Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters With Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide
Author: Sarin Marchetti File Type: pdf The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of two distinct philosophical schools in Europe analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The history of 20th-century philosophy is often written as an account of the development of one or both of these schools, as well as their overt or covert mutual hostility. What is often left out of this history, however, is the relationship between the two European schools and a third significant philosophical event the birth and development of pragmatism, the indigenous philosophical movement of the United States. Through a careful analysis of seminal figures and central texts, this book explores the mutual intellectual influences, convergences, and differences between these three revolutionary philosophical traditions. The essays in this volume aim to show the central role that pragmatism played in the development of philosophical thought at the turn of the twentieth century, widen our understanding of a seminal point in the history of philosophy, and shed light on the ways in which these three schools of thought continue to shape the theoretical agenda of contemporary philosophy. **From the Back Cover American pragmatism saw itself as the culmination of a process of naturalizing Kant and Hegel in the direction of an empiricism focused on selectional developmental processes of the sort epitomized by evolution and individual learning. This naturalizing, historicizing process was in many ways rudely interrupted by Russell and Husserl, each in his own way inventing something philosophy could be apodeictic about from its armchair. This fascinating volume provides a novel perspective on the familiar twentieth century opposition between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, by viewing those traditions through the mediating lens of their interactions with contemporaneous pragmatism.--Robert Brandom, University of Pittsburgh, USA Whether through Husserls adaptations of Jamess psychology, Ramseys refinements of Peirces account of truth, Russells adaptation of Jamess radical empiricism, or the later Wittgensteins emphasis on concrete human life, two divergent traditions of twentieth century philosophy--phenomenology and analytic philosophy--were influenced by the pragmatists. The rich and varied essays in this collection break new ground not only in charting these and other pragmatic influences, but in helping us understand pragmatisms vitality today.--Russell B. Goodman, University of New Mexico, USA Pragmatism and the European Traditionis an exemplary specimen of a new kind of collection of philosophical essays. It reviews, with a considerable range and expertise and fresh detail, the sources of doctrinal dissatisfaction involving intractable quarrels between analytic and continental philosophy (chiefly positivism and phenomenology) and the prospects of conceptual mediation by way of pragmatism. Quite a good idea. Thats to say, philosophical rivals must now demonstrate a measure of dialectical skill in reconciling once insurmountable doctrinal divisions. Repays a careful reading.--Joseph Margolis, Temple University, USA This collection offers a scholarly and timely corrective to the prevailing narrative of early 20th-century philosophy. According to that narrative, analytic philosophy and phenomenology marginalized pragmatism and never engaged with pragmatism. The essays in this collection show that narrative to rely on either neglecting or misreading important figures. At a time when the very divide between analytic and Continental philosophy is being closely scrutinized from multiple perspectives, this book further complicates the story in productive ways.--Carl B. Sachs, Marymount University, USA
Author: Bradley C. Birkenfeld
File Type: epub
As a private banker working for the largest bank in the world, UBS, Bradley Birkenfeld was an expert in Switzerlands shell-game of offshore companies and secret numbered accounts. He wined and dined ultrawealthy clients whose millions of dollars were hidden away from business partners, spouses, and tax authorities. As his client list grew, Birkenfeld lived a life of money, fast cars, and beautiful women, but when he discovered that UBS was planning to betray him, he blew the whistle to the US Government. The Department of Justice scorned Birkenfelds unprecedented whistle-blowing and attempted to silence him with a conspiracy charge. Yet Birkenfeld would not be intimidated. He took his secrets to the US Senate, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Internal Revenue Service, where he prevailed. His bombshell revelations helped the US Treasury recover over $15 billion (and counting) in back taxes, fines, and penalties from American tax cheats. But Birkenfeld was shocked to discover that at the same time he was cooperating with the US Government, the Department of Justice was still doggedly pursuing him. He was arrested and served thirty months in federal prison. When he emerged, the Internal Revenue Service gave him a whistle-blower award for $104 million, the largest such reward in history. A page-turning real-life thriller, Lucifers Banker is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the secret Swiss high-net worth banking industry and a harrowing account of our governments justice system. Readers will follow Birkenfeld and share his outrage with the incompetence and possiblecorruption at the Department of Justice, and they will cheer him on as he hammers one of the most well-known and powerful banks in the world.
