Social Philosophy Books - Page 2

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Great Books in Philosophy)

Adam Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The Theory of Moral Sentiments" clearly demonstrates that besides mundane economic pursuits, Smith was just as interested, if not more so, in the capacity of people to bestow and to esteem benevolence, and to strive for virtue even while they are pursuing their own self-interest. The root of our motivation to act benevolently toward others, says Smith, is our natural propensity to sympathise with others. By the same token, our need to have others sympathise with us fuels our desire to be esteemed by others for our benevolence and generally virtuous character. But beyond the need for social approbation, we also have a genuine desire to live according to the dictates of conscience (called by Smith the 'Impartial Spectator'). This is our highest impulse and leads us continually to strive for excellence in all spheres of life quite apart from any recognition or encouragement from others. It may be prudent in our economic life to follow our self-interest to secure the basic necessities, but this is only the first stage of personal development toward the much higher goal of living a morally virtuous life. Although "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" is not well known today, it was widely read and highly praised by the leading intellectuals of the day including David Hume and Edmund Burke. This book went through six different editions between 1759 and 1790 and was also translated into French by the widow of Condorcet. To gain a complete picture of Adam Smith and his ideas, every reader of "The Wealth of Nations" should also become familiar with his classic treatment of ethics.

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

David Abram

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

mind magic 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the rarest, most utterly original books there is, and indeed could ever be. It is written by someone whose soul is that of a magician and poet and whose art is so triumphant with sheer spirit that every sentence is radical and radicalizing. It is a book whose comprehension of the human condition is generous, natural and enormous. It describes the necessity of nature not just for human being but for human thinking; this is a cry for the protection of the human mind.

It has deeply influenced my own thinking, from the moment I read it, and has remained one of the best books I've ever read.

A New Appreciation of Nature 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

"A butterfly glides by, golden wings navigating delicate air currents with a few momentary flutters before they settle on a white flower...Fragrant whiffs from the new blossoms in the overgrown orchard by the creek stir...My sensing body now vividly awake to the world." ~ pg. 223

"The Spell of the Sensuous" is a fairly complex read that takes you on a journey through a myriad of experiences as related to the natural world. Through this journey we gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in a sensuous world. Language, lore and cultural heritage is also a focus.

David Abram subtly draws a stark contrast between how tribal cultures have viewed the earth and how modern man seems far removed from nature's protective beauty. Whether he is speaking about Native Americans or the Ancient Greeks he explores their culture from the viewpoint of how they relate to the land and air.

"The emergence or adoption of a formal writing system significantly solidifies the ephemeral perceptual boundary already established by a common tongue; now the spoken language has a visible counterpart that floats, fixed and immobile, between the human body and the sensuous world." ~ pg. 256

While at first this may seem like a casual discussion of how cultures pass along their traditions, you may soon realize that this is much more a serious investigation into how people either preserve or destroy the living breathing environment. A discussion of how cultures moved from oral traditions to the written word is fascinating. You can see how even today some cultures show a remarkable respect for their environments while others seem to have lost their connection to the earth.

At times highly intellectual and at other times pure, spiritual and poetic, David Abram's writing weaves through your soul to bring you to a higher awareness of the land in which you live and the importance of preserving your natural heritage.

~The Rebecca Review

Editorial Review:

A stunningly original work of ecological philosophy documenting the historical and current effects of language on our perception of and interaction with nature. Utne Magazine recently voted Abram one of "The 100 People Who Will Change the World." And if this book is read as widely as it deserves, that prediction may come to pass. Very Highly Recommended.

The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Cornell Paperbacks)

Giambattista Vico

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A bold new translation of a masterpiece of early social science that has found enthusiasts among such artists and scholars as James Joyce and Harold Bloom.

Although Vico lived his whole life as an obscure academic in Naples, his New Science is an astonishingly ambitious attempt to provide a comprehensive science of all human society by decoding the history, mythology, and law of the ancient world. It argues that the key to true understanding lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of the Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews, and Babylonians were utterly different from our own. In examining these huge themes, Vico offers countless fresh insights into topics ranging from physics to politics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, the New Science even inspired the framework for Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This powerful new translation makes it clear why this work marked a turning-point in humanist thinking as significant as Newton's contemporary revolution in physics.

Translated by David Marsh with an Introduction by Anthony Grafton

"My imagination grows every time I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung."-- James Joyce

Finite and Infinite Games

James P. Carse

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Starts out well, then descends to nonsense 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed the first chapter of this book. His explanation of what he calls finite games is interesting and can be useful in looking at relationships, politics, entertainment, etc. He draws some nice distinctions between those and what he calls "infinite games," but since infinite games are much harder to explain the book goes awry in the later chapters.

The book is written in a sort of Tralfamadorian-style series of brief sections, each with its own paradoxical and sometimes interesting idea. After the first chapter, though, the style begins to pall and by the third chapter--"I am the Genius of Myself"--paradox becomes an end in itself and a book that had been interesting descends to the merely clever and then to the meaningless. For example, here is the difference between infinite and finite players on the subject of war: "For infinite players, if it possible to wage war without killing a single person [an idea he takes from Rousseau], then it is possible to wage war only without killing a single person." He does not offer any reasons why this is true, or even what it means. In the last five chapters, Carse makes many statements like this. Some are unexplained, some perhaps inexplicable and many that are just silly.

