Title: Nietzsche, genealogy, morality: essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of morals
Author: Schacht, Richard 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | German Studies | European History | European Literature
Publisher's Description: Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Nietzsche's persisting concerns coming together in an illuminating constellation. A profound influence on psychoanalysis, antihistoricism, and poststructuralism and an abiding challenge to ethical theory, Nietzsche's book addresses many of the major philosophical problems and possibilities of modernity.In this unique collection focusing on the Genealogy , twenty-five notable philosophers offer diverse discussions of the book's central themes and concepts. They explore such notions as ressentiment , asceticism, "slave" and "master" moralities, and what Nietzsche calls "genealogy" and its relation to other forms of inquiry in his work. The book presents a cross section of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship and philosophical investigation that is certain to interest philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and anyone concerned with one of the master thinkers of the modern age.   [brief]
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Title: Nuptial arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's commentary on the fatal number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic 
Author: Allen, Michael J. B
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | Philosophy | Medieval Studies | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: The latest of Michael Allen's distinguished studies of the Renaissance Neoplatonist, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), presents a difficult, fascinating text. Late in his career, Ficino wrote a commentary on the intractable passage in Book VIII of Plato's Republic that concerns the mysterious geometric or "fatal" number. He was thus the first modern interpreter of this famous passage, and Allen is the first in our era to translate and elucidate his remarkable commentary.Allen's critical translation of Ficino's analysis of the fatal number passage shows how it develops philosophical, psychological, numerological, astrological, and prophetic themes that had a particular resonance at the end of the fifteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Oedipus lex: psychoanalysis, history, law 
Author: Goodrich, Peter 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Law | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Oedipus Lex offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions - the poets, women, and outsiders - that legal science has left in its wake.Goodrich analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law.   [brief]
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Title: On Heidegger's Nazism and philosophy 
Author: Rockmore, Tom 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | German Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: That Martin Heidegger supported National Socialism has long been common knowledge. Yet the relation between his philosophy and political commitments remains highly contentious and recently has erupted into a vociferous debate. Boldly refuting arguments that the philosopher's political stance was accidental or adopted under coercion, Rockmore argues that Heidegger's philosophical thought and his Nazism are inseparably intertwined, that he turned to National Socialism on the basis of his philosophy, and that his later evolution is largely determined by his continuing concern with Nazism.After developing a framework that clearly outlines the interrelation of Nazism and Heidegger's philosophy, Rockmore analyzes the famous rectoral address the philosopher delivered in 1933 upon becoming rector of the University of Freiburg. In that speech Heidegger sought to ground politics in philosophy. Rockmore examines the inseparable relation of politics and philosophy in Heidegger's Being and Time , the recently published Contributions to Philosophy (written from 1936 to 1938), and the interpretations of Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and technology.In his conclusion Rockmore considers the ongoing discussion of Heidegger's thought and Nazism in France. Combining extensive documentation of the Heidegger controversy with philosophical and historical analysis, this book raises profound questions about the social and political responsibility of philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: The philosopher's gaze: modernity in the shadows of enlightenment 
Author: Levin, David Michael 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Philosophy | Gender Studies | Art History | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze . Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living.In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision - if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing - the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision.In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live.   [brief]
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Title: Plato's Euthydemus: analysis of what is and is not philosophy 
Author: Chance, Thomas H
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Classical Philosophy | Literature
Publisher's Description: With Plato's Euthydemus , Thomas Chance solves a longstanding riddle of Platonic studies. Thought to be an early, immature work, the Euthydemus has come across to scholars as lacking Plato's characteristic greatness. This apparent lack, Chance argues, is not a failure of the text but of scholarly perception. He advances a single thesis: that Plato deliberately presents eristic - contentious debate - as the antithesis to his own philosophical method. Once this thesis is accepted, the "hidden" purpose of the Euthydemus becomes manifest: Plato has used the occasion of his dialogue to combine a brilliantly crafted parody of sophistic antilogy with a subtle yet forceful exhortation designed to persuade all of us to pursue virtue and to love wisdom.   [brief]
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Title: Plato's Parmenides
Author: Plato
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Philosophy | Classical Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Of all Plato's dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov's analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov's interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.   [brief]
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Title: Political criticism 
Author: Shapiro, Ian
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Philosophy | Sociology
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Title: Politics, death, and the devil: self and power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann
Author: Goldman, Harvey
