Movements Books - Page 6

The Animal That Therefore I Am (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Jacques Derrida

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Editorial Review:

The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida’s ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled “The Autobiographical Animal,” the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session.The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida’s work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction—dating from Descartes—between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single “the animal.” Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses tothe question in the work of each of them.The book’s autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida’s experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of “man’s dominion over the beasts” and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of “life” to which he returned in much of his later work.

The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Howard Bloom

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Total reviews: 140 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Overrated but interesting 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The general themes and ideas presented in this book are interesting: That we are all part of a competitive social superorganism driven by memetic transmission. However, I find his understanding of certain concepts (e.g. stress, religion, philosophy) to be extremely limited.

So while I found the book to be thought provoking, it was hard to overlook the cherry-picking of factual "evidence" and limited understanding of important concepts (see above).

Editorial Review:

The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that "evil" is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric. "An act of astonishing intellectual courage." -- Leon Uris; "Destined to be the Future Shock of our time." -- Spin; "A revolutionary vision of the relationship between psychology and history, The Lucifer Principle will have a profound impact on our concepts of human nature. It is astonishing that a book of such importance could be such a pleasure to read." -- Elizabeth F. Loftus, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington, and author of Memory and Eyewitness Testimony.

Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition

Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. M. Anscombe, Elizabeth Anscombe

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

3 stars only for 50th Anniversary edition 3 out of 5 stars.
58 of 59 people found this review helpful.

Just a few comments on this 50th anniversary--supposedly FINAL--edition of the translation:
1) After 50 years Anscombe STILL did not fix the snafu in section 412 where she forgot to translate a parenthetical. She was informed of this in the 1950's!
2) To change the translation of "Lebensform" from "form of life" to "life-form" after all these years is unnecessary and stupid. It rings too much of biology and Star Trek.
3) To change the pagination, by which all references to Part II and inserts to Part I have been made for 50 years, is an unnecessary bother.
4) The translation has NEWLY-INTRODUCED typos in sections 38, 41, 47, and then I stopped counting. How is this an improvement?
Please bring the older editions back in print!

Editorial Review:

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations presents his own distillation of two decades of intense work on the philosophies of mind, language and meaning. When first published in 1953, it immediately entered the centre of philosophical debate, and achieved a classic status it has retained ever since.

This revised German–English edition is published on the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death. It incorporates final revisions by G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001) to her original English translation.

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Difference and Repetition

Gilles Deleuze

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Deleuze wasn't messing around here, seriously. 5 out of 5 stars.
42 of 47 people found this review helpful.

Many people consider this to be the cornerstone of Deleuze's body of work, and in many ways it is. In many ways it is also invaluable, and perhaps the most significant piece of philosophy to emerge in the last half-century (though I don't think so, but I also don't think we're ready for this book yet, so I await Deleuze's Kojeve eagerly). Difference and Repetition is a front to back masterpiece, and on every page Deleuze's colossal creative genius is on full display. But, that doesn't mean you'll like it--in fact, I bet you (in your heart of hearts) won't. And I'm not challenging anyone--I don't even like it. Even stronger: I can't really fathom how it is POSSIBLE to like it. Let me tell you why, if you haven't already tried the beast a few times (in which case you know already).
D&R runs at a pace and a level of sophistication that perhaps no one in the world besides Deleuze himself could completely follow. It is assumed that not only are you familiar with the ins and outs of some of the most obscure aspects of people like Kant, Leibniz, and Bergson--but that you also be familiar with Deleuze's take on those aspects (which I just dont see how you could grasp in any way but superficially from this book). It's also assumed that you have experience in differential calculus and its theoretical underpinnings (granted mostly from Leibniz and Structuralism, but come on, who can really explain what a "singular point" is without it?). And to top all of that off, it is, very apparently (I won't say really) unwieldy and circulates between all of the above mentioned and more and much more in the snap of a finger. No doubt part of the book's affect and greatness, but, no doubt, more than part of the reason why no one can (under)stand it.
I'm not kidding when I say this: D&R is indisputably the most difficult piece of philosophy I've ever read. It will run off 15-20 dense pages at a time that are not just prolix and turgid, but sometimes senselessly so. Yeah, you wrestle with it about three or four times, you have your moments of lucidity, little chunks here and there that are admittedly shining examples of what sort of a writer Deleuze was and would become. But I repeat: you think Kant, Heidegger, Whitehead, Derrida, Jameson, and Hegel are difficult? I swear before everything holy and unholy this book that you might buy today is infinitely more difficult than anything any of them ever wrote.
But don't take my word for it. Try it, and be honest with yourself. Don't just get it so you can say "oh, come on, it's not that bad." Try and explain it, try and give accounts for your explanations, try and tie it all together, or not. Until I see a lucid exposition of this book (like Holland's for AO), I refuse to believe that anyone really likes it or understands its SPIRIT (not of course the letter, which anyone can get, and parrot). Yet--undoubtedly worth every minute of your time. Such is the enigma of Deleuze...

