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The philanthropist and philosopher Strachan Donnelley (1942--2008) devoted his life to studying the complex relationship between humans and nature. Founder and first president of the Center for Humans and Nature, Donnelley was a pioneer in the exploration and promotion of the idea that human beings individually and collectively have moral and civic responsibilities to natural ecosystems. In this wide-ranging volume, Donnelley traces the connections between influential figures such as Aldo Leopold and Charles Darwin, as well as lesser-known but original thinkers that he met during the course of a full life -- ministers at his church, friends with whom he fished, and colleagues who shared his passion for research and writing. He grounds his work in classic philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Whitehead and reinterprets their writings about the natural world to develop a conservation-centered philosophy, which he dubs "democratic ecological citizenship." Edited by his daughter, Ceara Donnelley, and Bruce Jennings, Frog Pond Philosophy illuminates the dominant strands of Donnelley's intellectual identity as a philosopher, naturalist, agitator, and spiritualist. Despite his often grim depiction of the current state of the environment, Donnelly never surrenders his faith in humanity's ability to meet its ethical obligations to conserve, respect, and nurture the complexity and diversity of the natural world. His vivid and personal essays, rooted in everyday experiences, offer a distinctive perspective on questions of urgent contemporary importance.
A critique of Kant's philosophy revealing that the relationship between his Analytic and Dialectic is more complicated than supposed (something we thought utterly impossible). Kerszberg (philosophy, Pennsylvania State U.) dives into the Kantian universe and finds the black holes of the philosophers cosmological principle, transcendental time, the doubled illusion, the reversals of reversal oscillating between givenness and nothingness to, suggests the author, the confusion of his successors Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel with whom we sympathize. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
THE TOTALITY OF NATURE is comprised of some twenty cycles of aphoristic philosophy with titles ranging from the arguably banal 'Cause and Effect' to the rather more cryptic 'Paradigmatic Triplicities', as well as a number of the by-now familiar dichotomous titles like 'Blessed and Cursed vis-a-vis Saved and Damned', all of which, as before, supplement or complement the Elemental theories which are at the roots of John O'Loughlin's philosophy and which stretch logic, and therefore a conception of nature, into a fourfold structure that becomes the basis of subsequent enrichment and/or embellishment.
Collected in this text are the written notes of courses on the concept of nature give by Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in the 1950s. The ideas that animated the philosopher's lectures emerge in an early, fluid form in the process of being elaborated, negotiated, critiqued and reconsidered.
This interdisciplinary endeavour portrays the central features of militant movements which hold totality as an important part of their doctrinal core. Revisiting the importance of modernity, utopianism, eschatology, charisma, psychology and the history of ideas, Mihai Murariu pursues a reconstruction of the historical requirements for the emergence of such movements. Making a central use of the concept of totalism, the work establishes a conceptual bridge from antiquity to the contemporary period, whilst also arguing for the suitability of the term in comparison to totalitarianism or political religion. The author also proposes a distinct taxonomy for structural elements, variants, and development phases which may be encountered in totalist movements.
Recent attempts to revitalize Hegel's social and political philosophy have tended to be doubly constrained: firstly, by their focus on Hegel's Philosophy of Right; and secondly, by their broadly liberal interpretive framework. Challenging that trend, Arash Abazari shows that the locus of Hegel's genuine critical social theory is to be sought in his ontology – specifically in the 'logic of essence' of the Science of Logic. Mobilizing ideas from Marx and Adorno, Abazari unveils the hidden critical import of Hegel's logic. He argues that social domination in capitalism obtains by virtue of the illusion of equality and freedom; shows how relations of opposition underlie the seeming pluralism in capitalism; and elaborates on the deepest ground of domination, i.e. the totality of capitalist social relations. Overall, his book demonstrates that Hegel's logic can and should be read politically.
This compelling study of the origins of all that exists, including explanations of the entire material world, traces the responses of philosophers and scientists to the most elemental and haunting question of all: why is anything here—or anything anywhere? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why not nothing? It includes the thoughts of dozens of luminaries from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and Leibniz to modern thinkers such as physicists Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg, philosophers Robert Nozick and Derek Parfit, philosophers of religion Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, and the Dalai Lama. The first accessible volume to cover a wide range of possible reasons for the existence of all reality, from over 50 renowned thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Robert Nozick, Derek Parfit, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, John Polkinghorne, Paul Davies, and the Dalai Lama Features insights by scientists, philosophers, and theologians Includes informative and helpful editorial introductions to each section Provides a wealth of suggestions for further reading and research Presents material that is both comprehensive and comprehensible
The kingdom of heaven, global climate meltdown and international networks of terror, the beloved who completes us, and the virtual cybervillage all have something in common. As products of our imagination, symbolic expressions of totality like these orient individual and collective life. Both panacea and poison, our dreams of totality power religious beliefs, sociopolitical programs such as capitalism and globalism, psychology's narratives of wholeness, even our ideas about individual and cultural health. When dreams of totality go bad, and they often do--becoming totalitarian or fundamentalist--they are more destructive than any plague or natural disaster. Dreams of Totality explores images of wholeness in cultures from ancient civilizations through today. It explains why symbols of totality appear without fail in response to chaos and distress, how they subsequently entomb us, and then eventually deconstruct as disenfranchised elements of psyche and society press for inclusion. Today, unmoored dreams of totality like globalization and the virtual Web community are taking over our collective imagination at the same time we are being exploited by a surfeit of image-industry spin. But as this book explains, we can't go backward into malignant nostalgia for a time when the gods spoke as one, take refuge in fractured fundamentalisms, nor should we succumb to a casual relationship to truth. Rather, preserving the creative function of dreaming of totality while at the same time loosening its often-deadening grip--an Rx for taking the medicine of totality when there's nothing at the center--is crucial as we try to cultivate an ethic of responsibility and integrity toward one another on a global scale.
Hailed as "one of the most valuable books on the relation of philosophy and science," Alfred North Whitehead's The Concept of Nature, first published in 1920, was an important contribution to the development of philosophic naturalism. Examining the fundamental problems of substance, space, and time, Whitehead assesses the impact of Einstein's theories as well as the then-recent findings of modern physics on the concept of nature. For students and teachers of natural philosophy, this is essential reading. English mathematician and philosopher ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (1861-1947) contributed significantly to 20th-century logic and metaphysics. With Bertrand Russell he cowrote the landmark Principia Mathematica, and also authored An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Function of Reason, and Process and Reality.