Under the influence of science, modern civilization has adopted the view that only things that can be verified empirically or arrived at rationally are true. Modern people tend to regard themselves as mechanisms, without any subjective aspects to their nature. In this insightful and passionately concerned book, British educationist and man of letters David Holbrook retorts persuasively that this reductive view of human nature is profoundly false. Man's inner, subjective life is essential to his nature, what happens to his consciousness is the most important thing in his life, and his greatest need is to find meaning.Holbrook also warns that reductionism has pernicious, even lethal, cultural, social, and political consequences. The logical result is nihilism: if human beings and existence are but physical mechanisms, it necessarily follows that consciousness does not exist, life is meaningless, our concern with moral values is pointless, and so are our lives and actions. Life itself reduces to nothing but self-indulgence and self-assertion. A culture informed by this perspective is necessarily full of expressions of hate and meaninglessness, which coarsens and demoralizes the majority of the population and worsens the mental pathologies of unstable persons. "Egoistical nihilism" becomes ever more widespread, and a decent society becomes impossible.Holbrook advances a keenly insightful and eloquent critique of the radical individualism of Max Stirner's famous tract The Ego and His Own. Stirner's worldview, he argues, is grounded in psychopathology and takes the nihilist assumptions of modernity to their logical conclusion: "the unique one" totally detached from society and reducing others to mere means to his ends, fair game for exploitation unfettered by ethical considerations. Ominously, he notes, the Stirnerean attitude toward existence is becoming increasingly common. Against the reductive perspective of positivism, Holbrook argues that scientific investigations establish the reality of meaning and of values rooted in love. He calls for a reaffirmation of both.Originally published in 1977, Education, Nihilism, and Survival speaks prophetically and even more urgently to us today. The worsening coarseness, nihilism, and brutality of our culture, the partisan fanaticisms and widespread alienation and apathy of our politics, and horrors such as school shootings reveal the consequences of radical individualism.Education, Nihilism, and Survival will be of interest to well-educated general readers concerned at the state of culture and society; educators alarmed at harmful approaches in education; and psychologists and philosophers concerned about existentialism, Stirner's egoist philosophy, and the need for meaningful, philosophical anthropology.

Whereas science, technology, and medicine have all called forth dedicated philosophical investigations, a fourth major contributor to the technoscientific world in which we all live - that is, engineering - has been accorded almost none of the philosophical attention it deserves. This volume thus offers a first characterisation of this important new field, by some of the primary philosophers and ethicists interested in engineering and leading engineers interested in philosophical reflections. The volume deals with such questions as: What is engineering? In what respect does engineering differ from science? What ethical problems does engineering raise? By what ethical principles are engineers guided? How do engineers themselves conceive of their profession? What do they see as the main philosophical challenges confronting them in the 21st century? The authors respond to these and other questions from philosophical and engineering view points and so illustrate how together they can meet the challenges and realize the opportunities present in the necessary encounters between philosophy and engineering - encounters that are ever more important in an increasingly engineered world and its problematic futures.

"Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction. Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans."--Publisher

Addressed to Jews and non-Jews alike, though aware that these two reader groups were likelyn to approach the book with very different presuppositions, Daiches sets out to define Judaism in relation to philosophy, to explain Kant's philosophy through the superiority of halakhah, defend a biblically based Jewish interpretation of history, and champion Judaism as a religion of freedom guaranteed by halakhah (Jewish law).

"Extending his well-known investigations into the nature and logic of art and history in the cultural world, Joseph Margolis here offers a sustained account of how selves and the cultural phenomena they generate (language, history, action, art) can be viewed as just as "real" as the physical nature from which they are emergent, while not being reducible to it. The book starts off with a review of prominent philosophies of art over the past half a century, focusing especially on Beardsley, Goodman, and Danto, so as to highlight the need for carefully distinguishing between the metaphysical and epistemological features of physical nature and human culture. The second part of the book builds on the first part's analyses of artworks to propose a theory of selves as "self-interpreting texts." Selves and Other Texts aims to develop new ways of understanding the conceptual inseparability of our analysis of physical nature and our analysis of ourselves."--BOOK JACKET.