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Sociology | Social Theory | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism | Political Theory | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: This sequel to Harvey Goldman's well-received Max Weber and Thomas Mann continues his rich exploration of the political and cultural critiques embodied in the more mature writings of these two authors. Combining social and political thought, intellectual history, and literary interpretation, Goldman examines in particular Weber's "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation" and Mann's The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus .Goldman deals with the ways in which Weber and Mann sought an antidote to personal and cultural weakness through "practices" for generating strength, mastery, and power, drawing primarily on ascetic traditions at a time when the vitality of other German traditions was disappearing. Power and mastery concerned both Weber and Mann, especially as they tried to resolve problems of politics and culture in Germany. Although their resolutions of the problems they confronted seem inadequate, they show the significance of linking social and political thought to conceptions of self and active worldly practices.Trenchant and illuminating, Goldman's book is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory, social thought, and the intellectual history of Germany.   [brief]
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Title: Practicing virtues: moral traditions at Quaker and military boarding schools 
Author: Hays, Kim
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | Philosophy | Education
Publisher's Description: Practicing Virtues is about learning to be good in the distinct moral worlds of Quaker and military boarding schools. Both types of schools bind their communities with shared codes of conduct, the military schools' conservative tradition emphasizing discipline and hard work, the Quaker schools' liberal tradition favoring tolerance and togetherness. At the heart of this contrast are two sets of virtues: pride, loyalty, and leadership among the cadets; simplicity, equality, and concern among the students at Quaker schools.During the course of a year Kim Hays lived in six schools, attending classes and staff meetings, sharing meals and informal conversation, and participating in the nonacademic side of boarding-school life.Despite the outward contrast between the Quaker and military settings, Hays found surprising similarities. Both systems cherish individualism while encouraging group identification and service to the school community. Hays shows that orderliness, obedience, and harmony do not in themselves create a vital moral environment. To reach that goal, teachers, students, and administrators need to disagree, question rules, and fight for change.This book has much to say about the role of education in developing moral responsibility. Every educator, student, and parent who cares about the future of American schooling will find valuable lessons here.   [brief]
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Title: The problems of a political animal: community, justice, and conflict in Aristotelian political thought
Author: Yack, Bernard 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Philosophy | Political Theory | Social and Political Thought | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: A bold new interpretation of Aristotelian thought is central to Bernard Yack's provocative new book. He shows that for Aristotle, community is a conflict-ridden fact of everyday life, as well as an ideal of social harmony and integration. From political justice and the rule of law to class struggle and moral conflict, Yack maintains that Aristotle intended to explain the conditions of everyday political life, not just, as most commentators assume, to represent the hypothetical achievements of an idealistic "best regime."By showing how Aristotelian ideas can provide new insight into our own political life, Yack makes a valuable contribution to contemporary discourse and debate. His work will excite interest among a wide range of social, moral, and political theorists.   [brief]
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Title: Profane illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of surrealist revolution
Author: Cohen, Margaret
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: German Studies | Philosophy | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Margaret Cohen's encounter with Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's most influential cultural and literary critics, has produced a radically new reading of surrealist thought and practice. Cohen analyzes the links between Breton's surrealist fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism and Benjamin's post-Enlightenment challenge to Marxist theory. She argues that Breton's surrealist Marxism played a formative role in shaping postwar French intellectual life and is of continued relevance to the contemporary intellectual scene.   [brief]
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Title: Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism 
Author: Seyhan, Azade
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Literary Theory and Criticism | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism.Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Residues of justice: literature, law, philosophy 
Author: Dimock, Wai-chee 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Studies | Law | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: In this arresting book, Wai Chee Dimock takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. The idea of justice is based on the premise that the world can be resolved into commensurate terms: punishment equal to the crime, redress equal to the injury, benefit equal to the desert. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice. To honor these "residues," she turns to literature, which, in its linguistic density, transposes the clean abstractions of law and philosophy into persistent shadows, the abiding presence of the incommensurate. Justice can only be a partial answer to the phenomenon of human conflict.In arguing for justice as an incomplete virtue, Dimock draws upon legal history, political philosophy, linguistics, theology, and feminist theory; she discusses Aristotle and Augustine, Locke and Luther, Marx and Durkheim, Michael Sandel and Carol Gilligan, Noam Chomsky and Mary Ann Glendon. She also examines an unusual configuration of nineteenth-century American authors, pairing figures such as Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman and Susan Warner.The result is a book both passionate and scholarly. It invites us to rethink the meanings of literature, law, and philosophy, and to imagine a language of community more supple and more nuanced than the language of justice.   [brief]
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Title: Rethinking evil: contemporary perspectives
Author: Lara, María Pía