Author: George M. Anderson
File Type: pdf
The book provides an account of many Jesuits, from the time of St. Ignatius to the 1990s, who have been incarcerated around the world for their faith. It is divided into chapters that deal with specific themes related to their imprisonment. The principal themes are prayer as a key element in survival, arrest and trial procedures, the experience of suffering, Mass, the daily order of prison life, forced labor, ministry to other prisoners, guards, prisoners who became Jesuits while imprisoned, community in prison, and voluntary incarceration.This is the first book to examine the experience of incarcerated Jesuits around the world and down through the centuries from the standpoint of these various themes. Much of the material is by the Jesuits themselves, in letters, autobiographical fragments and other sources-including obscure publications long out of print. The result is a gathering together of these pieces and fragments into a coordinated whole, with commentary on their significance in the context of the political and cultural situations of their time-situations that were generally the immediate cause of the Jesuits imprisonment, whether in Elizabethan England or in Communist China and Russia. A chart of imprisoned Jesuits by country of incarceration at the beginning, and a glossary of names at the back (as well as an index), will help the reader to keep track of the names of the many Jesuits who figure in the book. **
Author: Michael Lucken
File Type: pdf
The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construct, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture, showing through several twentieth-century masterpieces the generative and regenerative power of Japanese arts. Choosing a representative work from each of four modern genrespainting, film, photography, and animationLucken portrays the range of strategies that Japanese artists use to re-present contemporary influences. He examines Kishida Ryuseis portraits of Reiko (19141929), Kurosawa Akiras Ikiru (1952), Araki Nobuyoshis photographic novel Sentimental JourneyWinter (1991), and Miyazaki Hayaos popular anime film Spirited Away (2001), revealing the sophisticated patterns of mimesis that are unique but not exclusive to modern Japanese art. In doing so, Lucken identifies the tensions that drive the Japanese imagination, which are much richer than a simple opposition between progress and tradition, and their reflection of human cultures universal encounter with change. This global perspective explains why, despite its non-Western origins, Japanese art has earned such a vast following. **
Author: Elizabeth MacFarlane
File Type: pdf
Just as J. M. Coetzees post-2003 books present essays and narrative alongside one another, this book engages with its ideas through both critical and creative writing. Reading Coetzee interleaves critical essays on Coetzees works with an autobiographical narrative detailing MacFarlanes more personal response to her reading and writing. The presentation of elements of the creative with the critical, and the critical within the creative, aims to challenge the traditional boundary between the two. This kind of methodology derives from the idea (and practice) of embodiment that an idea or philosophy does not float free, but is tied to the idiosyncrasies, divergences, and subjective travel of its speaker or writer. Coetzees Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year explicitly address themes which abide more surreptitiously throughout his oeuvre the divisions and paradoxes which occur the moment pen gains page, the value of literature, and the ethics of embodiment. In revealing the dialogue between writer-self and reader-self, and between author and character, these recent novels invite a rereading of Coetzees previous literature. Reading Coetzee explores Coetzees preoccupation with the act of writing using his recent books as a lens through which to view his eight previous novels as well as his memoirs and essays. **
Author: David Ellerman
File Type: pdf
This book argues that the recently deceased Capitalism-Socialism debate was wrong-headed from the beginning - like a debate over private or public ownership of slaves. The question was not private or public slavery, but slavery versus self-ownership. Similarly, this book argues that the question is not whether people should be private employees (capitalism) or public employees (socialism) but whether people should be hired or rented as employees at all versus always being jointly self-employed as employee-owned companies. Being a genuine work of political economy, the book re-examines the basic principles of private property and contract to obtain results at odds with the employer-employee relation and in favour of universal self-employment or economic democracy. Joint self-employment in the firm is the economic version of joint self-determination or political democracy in society. Private property should be based on people getting the fruits of their labor, but that only happens under joint self-employment. Market contracts should only apply to what can be transferred, but a persons labor is not really transferable (as we easily recognize for hired criminals). This book traces these ideas - the labor theory of property and the notion of inalienable rights - from ancient Stoics through the Reformation and Enlightenment, and restates the ideas in modern terms with critical applications to economic theory.
