For centuries, knowledge has been thought to be the key to human progress of all kinds and has dominated Western culture. But what if knowing has now become an impediment to further human development? The End of Knowing is concerned with the practical consideration of how to reconstruct our world when modernist ideas have been refuted and many social problems appear insoluble. Newman and Holzman suggest provocatively that we should give up knowing in favour of "performed activity." They show how to reject the knowing paradigm in practice and present the many positive implications this has for social and educational policy.

"Scrolls, Volume 3: Essays On Jewish History and Literature, and Kindred Subjects" presents a collection of insightful essays by Gotthard Deutsch, a renowned scholar of Jewish history. This volume delves into various aspects of Jewish history, literature, and related topics, offering readers a comprehensive understanding of the Jewish experience through the ages. Deutsch's essays explore diverse themes within Jewish studies, providing valuable perspectives on historical events, literary works, and cultural developments. This volume is a significant contribution to the field and an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in Jewish history and literature. Originally published in 1920, these essays continue to resonate with their scholarly rigor and insightful analysis, making "Scrolls, Volume 3" a timeless addition to any collection of Jewish studies. 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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. 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. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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.

"In this bold and wide-ranging book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces across several centuries the conflict between two versions of nominalism-"conventional" nominalism and what he calls "magical" nominalism. According to Jay, since at least William of Ockham, the conventional form of nominalism contributed to the disenchantment of the world by rejecting the notion of general terms as anything other than names we use to group particular objects together, rejecting the idea that they have any reference to a further, "higher" reality. Magical nominalism, instead, performs a reenchanting function by investing names with an auratic power of their own. Starting with the initial revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay proceeds to unpack various "counterrevolutions" against nominalism itself. Ranging from theology to critical theory, philosophy of history, aesthetics, and political theory, engaging with thinkers including Adorno, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, and Derrida; artists such as Marcel Duchamp; and a range of contemporary theorists, this book provides us with a new way to understand humanity's intellectual path to modernity and its aftermath. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language and reality, Jay shows, allows for surprising, illuminating connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience"--

"Texts Without Referents" offers a detailed and systematic theory of human culture, ranging across both Anglo-American and Continental European philosophy, and their allied disciplines. In it Joseph Margolis provides an account of history and interpretation and the ontology of cultural entities (persons, artefacts, artworks, words and sentences, actions, institutions, societies). Central to the book is the question of the coherent relationship between the human and the natural sciences. The author elaborates a theory that may be said to question, and challenge, the traditional emphasis given in the Western philosophical canon to the subordination of the human sciences to the physical sciences. Margolis' strategy is to show the strong conceptual evidence offered by such diverse movements as pragmatism, naturalism, phenomenology, deconstruction, Marxism, Frankfurt Critical Theory, hermeneutics, and Wittgensteinian and Nietzschean currents, for overturning this ranking. Margolis argues that it is the physical sciences that depend on the human for their distinctive rigour, and that they need to be brought under the larger constraints of social existence if, together, they are to yield a coherent and comprehensive picture of the full powers of human inquiry. This, the third volume in Margolis' trilogy, brings the issues of the first two volumes together, reworking them within a general theory of cultural life. A number of strategic questions are examined, including the nature of texts, reference, selves, praxis, thinking, and historical time. Expansive and challenging, it represents the climax to an ambitious reassessment of the relationship, within the world of culture, between the natural and the human sciences, and a reassessment of the complexities of human existence. The books is aimed at students and specialists in philosophy, social theory and the philosophy of culture.

[I]f the diffusion of American wealth is accentuated, can it be denied that the extremes are greater here than anywhere else, -that the army of the unemployed is swelling while the billion-dollar trusts are formed, that the richest men are richer than any European, while the slums of New York show a misery that is unknown in Berlin? -from "American Democracy" As a psychologist and an innovator of experimental psychology, Hugo Münsterberg was a powerful influence on thinking in both the medical and social arenas at the turn of the 20th century, developing practical applications of psychology to industry, medicine, education, the arts, and criminal investigation. Here, though, in this 1901 work, Münsterberg turns his scientific eye on American culture at large, offering the perspective of an educated and observant immigrant on the New World experience in the Gilded Age. From the delusions of American democracy to the condition of women, Münsterberg's commentary tells us much not just about the United States in the pre-World War I period, but also about the mind of a man whose work continues to impact today's philosophy of the mind and how it shapes human behavior. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Münsterberg's Psychology and Social Sanity, The Eternal Life, The War and America, and Psychotherapy OF INTEREST TO: readers of American history, students of cultural psychology German-American psychologist and philosopher HUGO MÜNSTERBERG (1863-1916) was professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1892 until his death. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1898.

