Philosophies of Place: An Intercultural Conversation
Author: John W. M. Krummel File Type: pdf Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the same rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of the word place often pivot on the distinction between space and place formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presencephysical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritualplaces emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body.
Author: William Lad Sessions
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span orphans 2 widows 2Honor For Us is the first contemporary philosophical inquiry into the concept of honor. It is unique not only in its analysis of six distinct concepts of honor, which includes an investigation into the place of honor in religious thought and ethics, but also in its interpretation of honors prevalence in our own culture. Many would like to discard honor altogether as obsolete, but Sessions contends that the concept of honor is poorly understood, standing sorely in need of clarification. He argues that the notion of honor remains viable in the face of powerful criticism, and that it has important features which warrant our normative interest. While not downplaying the dark side of honor (violence, sexism, inegalitarianism, its abuse in religion), Sessions shows that honor not only constitutes a descriptively useful concept but also remains a potentially valuable concept for us today.span
Author: James Longenbach
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By thoroughly examining T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound collected and uncollected writings, James Longenbach presents their understandings of the philosophical idea of history and analyzes the strategies of historical interpretation they discussed in their critical prose and embodied in their poems including history.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Minxin Pei
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When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build socialism with Chinese characteristics. More than three decades later, Chinas efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working peoples paradise Deng envisioned an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. Chinas Crony Capitalism traces the origins of Chinas present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership. Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned propertyin particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly. Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath Chinas facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay. **
Author: Douglas A. Sweeney
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Scholars have long recognized that Jonathan Edwards loved the Bible, but preoccupation with his roles in Western public life and letters has eclipsed the significance of his biblical exegesis. In Edwards the Exegete, Douglas A. Sweeney fills this lacuna, exploring Edwards exegesis and its significance for Christian thought and intellectual history. As Sweeney shows, throughout Edwards life the lions share of his time was spent wrestling with the words of holy writ. After reconstructing Edwards lost exegetical world and describing his place within it, Sweeney summarizes his four main approaches to the Bible-canonical, Christological, redemptive-historical, and pedagogical-and analyzes his work on selected biblical themes that illustrate these four approaches, focusing on material emblematic of Edwards larger interests as a scholar. Sweeney compares Edwards work to that of his most frequent interlocutors and places it in the context of the history of exegesis, challenging commonly held notions about the state of Christianity in the age of the Enlightenment. Edwards the Exegete offers a novel guide to the theologians exegetical work, clearing a path that other specialists are sure to follow. Sweeneys significant reassessment of Edwards place in the Enlightenment makes a major contribution to Edwards studies, eighteenth-century studies, the history of exegesis, the theological interpretation of Scripture, and homiletics. **
Author: Todd McGowan
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The Real Gaze develops a new theory of the cinema by rethinking the concept of the gaze, which has long been central in film theory. Historically film scholars have located the gaze on the side of the spectator however, Todd McGowan positions it within the filmic image, where it has the radical potential to disrupt the spectators sense of identity and challenge the foundations of ideology. This book demonstrates several distinct cinematic forms that vary in terms of how the gaze functions within the films. Through a detailed investigation of directors such as Orson Welles, Claire Denis, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Federico Fellini, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and David Lynch, McGowan explores the political, cultural, and existential ramifications of these differing roles of the gaze.
Author: William R. Harper
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A key text in the study of the minor prophets, this volume by distinguished academic William Rainey Harper offers a comprehensive look at the pre-prophetic movement, and in-depth analysis of meaning and literary form in these prophetic works. **