Social Philosophy Books - Page 7

Freedom, Fame, Lying And Betrayal: Essays On Everyday Life

Leszek Kolakowski

Amazon Price: $32.00 List Price: $32.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Westview Press Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $6.50

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Eastern -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Eastern -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Modern

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

a simple philosophy book 5 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I have always been skeptical of philosophy books, having been scarred at school and university by their academic pretentiousness. Descartes once wrote: "I am sorry this letter is so long. I did not have the time to make it short" This book is short and concise, yet more profound and well-thought out than the encyclopedic volumes that we all had to plough through. Admittedly, some of the essays are weaker than others. Some are vague, but most are brilliant in their thought and structure. Kolakowski isn't trying to give everybody else's definitions and views on topics. He just writes what he thinks and sometimes, he does miss a point or he doesn't explore a particular issue as much as he could. Nonetheless, this is a very good read and it does provide a valuable guide on how to think and argue about issues

Editorial Review:

In eighteen short essays, one of the world's most admired living philosophers reflects on the important themes of everyday life.

Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski is renowned worldwide for wrestling with serious philosophical conundrums with dazzling elegance. In this new book, he turns his characteristic wit to important themes of ordinary life, from the need for freedom to the wheel of fortune, from the nature of God to the ambiguities of betrayal. Extremely lucid and lacking in intellectual pretension, these essays speak in everyday language, spurring the reader's own thoughts and providing a handle on which to debate and think about the themes. The eighteen essays cover the following topics: power, fame, equality, lying, toleration, travel, virtue, collective responsibility, the wheel of fortune, betrayal, violence, boredom, freedom, luxury, God, respect for nature, superstition, and national stereotypes.

Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates

List Price: $49.95 By: Indiana University Press Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $49.77

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Modern
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Political
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Social Philosophy

Editorial Review:

The ten essays in this lively anthology move beyond a purely historical consideration of Latin American philosophy to cover recent developments in political and social philosophy as well as innovations in the reception of key philosophical figures from the European Continental tradition. Topics such as indigenous philosophy, multiculturalism, the philosophy of race, democracy, postmodernity, the role of women, and the position of Latin America and Latin Americans in a global age are explored by notable philosophers from the region. An introduction by Eduardo Mendieta examines recent trends and points to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions that have inspired the discipline. Latin American Philosophy brings English-speaking readers up to date with recent scholarship and points to promising new directions.

The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (S U N Y Series in Social and Political Thought)

Axel Honneth

List Price: $59.50 By: State Univ of New York Pr Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $18.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Political
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Social Philosophy
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General

Editorial Review:

The essays in this book weave together insights and arguments from such diverse traditions as German critical theory, French philosophy and social theory, and recent Anglo-American moral and political theory, offering a unique approach to the political and theoretical consequences of the modernism/postmodernism discussion. Through an analysis of central themes in classical Marxism and early critical theory, the author shows how recent work in a variety of traditions converges on the need to question familiar distinctions between material production and culture, the public and the private, and the political and the social, and to reconsider the conceptions of agency and power that have informed them.

Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Karl-Otto Apel

List Price: $37.50 By: The MIT Press Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $33.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Social Philosophy
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The explanation versus understanding debate was important to the philosophy of the social sciences from the time of Dilthey and Weber through the work of Popper and Hempel. In recent years, with the development of interpretive approaches in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and language analysis, the problematic has become absolutely central. The broad literature to which it has given rise, while still split along "analytic" versus "continental" lines, shows increasing signs of a reunification in philosophy. G. H. von Wright's important book, Explanation and Understanding, originally published in 1971, is a good example of this trend.

In Understanding and Explanation, Karl-Otto Apel takes von Wright's work as a point of departure for a rigorous, penetrating analysis of the issues involved. After reviewing the failure of earlier discussions to resolve these issues, Apel develops his own approach in light of the turn from logico-semantic to pragmatic analysis of language in post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. In doing so, he constructs bridges that reach back to themes and positions of the German tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, but from strikingly new angles.

