Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

Beyond Objectivism and Relativism PDF Author: Richard J. Bernstein
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205502
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Drawing freely and expertly from Continental and analytic traditions, Richard Bernstein examines a number of debates and controversies exemplified in the works of Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt. He argues that a "new conversation" is emerging about human rationality—a new understanding that emphasizes its practical character and has important ramifications both for thought and action.

Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

Beyond Objectivism and Relativism PDF Author: Richard J. Bernstein
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205502
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
Drawing freely and expertly from Continental and analytic traditions, Richard Bernstein examines a number of debates and controversies exemplified in the works of Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt. He argues that a "new conversation" is emerging about human rationality—a new understanding that emphasizes its practical character and has important ramifications both for thought and action.

Praxis and Action

Praxis and Action PDF Author: Richard J. Bernstein
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205499
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
From the Introduction: This inquiry is concerned with the themes of praxis and action in four philosophic movements: Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. It is rare that these four movements are considered in a single inquiry, for there are profound differences of emphasis, focus, terminology, and approach represented by these styles of thought. Many philosophers believe that similarities among these movements are superficial and that a close examination of them will reveal only hopelessly unbridgeable cleavages. While respecting the genuine fundamental differences of these movements, this inquiry is undertaken in the spirit of showing that there are important common themes and motifs in what first appears to be a chaotic babble of voices. I intend to show that the concern with man as an agent has been a primary focal point of each of these movements and further that each contributes something permanent and important to our understanding of the nature and context of human activity.

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1 PDF Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139935763
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Richard Rorty's collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Hermeneutics and Praxis

Hermeneutics and Praxis PDF Author: Robert Hollinger
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description


Relativism and Human Rights

Relativism and Human Rights PDF Author: Claudio Corradetti
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9402421300
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This is an innovative contribution to the philosophy of human rights. Considering both legal and philosophical scholarship, the views here bear an importance on the legitimacy of international politics and international law. As a result of more than 10 years of research, this revised edition engages with current debates through the help of new sections. Pluralistic universalism considers that, while formal filtering criteria constitute unavoidable requirements for the production of potentially valid arguments, the exemplarity of judgmental activity, in its turn, provides a pluralistic and retrospective reinterpretation for the fixity of such criteria. While speech formal standards grounds the thinnest possible presuppositions we can make as humans, the discursive exemplarity of judgments defends a notion of validity which is both contextually dependent and "subjectively universal". According to this approach, human rights principles are embedded within our linguistic argumentative practice. It is precisely from the intersubjective and dialogical relation among speakers that we come to reflect upon those same conditions of validity of our arguments. Once translated into national and regional constitutional norms, the discursive validity of exemplar judgments postulates the philosophical necessity for an ideal of legal-constitutional pluralism, challenging all those attempts trying to frustrate both horizontal (state to state) and vertical (supra-national-state-social) on-going debates on human rights. On the first edition of this book: “Claudio Corradetti’s book is a thoughtful attempt to find an adequate theoretical foundation for human rights. Its approach is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on issues in analytical philosophy as well as contemporary political theorists, and the result is a densely argued text aimed at scholars ... .” (Andrew Lambert, Metapsychology Online Reviews, Vol. 14 (3), January, 2010) "Charting a clear course through a vast landscape of theories, Claudio Corradetti develops an original and profound account of human rights beyond objectivism and relativism. A remarkable achievement." (Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main)

Violence

Violence PDF Author: Richard J. Bernstein
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745678793
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
We live in a time when we are overwhelmed with talk and images ofviolence. Whether on television, the internet, films or the videoscreen, we can’t escape representations of actual orfictional violence - another murder, another killing spree in ahigh school or movie theatre, another action movie filled withimages of violence. Our age could well be called “The Age ofViolence” because representations of real or imaginedviolence, sometimes fused together, are pervasive. But what do wemean by violence? What can violence achieve? Are there limits toviolence and, if so, what are they? In this new book Richard Bernstein seeks to answer these questionsby examining the work of five figures who have thought deeply aboutviolence - Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, FrantzFanon, and Jan Assmann. He shows that we have much to learn fromtheir work about the meaning of violence in our times. Through thecritical examination of their writings he also brings out thelimits of violence. There are compelling reasons to commitourselves to non-violence, and yet at the same time we have toacknowledge that there are exceptional circumstances in whichviolence can be justified. Bernstein argues that there can be nogeneral criteria for determining when violence is justified. Theonly plausible way of dealing with this issue is to cultivatepublics in which there is free and open discussion and in whichindividuals are committed to listen to one other: when publicdebate withers, there is nothing to prevent the triumph ofmurderous violence.

Beyond Epistemology

Beyond Epistemology PDF Author: Sharyn Clough
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742514652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Feminist thinkers have been critically examining science for over a century; but who critiques the criticism?

Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted

Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted PDF Author: Paul Fairfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441139001
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In this important new study, Paul Fairfield examines a number of issues of central importance to philosophical hermeneutics. His aim is less to reexamine the basic hypotheses of hermeneutics (Gadamer's hermeneutics in particular) than to understand it in relational terms, by bringing it into closer association with existentialism, pragmatism, critical theory, and postmodernism. Fairfield contends that there are important affinities and areas for critical exchange between hermeneutics and these four schools of thought which have, until now, remained underappreciated. Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted examines several of these connections by interpreting hermeneutics in relation to specific themes in the writings of key figures within each of these traditions. In so doing, he both clarifies some outstanding issues in hermeneutics and advances the subject beyond what Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur have given us.

The Pragmatic Turn

The Pragmatic Turn PDF Author: Richard J. Bernstein
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745659454
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In this major new work, Richard J. Bernstein argues that many of the most important themes in philosophy during the past one hundred and fifty years are variations and developments of ideas that were prominent in the classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George H Mead. Pragmatism begins with a thoroughgoing critique of the Cartesianism that dominated so much of modern philosophy. The pragmatic thinkers reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, mind-body dualism, the quest for certainty and the spectator theory of knowledge. They seek to bring about a sea change in philosophy that highlights the social character of human experience and normative social practices, the self-correcting nature of all inquiry, and the continuity of theory and practice. And they-especially James, Dewey, and Mead-emphasize the democratic ethical-political consequences of a pragmatic orientation. Many of the themes developed by the pragmatic thinkers were also central to the work of major twentieth century philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but the so-called analytic-continental split obscures this underlying continuity. Bernstein develops an alternative reading of contemporary philosophy that brings out the persistence and continuity of pragmatic themes. He critically examines the work of leading contemporary philosophers who have been deeply influenced by pragmatism, including Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom, and he explains why the discussion of pragmatism is so alive, varied and widespread. This lucid, wide-ranging book by one of America's leading philosophers will be compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of philosophy today.

Fear of Knowledge

Fear of Knowledge PDF Author: Paul Boghossian
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191622753
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The academic world has been plagued in recent years by scepticism about truth and knowledge. Paul Boghossian, in his long-awaited first book, sweeps away relativist claims that there is no such thing as objective truth or knowledge, but only truth or knowledge from a particular perspective. He demonstrates clearly that such claims don't even make sense. Boghossian focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed - one as a thesis about truth and two about justification. And he rejects all three. The intuitive, common-sense view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them. This short, lucid, witty book shows that philosophy provides rock-solid support for common sense against the relativists; it will prove provocative reading throughout the discipline and beyond.