Care of the World

Care of the World
Author: Elena Pulcini
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2012-08-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 940074482X

This book proposes a philosophy of care in a global age. It discusses the distinguishing and opposing pathologies produced by globalization: unlimited individualism or self-obsession, manifested as (Promethean) omnipotence and (narcissistic) indifference, and endogamous communitarianism or an ‘us’-obsession that results in conflict and violence. The polarization between a lack and an excess of pathos is reflected in the distorted forms taken on by fear. The book advocates a metamorphosis of fear, which may restore in the subject an awareness of vulnerability and become the precondition for moral action. Such awareness and the recognition of the condition of contamination caused by the other’s unavoidable presence teach us to fear for rather than be afraid of. Fear for the world means care of the world, and care, understood as concern and solicitude, is a new notion of responsibility, in which the stress is shifted to a relational subject capable of responding to and taking care of the other. From a global perspective, the proposed vision of care also compels us to explore a new paradigm of justice.

Steering Human Evolution

Steering Human Evolution
Author: Yehezkel Dror
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000055590

Humanity must steer its evolution. As human knowledge moves a step ahead of Darwin’s theories, this book presents the emergence of human-made meta-evolution shaping our alternative futures. This novel process poses fateful challenges to humanity, which require regulation of emerging science and technology which may endanger the future of our species. However, to do so successfully, a novel ‘humanity-craft’ has to be developed; main ideologies and institutions need redesign; national sovereignty has to be limited; a decisive global regime becomes essential; some revaluation of widely accepted norms becomes essential; and a novel type of political leader, based on merit in addition to public support, is urgently needed. Taking into account the strength of nationalism and vested interests, it may well be that only catastrophes will teach humanity to metamorphose into a novel epoch without too high transition costs. But initial steps, such as United Nation reforms, are urgent in order to contain calamities and may soon become feasible. Being both interdisciplinary and based on personal experience of the author, this book adds up to a novel paradigm on steering human evolution. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, evolution sciences, future studies, political science, philosophy of action, and science and technology. It will also be of wide appeal to the general reader anxious about the future of life on Earth. Comments on the Corona pandemic add to the book’s concrete significance.

Death Education and Research

Death Education and Research
Author: William G Warren
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 131777356X

A critical review of research and reflection in the area of death, with special emphasis on death education. Thought-provoking, often controversial reviews of and reactions to the current general domain of death phenomena--specifically death education--are addressed in this book. The author, skeptical that we can do very much with the phenomenon of death and dying, especially in relation to our efforts at addressing it educationally, explores the philosophical, psychological, socio-cultural, and theoretical aspects and raises critical questions that will challenge proponents of death education. Both advocates and critics of death education in particular, and death research in general, will benefit from this intellectually stimulating volume that sounds a cautionary note, yet offers some positive suggestions for the future of death education. Professionals interested in any aspect of death education will be intrigued by this thorough examination of death education from several perspectives.

The Unconstructable Earth

The Unconstructable Earth
Author: Frédéric Neyrat
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0823282597

Winner, Grand Prize, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—that takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. In short, our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Such is the position we find ourselves in, when proposals for reengineering the earth’s ecosystems and geosystems are taken as the only politically feasible answer to ecological catastrophe. Yet far from being merely the fruit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative of geopower has also been activated by theorists of the constructivist turn—ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, accelerationist—who have likewise called into question the great divide between nature and culture. With the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature has been built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by technologies that proliferate within the space of human needs and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden anaturalism denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology thus finds itself in no position to confront the geoconstructivist project, with its claim that there is no nature and its aim to replace Earth with Earth 2.0. Against both positions, Neyrat stakes out the importance of the unconstructable Earth. Against the fusional myth of technology over nature, but without returning to the division between nature and culture, he proposes an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against the capitalist, technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but equally against an organicism marked by unacknowledged traces of racism and sexism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming: a traject that cannot be replicated in a laboratory. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it. This remarkable book, which will be of interest to those across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, from theorists to shapers of policy, recasts the earth as a singular trajectory that invites humans to turn political ecology into a geopolitics.

Ecce Homo! A Lexicon of Man

Ecce Homo! A Lexicon of Man
Author: Luigi Romeo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 181
Release: 1979-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9027274525

This fascinating lexicon presents a compilation of approximately a thousand labels with which man has referred to himself in literary history. This is an indispensible reference tool for anyone interested in the accomplishments of Homo.

Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker
Author: Paul Anthony Dominiak
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 056768508X

Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has long been acknowledged as an influential philosophical, theological and literary text. While scholars have commonly noted the presence of participatory language in selected passages of Hooker's Laws, Paul Anthony Dominiak is the first to trace how participation lends a sense of system and coherency across the whole work. Dominiak analyses how Hooker uses an architectural framework of 'participation in God' to build a cohesive vision of the Elizabethan Church as the most fitting way to reconcile and lead English believers to the shared participation of God. First exploring Hooker's metaphysical architecture of participation in his accounts of law and the sacraments, Dominiak then traces how this architecture structures cognitive participation in God, as well as Hooker's political vision of the Church and Commonwealth. The volume culminates with a summary of how Hooker provides a salutary resource for modern ecumenical dialogue and contemporary political retrievals of participation.

A Philosophical Journey Into the Anthropocene

A Philosophical Journey Into the Anthropocene
Author: Agostino Cera
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Geology, Stratigraphic
ISBN: 1793630828

"This book presents a philosophical journey into the Anthropocene that views this geological epoch as the potential métarécit of our age and the planetary framework within which technology becomes the environment for human life. The appropriate name for this epochal phenomenon is, as a result, not Anthropocene, but Technocene"--

The Invention of Tomorrow

The Invention of Tomorrow
Author: Thomas Suddendorf
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2022-09-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1541675738

A spellbinding exploration of the human capacity to imagine the future Our ability to think about the future is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. In The Invention of Tomorrow, cognitive scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, and Adam Bulley argue that its emergence transformed humans from unremarkable primates to creatures that hold the destiny of the planet in their hands. Drawing on their own cutting-edge research, the authors break down the science of foresight, showing us where it comes from, how it works, and how it made our world. Journeying through biology, psychology, history, and culture, they show that thinking ahead is at the heart of human nature—even if we often get it terribly wrong. Incisive and expansive, The Invention of Tomorrow offers a fresh perspective on the human tale that shows how our species clawed its way to control the future.

The Hermetic Deleuze

The Hermetic Deleuze
Author: Joshua Ramey
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-08-20
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 082235229X

In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Gilles Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition.

Human Beings in International Relations

Human Beings in International Relations
Author: Daniel Jacobi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2015-09-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316369048

Since the 1980s, the discipline of International Relations has seen a series of disputes over its foundations. However, there has been one core concept that, although addressed in various guises, had never been explicitly and systematically engaged with in these debates: the human. This volume is the first to address comprehensively the topic of the human in world politics. It comprises cutting-edge accounts by leading scholars of how the human is (or is not) theorized across the entire range of IR theories, old and new. The authors provide a solid foundation for future debates about how, why, and to which ends the human has been or must (not) be built into our theories, and systematically lay out the implications of such moves for how we come to see world politics and humanity's role within it.