can we plausibly claim that Vatol has reason to doubt, but we don't? These are the questions that provide the novel framework for the debates in this book. Topics that are treated here in significantly new ways include: the view that we ought to doubt only when we philosophize; epistemological “dogmatism”; and connections between radical doubt and “having a self.” The book adopts the innovative form of a “dialogue/play.” The three characters, who are Talmud students as well as philosophers, hardly limit themselves to pure philosophy, but regale each other with Talmudic allusions, reminiscences, jokes, and insults. For them the possibility of doubt emerges as an existential problem with potentially deep emotional significance. Setting complex arguments about radical skepticism within entertaining dialogue, this book can be recommended for both beginners and specialists.
Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) was an important and provocative thinker. Born in Russia, he spent most of his life in France. His interpretation of Hegel and his notorious declaration that history had come to an end exerted great influence on French thinkers and writers such as Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau. An unorthodox Marxist, he was a critic of Martin Heidegger and interlocutor of Leo Strauss who played a significant role in establishing the European Economic Community; a polyglot with many unusual interests, he wrote works, mostly unpublished in his lifetime, on quantum physics, the problem of the infinite, Buddhism, atheism, and Vassily Kandinsky’s paintings. In The Black Circle, Jeff Love reinterprets Kojève’s works, showing him to be an essential thinker who challenged modern society and its valuation of individuality, self-interest, and freedom from death. Emphasizing Kojève’s neglected Russian roots, The Black Circle puts him in the context of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian debates over the proper ends of human life. Love explores notions of perfection, freedom, and finality in Kojève’s account of Hegel and his neglected later works, clarifying Kojève’s emancipatory thinking and the meaning of the oft-misinterpreted “end of history.” Combining intellectual history, close textual analysis, and philosophy, The Black Circle reveals Kojève’s thought as a profound critique of capitalist individualism and a timely meditation on human freedom.