"Ivan Illich alights on such topics as education, history, language, politics, and the church. The conversations range over the whole of Illich's published work and public career as a priest, vice-rector of a university, founder of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and author of such classics as Tools for Conviviality , Medical Nemesis , and Deschooling Society ."

Three disciplines -- politics, philosophy, and science -- are united in reader-friendly language. Citing the works of eminent physicists from Einstein to Hawking, he reveals the convergence of science and Torah. He shows how philosophers, scientists and world empires and major religions have unwittingly helped Israel move towards Redemption.

Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself.In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to "e Desmond Tutu, “words,language, and rhetoric do things,” creating things like the new “rainbow people.” Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community.Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence (being the only language able to say what “is”) and today is German.Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a newparadigm for the human sciences.

"In 1909 Francisco Ferrer founded La Escuela Moderna with a curriculum based on the natural sciences and moral rationalism, freed of all religious dogma and political bias. Although students received systematic instruction, there were no prizes for scholarship, no marks or examinations, indeed no atmosphere of competition, coercion, or humiliation. The classes, in Ferrer's words, were guided by the "principle of solidarity and equality." For this he was murdered in 1909 by the combined forces of Spain's ruling Church and State." "Outraged by Ferrer's execution and influenced by his teaching methods, anarchists, artists, and educators joined forces to carry on his work. Between 1910 and 1960 anarchists across the United States established more than twenty schools where children might study in an atmosphere of freedom and self-reliance in contrast to the formality and discipline of the traditional classroom. These "Modern Schools" sought to abolish all forms of authority, political and economic as well as educational, and to usher in a new society based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals. Their object, during an era of war, social ferment, and government repression, was to create not only a new type of school, but also a new culture, a new life, a new world." "Among the participants in the Modern School Movement were anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, feminist Margaret Sanger, authors Will and Ariel Durant, and groundbreaking artists Robert Henri, George Bellows, and Man Ray. Based on extensive interviews with former pupils and teachers, this work is an investigation into the potential of educational alternatives."--BOOK JACKET.

A blend of political theory, social theory, and philosophy of culture, the book will show the relationship and tension between thought and action, politics and literature, power and dissent in modern politics and culture.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1912 Edition.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

DOES DISCOURSE HAVE A 'STRUCTURE'? HARRIS'S REVOLUTION IN LINGUISTICS As a freshman back in 1947 I discovered that within the various academic divisions and subdivisions of the University of Pennsylvania there existed a something (it was not a Department, but a piece of the Anthropology Department) called 'Linguistic Analysis'. I was an untalented but enthusiastic student of Greek and a slightly more talented student of German, as well as the son of a translator, so the idea of 'Linguistic Analysis' attracted me, sight unseen, and I signed up for a course. It turned out that 'Linguistic Analysis' was essentially a graduate program - I and another undergraduate called Noam Chomsky were the only two undergraduates who took courses in Linguistic Analysis - and also that it was essentially a one-man show: a professor named Zellig Harris taught all the courses with the aid of graduate Teaching Fellows (and possibly - I am not sure - one Assistant Professor). The technicalities of Linguistic Analysis were formidable, and I never did master them all. But the powerful intellect and personality of Zellig Harris drew me like a lodestone, and, although I majored in Philosophy, I took every course there was to take in Linguistic Analysis from then until my gradua tion. What 'Linguistics' was like before Zellig Harris is something not many people care to remember today.

"In a spirit of good-natured dialogue, leading scholars of various philosophical persuasions critically engage these important questions. The fourteen previously unpublished essays in this volume explore Margolis's contributions, ranging from the subtle issues of detail within his system to very general questions of the need, viability, and value of a hermeneutic, relativistic metaphysics of flux. At the conclusion of the book, Professor Margolis responds to points raised in each paper."--BOOK JACKET.