The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal

The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal
Author: Victor Kestenbaum
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2021-03-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226818004

In this highly original book, Victor Kestenbaum calls into question the oft-repeated assumption that John Dewey's pragmatism has no place for the transcendent. Kestenbaum demonstrates that, far from ignoring the transcendent ideal, Dewey's works—on education, ethics, art, and religion—are in fact shaped by the tension between the natural and the transcendent. Kestenbaum argues that to Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for ideal meaning occurs at the frontier of the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Penetrating analyses of Dewey's early and later writings, as well as comparisons with the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Oakeshott, and Wallace Stevens, shed new light on why Dewey regarded the human being's relationship to the ideal as "the most far-reaching question" of philosophy. For Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for the good life required a willingness "to surrender the actual experienced good for a possible ideal good." Dewey's pragmatism helps us to understand the place of the transcendent ideal in a world of action and practice.

Undeclared

Undeclared
Author: Chris Higgins
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2024-05-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262377616

An imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose. What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared, Chris Higgins confronts the contemporary university in a bid to reclaim a formative mission for higher education. In a series of searching essays and pointed interludes, Higgins challenges us to acknowledge how far our practices have drifted from our ideals, asking: What would it look like to build a college from the ground up to support self-discovery and personal integration? What does it mean to be a public university, and are there any left? How can the humanities help the job-ified university begin to take vocation seriously? Cutting through the underbrush of received ideas, Higgins follows the insight where it leads, clearing a path from the corporate multiversity to the renaissance in higher education that was Black Mountain College and back again. Along the way, we tour a campus bent on becoming a shopping mall, accompany John Dewey through a midlife crisis, and witness the first "happening.” Through diverse and grounded philosophical engagements, Undeclared assembles the resources to expand the contemporary educational imagination.

The Severity of God

The Severity of God
Author: Paul K. Moser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1107311055

This book explores the role of divine severity in the character and wisdom of God, and the flux and difficulties of human life in relation to divine salvation. Much has been written on problems of evil, but the matter of divine severity has received relatively little attention. Paul K. Moser discusses the function of philosophy, evidence and miracles in approaching God. He argues that if God's aim is to extend without coercion His lasting life to humans, then commitment to that goal could manifest itself in making human life severe, for the sake of encouraging humans to enter into that cooperative good life. In this scenario, divine agapē is conferred as free gift, but the human reception of it includes stress and struggle in the face of conflicting powers and priorities. Moser's work will be of great interest to students of the philosophy of religion, and theology.

New Directions in Ethics

New Directions in Ethics
Author: Joseph P. DeMarco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000049434

Originally published in 1986, this book examines the extent to which existing ethical theory can provide an adequate framework for the resolution of practical moral issues. The contributors, all leading moral philosophers, provide an authoritative and comprehensive account of developments in ethical theory, with emphasis on issues in applied ethics. They explain the dominant ethical theories, survey major field of applied ethics and speculate about the future of ethics.

The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression

The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression
Author: Shannon Sullivan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2015-07-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190269707

While gender and race often are considered socially constructed, this book argues that they are physiologically constituted through the biopsychosocial effects of sexism and racism. This means that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race and feminist philosophy need to examine not only the financial, legal, political and other forms of racist and sexism oppression, but also their physiological operations. Examining a complex tangle of affects, emotions, knowledge, and privilege, The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression develops an understanding of the human body whose unconscious habits are biological. On this account, affect and emotion are thoroughly somatic, not something "mental" or extra-biological layered on top of the body. They also are interpersonal, social, and can be transactionally transmitted between people. Ranging from the stomach and the gut to the hips and the heart, from autoimmune diseases to epigenetic markers, Sullivan demonstrates the gastrointestinal effects of sexual abuse that disproportionately affect women, often manifesting as IBS, Crohn's disease, or similar functional disorders. She also explores the transgenerational effects of racism via epigenetic changes in African American women, who experience much higher pre-term birth rates than white women do, and she reveals the unjust benefits for heart health experienced by white people as a result of their racial privilege. Finally, developing the notion of a physiological therapy that doesn't prioritize bringing unconscious habits to conscious awareness, Sullivan closes with a double-barreled approach for both working for institutional change and transforming biologically unconscious habits. The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression skillfully combines feminist and critical philosophy of race with the biological and health sciences. The result is a critical physiology of race and gender that offers new strategies for fighting male and white privilege.

Faith in Life

Faith in Life
Author: Donald J. Morse
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823283089

This is the first book to consider John Dewey’s early philosophy on its own terms and to explicate its key ideas. It does so through the fullest treatment to date of his youthful masterwork, the Psychology. This fuller treatment reveals that the received view, which sees Dewey’s early philosophy as unimportant in its own right, is deeply mistaken. In fact, Dewey’s early philosophy amounts to an important new form of idealism. More specifically, Dewey’s idealism contains a new logic of rupture, which allows us to achieve four things: • A focus on discontinuity that challenges all naturalistic views, including Dewey’s own later view; • A space of critical resistance to events that is at the same time the source of ideals; • A faith in the development of ideals that challenges pessimists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and • A non-traditional reading of Hegel that invites comparison with cutting-edge Continental philosophers, such as Adorno, Derrida, and Zizek, and even goes beyond them in its systematic approach; In making these discoveries, the author forges a new link between American and European philosophy, showing how they share similar insights and concerns. He also provides an original assessment of Dewey’s relationship to his teacher, George Sylvester Morris, and to other important thinkers of the day, giving us a fresh picture of John Dewey, the man and the philosopher, in the early years of his career. Readers will find a wide range of topics discussed, from Dewey’s early reflections on Kant and Hegel to the nature of beauty, courage, sympathy, hatred, love, and even death and despair. This is a book for anyone interested in the thought of John Dewey, American pragmatism, Continental Philosophy, or a new idealism appearing on the scene.

Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah

Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah
Author: Frederick E. Greenspahn
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814732887

This title describes recent discoveries and insights into the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the modern day. From mystical outpourings in ancient Palestine to the Kabbalah Centre, this volume explores the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present day.