"Nietzsche's pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought is the first study to place Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy in the context of Nietzsche's overall thought. It interprets Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy as a development of Nietzsche's earliest thinking as it is laid out in his school dissertation on Theognis of Megara. As author Carlos A. Segovia contends, the key figure in this early thinking is not Dionysus but Apollo, an earthly Apollo who, despite his partial erasure after The Birth of Tragedy, haunts Nietzsche in his later writings, including his unpublished fragments and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The author also shows that retrieving Nietzsche's pre-Dionysian Apollo can help us move beyond the theoretical limits assumed by today's two major philosophical trends, speculative realism and new materialism, thus stressing Nietzsche's untimeliness from a strictly contemporary standpoint. This book will be essential reading for all interested in Nietzsche and the birth of contemporary philosophy, including graduate students and researchers"--

Spanning forty years, this collection of essays represents the work of a renowned teacher and scholar of the ancient Greek world. Martin Ostwald's contribution is both philological and historical: the thread that runs through all of the essays is his precise explanation, for a modern audience, of some crucial terms by which the ancient Greeks saw and lived their lives—and influenced ours. Chosen and sequenced by Ostwald, the essays demonstrate his methodology and elucidate essential aspects of ancient Greek society. The first section plumbs the social and political terms in which the Greeks understood their lives. It examines their notion of the relation of the citizen to his community; how they conceived different kinds of political structure; what role ideology played in public life; and how differently their most powerful thinkers viewed issues of war and peace. The second section is devoted to the problem, first articulated by the Greeks, of the extent to which human life is dominated by nature (physis) and human convention (nomos), a question that remains a central concern in modern societies, even if in different guises. The third section focuses on democracy in Athens. It confronts questions of the nature of democratic rule, of financing public enterprises, of the accountability of public officials, of the conflict raised by imperial control and democratic rule, of the coexistence of "conservative" and "liberal" trends in a democratic regime, and of the relation between rhetoric and power in a democracy. The final section is a sketch of the principles on which the two greatest Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, constructed their outlooks on human affairs. Ultimately, the collection intends to make selected key concepts in ancient Greek social and political culture accessible to a lay audience. It also shows how the differences—rather than the similarities—between the ancient Greeks and us can contribute to a deeper understanding of our own time.

This fresh collection of essays questions how the historical process affects our conception of science, including our understanding of its validity as well as our general conception of knowledge. The essays in this book consider the philosophical labours spanning the work of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, still the philosophical basis of our modern understanding of science, as well as recent selected philosophers and historians of science such as Kuhn and Feyerbend. Themes raised include the philosophical basis for the validity of science, the possibility of ever knowing the independent world as it truly is, and the intelligibility of construing scientific knowledge as a historical. Taken separately and together, these essays provide a sustained analysis of scientific claims to objective standing, the historicity of thought and inquiry. They point toward unfinished philosophical business and the need for a new beginning.

"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.

Regression addresses what has come before; it is a matter of looking backward of retrospections? The motionless things of nature are generally forward-looking their problem is that of the question: Where do we go from here? It is primarily with intelligent beings that we ask: How did we get to where we now find ourselves? Regression and infinite regression in particular is thus a concept that has gained a greater prominence in the human sciences than in the sciences of nature. Argumentation to infinite regress has long been a favored instrument of philosophical dialectic. Philosophers have used it to disprove the positions they model to criticize. Infinite regresses, so they reason, are unrealizable: they cannot be completed so as to achieve some definitive result. And thereby anything that would engender an infinite regress is automatically made ineffective. Infinite Regress examines the theory of regression and includes information on the topics of vicious regress, innocuous regress, circularity regress, and propositional regress. Also discussed is the history of regression stemming from ancient times, to medieval times, to early modern history. Some of the other chapters in this book focus on world class philosophers including Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Bertrand Russell. The book will play a significant role in theoretical philosophy as well as in social philosophy and the philosophy of mind.

"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

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.

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.

Review This collection of papers from the Academy for Jewish Philosophy...is striking evidence to the fact that Jewish philosophy is alive and well....Read and enjoy!>>>> (Paul M. Van Buren Shofar) ...a welcome addition to the somewhat scanty corpus of contemporary Jewish philosophy.>>>> (Shofar) ...a welcome addition to the somewhat scanty corpus of contemporary Jewish philosophy. (Shofar) This collection of papers from the Academy for Jewish Philosophy...is striking evidence to the fact that Jewish philosophy is alive and well....Read and enjoy! (Paul M. Van Buren Shofar) Product Description This book brings together for the first time a collection of essays by some of the most distinguished contemporary Jewish philosophers on issues such as the nature of Jewish philosophy from the perspectives of general philosophy, classical Jewish philosophy and Jewish law, the role of reason and revelation as authority in Judaism, and the impact of contemporary philosophy of history and language on Judaism. The book is a living record of the revitalization of Jewish philosophy in the post-Holocaust world. Co-published with Studies in Judaism. About the Author Norbert M. Samuelson is Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University.

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.

"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.

Transformation in the Writing, A Case of Surrender-and-Catch further develops the concepts first presented in Surrender and Catch (1976) and applied to sociology and its history in Survival and Sociology (1991) and autobiography in O Loma! (1989). This idea involves the recognition of the unprecedented nature of the present time in the history of humankind and the planet, a time when we ourselves, rather than Nature or the Deity, can annihilate both ourselves and our planet. Surrender' is nonlinguistic (or prelinguistic), prepredicative', prephenomenal', and involves suspending or bracketing' the world, calling it into question. This is the best any individual can do, in view of the point of crisis at which we are now. In Transformation in the Writing Wolff explores how his hypothesis of Surrender(-and-Catch) bears on aspects of autobiography (emigre status, field work), sociology of knowledge, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and on attitudes to our time.

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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.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.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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.

"Communicology is Vilém Flusser's first ever thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomena that permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around questions such as "What is Communication," "What are Codes," and "What is Technical Imagination" the work touches on theatre, photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in 1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world. Although Flusser was writing in the pre-digital 1970s, his work demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies, and philosophy"--