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Social and Political Thought | Intellectual History | Social Theory | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: This innovative volume will be welcomed by moral and political philosophers, social scientists, and anyone who reflects seriously on the twentieth century's heavy burden of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other evidence of people's desire to harm one another. María Pía Lara brings together a provocative set of essays that reexamine evil in the context of a "postmetaphysical" world, a world that no longer equates natural and human evil and no longer believes in an omnipotent God. The question of how and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans perform radically evil acts.   [brief]
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Title: Revenge of the aesthetic: the place of literature in theory today 
Author: Clark, Michael 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: This cutting-edge collection of essays showcases the work of some of the most influential theorists of the past thirty years as they grapple with the question of how literature should be treated in contemporary theory. The contributors challenge trends that have recently dominated the field--especially those that emphasize social and political issues over close reading and other analytic methods traditionally associated with literary criticism. Written especially for this collection, these essays argue for the importance of aesthetics, poetics, and aesthetic theory as they present new and stimulating perspectives on the directions which theory and criticism will take in the future. In addition to providing a selection of distinguished critics writing at their best, this collection is valuable because it represents a variety of fields and perspectives that are not usually found together in the same volume. Michael Clark's introduction provides a concise, cogent history of major developments and trends in literary theory from World War II to the present, making the entire volume essential reading for students and scholars of literature, literary theory, and philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: Risk and rationality: philosophical foundations for populist reforms 
Author: Shrader-Frechette, K. S 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Social Problems | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: Only ten to twelve percent of Americans would voluntarily live within a mile of a nuclear plant or hazardous waste facility. But industry spokespersons claim that such risk aversion represents ignorance and paranoia, and they lament that citizen protests have delayed valuable projects and increased their costs.Who is right? In Risk and Rationality , Kristin Shrader-Frechette argues that neither charges of irresponsible endangerment nor countercharges of scientific illiteracy frame the issues properly. She examines the debate over methodological norms for risk evaluation and finds analysts arrayed in a spectrum. Points of view extend from cultural relativists who believe that any risk can be justified (since no rational standards are ultimately possible) to naive positivists who believe that risk evaluation can be objective, neutral, and value free. Both camps, she argues, are wrong, because risk evaluation as a social process is rational and objective, even though all risk-evaluation rules are value-laden.Shrader-Frechette defends a middle position called "scientific proceduralism." She shows why extremist views are unreliable, reveals misconceptions underlying current risk-evaluation methods and strategies, and sketches the reforms needed to set hazard assessment and risk evaluation on a publicly defensible foundation.These reforms involve mathematical, economic, ethical, and legal procedures. They constitute a new paradigm for assessment when acceptance of public hazards is rational, recognizing that laypersons are often more rational in their evaluation of societal risks than either experts or governments have acknowledged. Such reforms would provide citizens with more influence in risk decisions and focus on mediating ethical conflicts, rather than seeking to impose the will of experts. Science, she argues, need not preclude democracy.   [brief]
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Title: The sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing
Author: Csordas, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Religion | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas investigates the healing practices of a modern religious movement to provide a rich cultural analysis of the healing experience. This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the nature of self and self- transformation. Blending ethnographic data and detailed case studies, Csordas examines processes of sensory imagery, performative utterance, orientation, and embodiment. His book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory that will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing.   [brief]
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Title: Sainthood: its manifestations in world religions
Author: Bond, George Doherty 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Religion | Comparative Religions | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Every major religion exalts certain individuals who occupy a dual role. On the one hand they serve as exemplars of virtue to be imitated, and on the other hand they stand removed from other mortals, privileged and unique. Christianity knows them as saints, and in the study of religion the term has been taken over and applied to similar figures in other traditions. The essays in this volume analyze the role of the saint in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, providing both a comparative and an interpretive view of sainthood.The notion of sainthood is problematic in two ways. First, can the category be usefully applied to individuals in religious traditions other than Christianity? How has it manifested itself, and what differences are there in the various manifestations of sainthood? Second, where individuals are considered to have risen above the norms in these different traditions, how is it possible to resolve the tension between the saint's imitability and his or her otherness, between imitating and venerating the saint? The authors consider these questions in relation to a wide range of individuals in all the major traditions.   [brief]
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Title: Schopenhauer on the character of the world: the metaphysics of will
Author: Atwell, John E
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: The most extensive English-language study of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will yet published, this book represents a major contribution to Schopenhauer scholarship. Here, John E. Atwell critically but sympathetically examines the philosopher's main work, The World as Will and Representation , demonstrating that the philosophical system it puts forth does constitute a consistent whole. The author holds that this system is centered on a single thought, "The world is self-knowledge of the will." He then traces this unifying concept through the four books of The World as Will and Representation , and, in the process, dissolves the work's alleged inconsistencies.   [brief]
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