Title: Abuses 
Author: Lingis, Alphonso 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Literature | Cultural Anthropology | Social  and  Political  Thought | Psychology | Travel
Publisher's Description: Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today.A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy - aesthetic and sympathetic - which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting."Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself."   [brief]
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Title: Althusser and the renewal of Marxist social theory 
Author: Resch, Robert Paul
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Political Theory | Social  and  Political  Thought
Publisher's Description: The writings of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and his associates have figured prominently in the development of contemporary social theory. The Althusserian school of Structural Marxism is a startlingly original synthesis of Marxism and Modernism, which has produced a large body of work that extends across the human sciences and the humanities to engage a wide variety of cultures, theoretical problems, and political issues. Despite the fact that Althusser himself is widely recognized as a major figure, the breadth, coherence, and achievements of Structural Marxism as a whole have gone largely unrecognized.In this, the most systematic and wide-ranging assessment of Structural Marxism in any language, Resch provides a comprehensive and thematic introduction to the work of Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Emmanuel Terray, Terry Eagleton, Göran Therborn, Renée Balibar, Perry Anderson, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Michel Pêchaux, Guy Bois, and others. Resch's sympathetic and critical study demonstrates the enormous significance of Althusser's modernist renewal of Marxist social theory and its ongoing challenge to post-Marxist movements such as postmodernism and neo-liberalism.   [brief]
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Title: Dilemmas of enlightenment: studies in the rhetoric and logic of ideology 
Author: Kenshur, Oscar 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought | Literary Theory and Criticism | European History
Publisher's Description: Oscar Kenshur combines trenchant analyses of important early-modern texts with a powerful critique of postmodern theories of ideology. He thereby contributes both to our understanding of Enlightenment thought and to contemporary debates about cultural studies and critical theory.While striving to resolve "dilemmas" occasioned by conflicting intellectual and political commitments, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often relied upon ideas originally used by their enemies to support very different claims. Thus, they engaged in what Kenshur calls "intellectual co-optation." In exploring the ways in which Dryden, Bayle, Voltaire, Johnson, and others used this technique, Kenshur presents a historical landscape distinctly different from the one constructed by much contemporary theory.   [brief]
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Title: Gadamer's repercussions: reconsidering philosophical hermeneutics 
Author: Krajewski, Bruce 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Certainly one of the key German philosophers of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer also influenced the study of literature, art, music, sacred and legal texts, and medicine. Indeed, while much attention has been focused on Gadamer's writings about ancient Greek and modern German philosophy, the relevance of his work for other disciplines is only now beginning to be properly considered and understood. In an effort to address this slant, this volume brings together many prominent scholars to assess, re-evaluate, and question Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, as well as his place in intellectual history. The book includes a recent essay by Gadamer on "the task of hermeneutics," as well as essays by distinguished contributors including Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Gerald Bruns, Georgia Warnke, and many others. The contributors situate Gadamer's views in surprising ways and show that his writings speak to a range of contemporary debates - from constitutional questions to issues of modern art. A controversial final section attempts to uncover and clarify Gadamer's history in relation to National Socialism. More an investigation and questioning than a celebration of this venerable and profoundly influential philosopher, this collection will become a catalyst for any future rethinking of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as a significant starting place for rereading and reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer.   [brief]
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Title: High anxieties: cultural studies in addiction 
Author: Brodie, Janet Farrell
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Media Studies | Gender Studies | Cognitive Science | Social  and  Political  Thought | Art | Sociology
Publisher's Description: High Anxieties explores the history and ideological ramifications of the modern concept of addiction. Little more than a century old, the notions of "addict" as an identity and "addiction" as a disease of the will form part of the story of modernity. What is addiction? This collection of essays illuminates and refashions the term, delivering a complex and mature understanding of addiction. Brodie and Redfield's introduction provides a roadmap for readers and situates the fascinating essays within a larger, interdisciplinary framework. Stacey Margolis and Timothy Melley's pieces grapple with the psychology of addiction. Cannon Schmitt and Marty Roth delve into the relationship between opium and the British Empire's campaign to control and stigmatize China. Robyn R. Warhol and Nicholas O. Warner examine accounts of alcohol abuse in texts as disparate as Victorian novels, Alcoholics Anonymous literature, and James Fenimore Cooper's fiction. Helen Keane scrutinizes smoking, and Maurizio Viano turns to the silver screen to trace how the representation of drugs in films has changed over time. Ann Weinstone and Marguerite Waller's essays on addiction and cyberspace cap this impressive anthology.   [brief]
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Title: Historied thought, constructed world: a conceptual primer for the turn of the millennium 
Author: Margolis, Joseph 1924-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Historied Thought, Constructed World offers a fresh vision: one that engages the reigning philosophies of the West, endorses the radical possibilities of historicity and flux, and reconciles the best themes of Anglo-American and continental European philosophy. Margolis sketches a program for the philosophy of the future, addressing topics such as the historical character of thinking, the intelligible world as artifact, the inseparability of theory and practice, and the reliability of a world without assured changeless structures.Through the use of numbered theorems that construct an interlocking argument, Margolis carefully articulates his distinctive ideas in the context of work by Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Derrida, Habermas, and Foucault. The discussion includes all the central topics of the philosophical tradition: from science to morality, from language to world, from persons to objects, from nature to culture, from causality to purpose, from change to history. What emerges is an argument against essentialism, one that champions the historicity of thought and cultural constructionism.   [brief]