Karl-Otto Apel holds the chair for social philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

The Velvet Monkey Wrench

John Muir

Amazon Price: $18.00 List Price: $20.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Ocean Tree Books Amazon Marketplace: 23 new & used starting at $7.63

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( M ) -> Muir, John
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Social Philosophy
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Back In Print 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I notice the reviews for The Velvet Monkey Wrench say they reviewed an out of print edition. This book is back in print, the magenta edition as pictured, with an afterword by me, Eve Muir. Richard Polese of Ocean Tree Publications writes: "A revolutionary classic of social philosophy --- and just in time --- to challenge the assumptions of greed and corporate capitalism that have left us yearning for a more human system." I happened to have it the other day at the park and remembered: it's also quite funny.

Illustrated with loving care 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I have an original, July 73 First Edition, and I've never finished the text because of the illustrations. I always get stopped at one. My copy is clear and sharp and that's a good thing because the excusite illustrations have miles and miles of tiny detailed work. Too fun. Much in the same style as R. Crumb, but more positive, the illustrations and the book nicely combine to reflect the late 60's, early 70's sentiment.

If you've seen the"...keep VW alive..." books and marveled at the illustrations, and the light hearted words of John Muir as he helps you fix your bug, you'll love this. I do.

Editorial Review:

From universal human rights and a justice system based on truth to new concepts in education and public transportation, author John Muir presents his highly original, often outrageous common-sense ideas for creating a world based on peace and harmony. An ideal gift for any afficionado of sixties-era nostalgia.

Justice and Equality Here and Now

List Price: $35.00 By: Cornell Univ Pr Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $1.79

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Political
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Social Philosophy
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General

Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience

Howard Caygill

Amazon Price: $160.00 List Price: $160.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Routledge Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $99.62

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 1.0 of 5

a reader of benjamin 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Caygill's book is largely unilluminating and somewhat misguided. While this work tracks many of the places where Benjamin mentions experience directly (such as Experience, One-way Street, On the Program of Coming Philosophy, Surrealism, The PAris Arcades, etc.) he does not offer insight into how the material analysis would render the theological and political categories as a hightened critical ground of inquiry or revolutionary action. He does not fully think through the idea that Benjamin handles incomensurable theses as depending on one another. Although this is a good place to start for a composit of Benjamin's theory of experience it is largely unconvincing that this reading would yeild more than another focus or approach to his work (e.g. politcal, theological, philosophy of history, allegory, etc.). And while he cits many of the hard and citable passages from Benjamin's corpus, he often relies on the catchiness of the passage to explain itself. Also I found the work to lack a clear understanding of benjamins use of dialectic and attempts to read him as being a bit too close to his predecessors (especially Derrida). as an alternative I would start with Susan Buck-Morss' Dialectics of seeing--a truly wonderful study--, Gary Smith's Benjamin: Aesthetics, History and Philosphy, and John McCole's Antinomies of Tradition. I found all of these much better than Caygill's account.

Editorial Review:

In this major reinterpretation, Howard Caygill argues that all of Benjamin's work is characterized by its focus on a concept of experience derived from Kant but applied by Benjamin to objects as diverse as urban experience, visual art, literature and philosophy. The book analyzes the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour.

By representing Benjamin as primarily a thinker of the visual field, Caygill is able to bring forward previously neglected texts on inscription and the visual field and to cast many of his more familiar texts, for instance the Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction in a new light.

The Wisdom of Love (Texts and Contexts)

Alain Finkielkraut

Amazon Price: $16.95 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of Nebraska Press Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $3.77

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Relationships -> Interpersonal Relations
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

The Wisdom of Love examines the seemingly contradictory claims of universalism and partisanship for the ethnic or racial Other. In discussions of topics ranging from the work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas to the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s to the contending positions of Right and Left in the recent culture wars in Europe and the Americas, Finkielkraut cautions against both an unreflective universalism and an equally inflexible advocacy of the Other. He argues instead that genuine respect for the Other is inseparable from calls for universal justice and equality. Rather than being opposites, otherness and universalism are, for Finkielkraut, inextricably bound to one another.

Economic Justice: Private Rights and Public Responsibilities : An Amintaphil Volume

Kenneth Kipnis

List Price: $48.25 By: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $26.12

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Theory
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Popular Economics -> General
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Popular Economics -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

Twenty distinguished philosophers and social theorists have contributed original papers to this stimulating investigation into the nature of the economically just society. Collectively, and in a remarkably coherent fashion, these papers set out the problems of contemporary social theory within the context of the distributive justice vs. property rights debate initiated by the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick.

Vision of the Future

Mortimer J. Adler

List Price: $14.38 By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 46 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> General
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Political