Eventually, the book becomes banal: finite players are bad, infinite players are good. If you must read the book, stop after the second chapter.

Editorial Review:

An extraordinary book that will dramatically change the way you experience life.
Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life, the games we play in business and politics, in the bedroom and on the battlefied -- games with winners and losers, a beginning and an end. Infinite games are more mysterious -- and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom.
In this elegant and compelling work, James Carse explores what these games mean, and what they can mean to you. He offers stunning new insights into the nature of property and power, of culture and community, of sexuality and self-discovery, opening the door to a world of infinite delight and possibility.
"An extraordinary little book . . . a wise and intimate companion, an elegant reminder of the real."
-- Brain/Mind Bulletin

Everyday Life in the Modern World (Classics in Communication and Mass Culture)

Henri Lefebvre

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Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture

Editorial Review:

Basing his discussions on everyday life in France, Lefebvre shows the degree to which our lived-in world and our sense of it are shaped by decisions about which we know little and in which we do not participate. He evaluates the achievements and shortcomings of applying various philosophical perspectives, such as Marxism and Structuralism, to daily life, studies the impact of consumerism on society, and looks at the effects on society of linguistic phenomena and terrorism communicated through mass media.

The Science of Conflict

James A. Schellenberg

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Editorial Review:

Providing a concise introduction to an increasingly urgent area of study, this book reviews recent developments in the social sciences that contribute directly to our understanding of social conflict. Drawing on classical sources--such as the writings of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx--the author traces the influence of their thinking on contemporary issues and covers the leading ideas, key research findings, and central questions to come out of sociobiology, game theory, labor-management negotiations, the sociology of revolution, and other crucial subjects.

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

Philip Ball

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society.

Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs.

Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Why Can't We Be Good?

Jacob Needleman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Good Man Befuddled 2 out of 5 stars.
7 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Jacob Needleman has been writing books of great interest to all who students of the human condition for many years. I think, however, that he has been led into deep murkiness by too many years spent studying the works of Gurdjieff, to whom he gives scant credit here. Whatever it is, some of his thoughts, particularly in chapter 11, the Essence, are so incoherently expressed as to baffle the reader. He clearly knows a good deal but his ability to express his ideas seems to have been lost.

Editorial Review:

The widely respected social philosopher embarks on his most gripping and broadly appealing work, asking the ultimate question of human nature: Why do we repeatedly violate our most deeply held values and beliefs?

After nearly forty years of weighing humanity's deepest dilemmas-working in settings ranging from university and high school classrooms to corporate offices and hospitals-bestselling author, philosopher, and religious scholar Jacob Needleman presents the most urgent, deeply felt, and widely accessible work of his career.

In Why Can't We Be Good? Needleman identifies the core problem that therapists and social philosophers fail to see. He depicts the individual human as a being who knows what is good, yet who remains mysteriously helpless to innerly adopt the ethical, moral, and religious ideas that are bequeathed to him.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice

Thomas Sowell

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Total reviews: 49 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Thomas Sowell is a man of immense learning but with a common touch. His books reveal a dazzling mind that ranges freely and easily from history and sociology to economics to public policy. He conveys complex ideas in a simple way for a mass audience, a skill he learned as an academic who writes a syndicated newspaper column. This strength is on full view in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which is perhaps best described as a work of moral philosophy. That may sound off-putting, but it shouldn't. Again, Sowell writes for lay readers, and his clear thinking is on immediate display. His topic is justice, broadly understood. We constantly hear of "social justice," he says. But how is social justice different from other kinds of justice? The word social, in fact, is redundant here: "All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?" The book goes on to show how one person's sense of justice and equality can lead to their exact opposites: injustice and inequality. He holds no quarter for those who pursue "cosmic justice," the dangerous notion that people can right all wrongs, and favors "traditional justice," which emphasizes rules and procedures. The Quest for Cosmic Justice ought to be required reading for all students in college-level political theory courses; Sowell's conservative politics and aversion to academic jargon probably guarantee it won't be. That's a shame, because he is the very definition of a public intellectual--and The Quest for Cosmic Justice is another awesome achievement. --John J. Miller

First Things

Hadley Arkes

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Thoughtful arguments 5 out of 5 stars.
27 of 28 people found this review helpful.

Throughout the years, Professor Arkes has established himself as one of the nation's finest natural law thinkers, and this book presents a thorough overview of his philosophy. In short, he attempts to show that moral principles can be discovered through human reason and not just based on emotion or tradition. This represents the foundation of natural rights, which includes the right to all aspects of freedom except those which can be shown to contradict the logic of morals (such as slavery). Since moral principles are universal and can be discovered by reason, freedom cannot be infringed simply based on majoritarian beliefs (the "might makes right" argument), but neither is freedom simply following one's conscience, since this will sometimes lead one to act in contradiction to moral laws. The argument is of course much more richly elaborated in the book and only by reading it in Arkes's own words can you appreciate it fully. The book is more than theory, however, and Arkes applies his principles to such controversial issues as religious exemptions, the obligation to rescue, and abortion. Even one who does not agree with all of the Professor's thoughts will still find this an enjoyable book written in an engaging yet witty manner.

Editorial Review:

An Inquiry into the first principles of morals and justice: This book restores to us an understanding that was once settled in the 'moral sciences': that there are propositions, in morals and law, which are not only true but which cannot be otherwise.