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Title: Interpretation radical but not unruly: the new puzzle of the arts and history 
Author: Margolis, Joseph 1924-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought
Publisher's Description: With this challenging work, Joseph Margolis continues the project begun in The Flux of History and the Flux of Science (California, 1993). Tackling one of philosophy's master themes, he develops the controversial thesis that the world is a flux. Here he applies this doctrine to Western theories of history and the interpretation of cultural phenomena - offering the first sustained analysis of the logic, methodology, and metaphysics of interpretation committed to a thoroughgoing relativism and the historicized structure of cultural phenomena. Versed in Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, Margolis draws on the best views of Western philosophy to investigate a topic regularly ignored in that tradition. The result is the surprising synthesis of two historically antipathetic approaches to philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: Just interpretations: law between ethics and politics 
Author: Rosenfeld, Michel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: American Studies | Social  and  Political  Thought | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: In pluralistic societies that lack common ethical, social, and political values, legal interpretation is constantly under siege. Just interpretations - that is, interpretations that reflect a shared vision of justice - may become just interpretations in the sense of mere interpretations, rooted in the orientations and interests of different groups. Confronting this crisis in legal interpretation, Just Interpretations offers a critical appraisal of the principal theoretical trends in contemporary American and European jurisprudence and proposes an alternative approach.Michel Rosenfeld's critique focuses on neoformalism, pragmatism, discourse theory, and legal autopoiesis, and includes discussions of such authors as Habermas, Rorty, Posner, Luhmann, Dworkin, Fish, and Weinrib. To overcome the drawbacks of these theories, Rosenfeld elaborates a theory of "comprehensive pluralism," based on a substantive vision of pluralism. This approach, building on the insights of deconstruction, turns the fact of pluralism into a guiding normative imperative. Just Interpretations will attract the attention of constitutional scholars, political scientists, and critical theorists, and will also address an interdisciplinary audience interested in texts, interpretations, and postmodern concerns with justice.   [brief]
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Title: Learning from experience: minority identities, multicultural struggles 
Author: Moya, Paula M. L
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Chicano Studies | Gender Studies | Social  and  Political  Thought | Politics | Social Theory | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies. This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.   [brief]
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Title: Legitimate differences: interpretation in the abortion controversy and other public debates 
Author: Warnke, Georgia
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Legitimate Differences challenges the usual portrayal of current debates over thorny social issues including abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and surrogate mothering as moral debates. How can it be said that our debates oppose principles of life to those of liberty, principles of liberty to those of equality, principles of equality to those of fairness, and principles of fairness to those of integrity, when we as Americans share all these principles?Debates over such issues are not, Georgia Warnke argues, moral debates over which principles we should adopt. Rather, they are interpretive debates over the meanings of principles we already possess. Warnke traces the structure of these debates with reference to the work of Jane Austen, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Bernard Williams. In separate chapters on surrogate mothering, affirmative action, abortion, and pornography she articulates new understandings of the meanings of some of our principles and shows the equal legitimacy of some different interpretations of the meanings of others. Finally, she suggests that the orientation of American public policy ought to be directed less at finding single canonical interpretations of our principles than at accommodating different legitimate understandings of them. The perspective offered by Legitimate Differences should have a significantly beneficial effect on public discussions.   [brief]
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Title: The longest night: polemics and perspectives on election 2000 
Author: Jacobson, Arthur J
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Social  and  Political  Thought | Law
Publisher's Description: The American presidential election of 2000 was perhaps the most remarkable, and in many ways the most unsettling, that the country has yet experienced. The millennial election raised fundamental questions not only about American democracy, but also about the nation's constitution and about the legitimate role of American courts, state and federal, and in particular about the United States Supreme Court. The Longest Night presents a lively and informed reaction to the legal aftermath of the election by the most prominent experts on the subject. With a balance of opposing views - including those of some of the most distinguished foreign commentators writing on the subject today - the contributors present an unusual breadth of perspectives in addressing the judicial, institutional, and political questions involved in the disputed election. Their commentaries bring the confusion and frenzy of the event into clear focus and lay the groundwork for an essential public debate that is sure to continue well into the future. The Longest Night contains a thorough chronology of the events in Florida, a detailed account of the institutional structure of American presidential elections, a series of analyses both criticizing and defending the decisions in Bush v. Gore, American perspectives on the Florida struggle and America's electoral system, and a debate on maintaining or reforming the electoral college. The authors include participants in the legal and political battles surrounding the Florida election, foreigners charged with monitoring and supervising elections, and scholars from many disciplines specializing in constitutionalism, democracy, and American election law. Contributors   [brief]
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Title: My Kantian ways 
