Unmodern Philosophy And Modern Philosophy

Download or read book Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy written by John Dewey and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2012-05-16 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 800x600Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work. In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment. Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy.

Download or read book Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity written by Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of ten essays offers the first systematic assessment of JürgenHabermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a book that defended the rational potential of themodern age against the depiction of modernity as a spent epoch. The essays (of which four are newlycommissioned, five were published in the journal Praxis International, and one -- by Habermas --first appeared in translation in New Critique) are divided into two sections: Critical Rejoindersand Thematic Reformulations.An opening essay by d'Entrèves sets out the main issues and orients thedebate between Habermas and the postmodernists by identifying two different senses ofresponsibility: a responsibility to act versus a responsibility to otherness (an openness todifference, dissonance, and ambiguity). These are linked with two alternative understandings of theprimary function of language: action-orienting versus world-disclosing. This is a fruitful way oflooking at the issues that Habermas has raised in his attempt to resurrect and complete the projectof Enlightenment.Habermas's essay discusses the main themes of his book in the context of a criticalengagement with neoconservative cultural and political trends. The main body of essays offer aninteresting collection of points of view, for and against Habermas's position by philosophers,social scientists, intellectual historians, and literary critics.SECTIONS & CONTRIBUTORS :Introduction, Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves. Modernity versus Postmodernity, Jürgen Habermas.Critical Rejoinders : Fred Dallmayr. Christopher Norris. David C. Hoy. James Schmidt. JoelWhitebook. Thematic Reformulations : James Bohman. Diana Coole. Jay M. Bernstein. DavidIngram.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dewey written by Steven Fesmire and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Download or read book John Dewey and Continental Philosophy written by Paul Fairfield and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “These essays build a valuable, if virtual, bridge between the thought of John Dewey and that of a host of modern European philosophers. They invite us to entertain a set of imagined conversations among the mighty dead that no doubt would have intrigued Dewey and each of the interlocutors gathered here.”—Robert Westbrook, author of John Dewey and American Democracy and/or Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. John Dewey and Continental Philosophy provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. John Dewey and Continental Philosophy demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate.

Download or read book We Have Never Been Modern written by Bruno Latour and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

Download or read book Nietzsche's Earth written by Gary Shapiro and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, philosopher Gary Shapiro aims to demonstrate the extreme relevance of Nietzsche s thought to some of the contemporary world s most pertinent political issues, fully acknowledging the prescience of his thinking in several areas. In particular, Shapiro takes up Nietzsche s environmentalism and his concern with the direction ("Sinn") of the earth to show how Nietzsche is one of few major philosophers to have anticipated the most important and characteristic questions about modernity, and to have addressed them when it first became possible to do so (given Nietzsche s historical context: the 19th century zenith of the nation-state and the new speeds of industry, transportation, and communication). Nietzsche, Shapiro says, has important things to say about topics that are very much on the agenda today: globalization; the character of a livable earth (what he called a "Menschen-Erde"); and geopolitical categories that characterize people and places, peoples and states. While Nietzsche was clear in foregrounding these issues and questions, there is still much to be done in making sense of them, and "Nietzsche s Earth" offers a fresh reading informed both by Nietzsche s assessment of modernity, and by contemporary philosophical discussion in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben, Badiou, Foucault, Derrida, and others."

Download or read book Dangerous Minds written by Ronald Beiner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order. In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right. Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.