Author: Darko Suvin
File Type: pdf
Returning to print for the first time since the 1980s, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is the origin point for decades of literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Darko Suvins paradigm-setting definition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement established a robust theory of the genre that continues to spark fierce debate, as well as inspiring myriad intellectual descendants and disciples. Suvins centuries-spanning history of the genre links SF to a long tradition of utopian and satirical literatures crying out for a better world than this one, showing how SF and the imagination of utopia are now forever intertwined. In addition to the 1979 text of the book, this edition contains three additional essays from Suvin that update, expand and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface that situate the book in the context of the decades of SF studies that have followed in its wake.Review This book marked the beginning of theoretically sophisticated science fiction criticism it changed the whole field, and remains a startling introduction to a discussion that has not ended since its first appearance. (Kim Stanley Robinson, author of 2312 and Aurora) Suvins classic book is not only a fundamental history of science fiction which deprovincializes our rather narrow and English-language view of the canon it is also a powerful theoretical intervention in the criticism and theory of the genre, which reunited it with the traditions of utopia as a genre. Not only did this paradigm shift transform our relationship to the latter, it also restored a political and social content to science fiction itself, making of the latter an implicit or explicit Brechtian estrangement-effect. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is thereby an indispensable companion to the study of both genres, which durably integrates them into literary history and theory as such. (Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University) About the Author Darko Suvin, scholar, critic and poet, was born in Yugoslavia, studied at the universities of Zagreb, Bristol, the Sorbonne and Yale and has taught in Europe and North America. He is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of numerous books and articles on literature and dramaturgy, culture, utopian and science fiction and political epistemology, as well as three volumes of poetry. In recent years he has been writing mainly about SFR Yugoslavia and communism. Gerry Canavan is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. His research focuses on the relationship between science fiction and the political and cultural history of the post-war period, with special emphasis on ecology and the environment. He is an editor at Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, as well as the author of Modern Masters of Science Fiction Octavia E. Butler (2016).
Author: Branislav Jakovljevic
File Type: pdf
In the 1970s, Yugoslavia emerged as a dynamic environment for conceptual and performance art. At the same time, it pursued its own form of political economy of socialist self-management. Alienation Effects argues that a deep relationship existed between the democratization of the arts and industrial democracy, resulting in a culture difficult to classify. The book challenges the assumption that the art emerging in Eastern Europe before 1989 was either official or dissident art and shows thatthe break up of Yugoslavia was not a result of ancient hatreds among its peoples but instead came from the distortion and defeat of the idea of self-management. The case studies include mass performances organized during state holidays proto-performance art, such as the 1954 production of Waiting for Godot in a former concentration camp in Belgrade student demonstrations in 1968 and body art pieces by Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and others. Alienation Effects sheds new light on the work of well-known artists and scholars, including early experimental poetry by Slavoj Zizek, as well as performance and conceptual artists that deserve wider, international attention. **
Author: Michael L. Tate
File Type: pdf
During the early weeks of 1848, as U.S. congressmen debated the territorial status of California, a Swiss immigrant and an itinerant millwright forever altered the future states fate. Building a sawmill for Johann August Sutter, James Wilson Marshall struck gold. The rest may be history, but much of the story of what happened in the following year is told not in history books but in the letters, diaries, journals, and other written recollections of those whom the California gold rush drew west. In this second installment in the projected four-part collection The Great Medicine Road Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, the hardy souls who made the arduous trip tell their stories in their own words. Seven individuals tales bring to life a long-ago year that enriched some, impoverished others, and forever changed the face of North America. Responding to often misleading promotional literature, adventurers made their way west via different routes. Following the Carson River through the Sierra Nevada, or taking the Lassen Route to the Sacramento Valley, they passed through the Mormon Zion of Great Salt Lake City and traded with and often displaced Native Americans long familiar with the trails. Their accounts detail these encounters, as well as the gritty realities of everyday life on the overland trails. They narrate events, describe the vast and diverse landscapes they pass through, and document a journey as strange and new to them as it is to many readers today. Through these travelers diaries and memoirs, readers can relive a critical moment in the remaking of the Westand appreciate what a difference one year can make in the life of a nation. **