Author: Bencivenga, Ermanno 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought
Publisher's Description: In My Kantian Ways , Ermanno Bencivenga, one of the most creative and iconoclastic practitioners of American philosophy, sets out to explore Kant's legacy for contemporary thought. Seeking to extricate the German philosopher's work from the stranglehold of the prevailing analytic tradition, he presents his own defamiliarizing and unique interpretation of Kantianism. Kant emerges as a master thinker whose emphasis on judgment provides the basis for a new approach to the practice of philosophy as a vehicle for learning. Ranging from speculations on the electronic self to a tour-de-force critique of the postmodern thought of Richard Rorty, Bencivenga's book is an inviting blend of styles and genres. Plucky, irritating, and sometimes wickedly funny, My Kantian Ways calls attention to the frequent mediocrity and false piety of much of today's professional philosophy. Through these intensely personal essays, Bencivenga reminds us just how much philosophy can matter.   [brief]
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Title: Nothing but history: reconstruction and extremity after metaphysics 
Author: Roberts, David D 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Intellectual History | Social  and  Political  Thought
Publisher's Description: What is the role of history in our "postmetaphysical" age? Surveying two centuries of philosophical writing, David Roberts offers a thoughtful guide to the philosophy of history before the recent challenges associated with deconstructive postmodernism. He then argues for a moderate intellectual tradition in which historical knowledge, although freed from transcendent values, continues to play a crucial role in the conduct of human affairs.Roberts's careful account of historicism explores the ideas of its major nineteenth-century representatives and foils, including Hegel, Dilthey, and Nietzsche. His thorough consideration of such twentieth-century thinkers as Gadamer, Croce, Foucault, and Heidegger contributes vitally to the ongoing discussions about the use and abuse of history. Certain to engage historians and philosophers, this book will interest scholars across the humanities who are concerned with the present and future utility of historical thinking.   [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: 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: Punishment: theory and practice 
Author: Tunick, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Social  and  Political  Thought | Law
Publisher's Description: What actions should be punished? Should plea-bargaining be allowed? How should sentencing be determined? In this original, penetrating study, Mark Tunick explores not only why society punishes wrongdoing, but also how it implements punishment.Contending that the theory and practice of punishment are inherently linked, Tunick draws on a broad range of thinkers, from the radical criticisms of Nietzsche, Foucault, and some Marxist theorists through the sociological theories of Durkheim and Girard to various philosophical traditions and the "law and economics" movement. He defends punishment against its radical critics and offers a version of retribution, distinct from revenge, that holds that we punish not to deter or reform, but to mete out just deserts, vindicate right, and express society's righteous anger. Demonstrating first how this theory best accounts for how punishment is carried out, he then provides "immanent criticism" of certain features of our practice that don't accord with the retributive principle.Thought-provoking and deftly argued, Punishment will garner attention and spark debate among political theorists, philosophers, legal scholars, sociologists, and criminologists.   [brief]
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Title: The Question of "eclecticism": studies in later Greek philosophy 
Author: Dillon, John M
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought
Publisher's Description: This collection of essays is addressed to the growing number of philosophers, classicists, and intellectual historians who are interested in the development of Greek thought after Aristotle. In nine original studies, the authors explore the meaning and history of "eclecticism" in the context of ancient philosophy. The book casts fresh light on the methodology of such central figures as Cicero, Philo, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Ptolemy, and also illuminates many of the conceptual issues discussed most creatively in this period.   [brief]
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Title: Rethinking the borderlands: between Chicano culture and legal discourse 
Author: Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: American Studies | Chicano Studies | Literature | Language and Linguistics | Law | Social  and  Political  Thought | Rhetoric | Postcolonial Studies | United States History | United States History
Publisher's Description: Challenging the long-cherished notion of legal objectivity in the United States, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues that Chicano history has been consistently shaped by racially biased, combative legal interactions. Rethinking the Borderlands is an insightful and provocative exploration of the ways Chicano and Chicana artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers engage this history in order to resist the disenfranchising effects of legal institutions, including the prison and the court.Gutiérrez-Jones examines the process by which Chicanos have become associated with criminality in both our legal institutions and our mainstream popular culture and thereby offers a new way of understanding minority social experience. Drawing on gender studies and psychoanalysis, as well as critical legal and race studies, Gutiérrez-Jones's approach to the law and legal discourse reveals the high stakes involved when concepts of social justice are fought out in the home, in the workplace and in the streets.   [brief]
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Title: Symbols, computation, and intentionality: a critique of the computational theory of mind 
Author: Horst, Steven W 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Philosophy | Social  and  Political  Thought | Psychology
Publisher's Description: The computational theory of mind - the belief that the mind can be likened to a computer and that cognitive states possess the generative and compositional properties of natural languages - has proven enormously influential in recent philosophical studies of cognition. In this carefully argued critique, Steven Horst pronounces the theory deficient. He refutes its claims and assumptions, particularly the assertion that symbolic representations need not have conventional meaning. Horst goes on to sketch a new methodology for looking at the philosophy of psychology, one that provides a more fruitful way of comparing computational psychology with rival views emerging from connectionism and neuroscience. Original and comprehensive, his book is certain to provoke controversy and stimulate debate.   [brief]
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