Editorial Review:

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers,Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts--pure difference and complex repetition--and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud, Difference and Repetition moves deftly to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics.

Critique of Pure Reason (Philosophical Classics)

Immanuel Kant

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A foundation stone of modern philosophy 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 21 people found this review helpful.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.

Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.

Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.

Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.

Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.

Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.

As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.

Editorial Review:

One of the cornerstone books of Western philosophy, here is Kant's seminal treatise, where he seeks to define the nature of reason itself and builds his own unique system of philosophical thought with an approach known as transcendental idealism. He argues that human knowledge is limited by the capacity for perception.

Memory, History, Forgetting

Paul Ricoeur

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Editorial Review:

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.

“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal 

“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

The Age of Reason

Thomas Paine

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Total reviews: 113 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Paine defended God's reputation 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Given the vitriol with which Christians have denounced Thomas Paine for more than 200 years, one may be under the impression, as I was, that he was an atheist. He was generally denounced as such, and Theodore Roosevelt's reference to him as a "filthy little atheist" was not atypical. But upon actually reading this famous tome of his, I discovered he was in fact a devout man of God. It was only Christianity and other organized religions he had a problem with, and he explains why.

Paine was a creationist who believed nature is God's primary revelation of himself to humankind. In this revelation are all the tools we need, to understand, to behave, to treat others with respect and kindness, to stand in awe of the creator and worship him. Thomas Paine did not appreciate anyone belittling God by suggesting he behaved as "revealed" in those old writings of men who did dastardly things and then justified their behaviors by claiming God told them to do it! Paine could see that the biblical God was created by men the same way they created all the other pagan gods of the day. (Christianity was not the first to have a virgin birth, resurrections and blood sacrifices.)

With no written description of God, and only the creation to go on, Paine was in the uncommon position of actually having to think for himself about what God must be like, what he expects of us, how we should behave. Thinking is work, but like most work, it can be invigorating and rewarding--written descriptions are severely limiting, confined to the words used, while one's imagination is limitless. (Similarly, the more literally one takes something, the more limited its application.) Paine loved observing and imagining what God must be like; he wasn't limited to the feeble, misguided words of ancients.

Those of us conditioned to getting our description of God through written material might at first think Paine to be at a great disadvantage. How silly, we are tempted to think, to imagine our understanding of God could be complete merely by looking around us. How could we possibly figure out that God wants us to have slaves, keep the Ten Commandments, offer sacrifices, flatter him more on Sunday (or is it Saturday?) and burn witches--all merely by observing nature? Then it dawns on us, and wow! If we believe God is good, then without these writings our imagination about his goodness is limitless. Throughout our lives, no matter how much we mature and grow in understanding, at any given moment we push the limits of God's goodness to the extremes of our imagination--never fully comprehending it, only approaching it. We are filled with awe and we are drawn to emulate that goodness. How silly all this stuff about a touchy biblical god who throws his weight around killing people at the drop of a pin if they don't offer the right sacrifice begins to look!

Thus Thomas Paine was offended by the pettiness and absurdities of man-made religion. By observing God directly, he did not find himself in the awkward position of having to create excuses for God's supposed evil behaviors, his weird pagan-like fascination with blood sacrifices, his horrible temper or his morbid fascination with punishment--like stoning unruly kids to death, striking people dead for small infractions and imposing the death the penalty for every human being's mistakes, misdeeds or mere failures to flatter him (to say nothing of torturing them to death by endless fire). Paine wasn't saddled with the burden of explaining why the deity he worships doesn't want women in pulpits or gays in love. He's not stuck with having to defend fantastic promises that are (let's be honest) never kept, and prophecies never really fulfilled. Ironically, the only thing he ever had to defend was God's reputation--which Bible writers had dragged through the mud by attributing their own wicked pursuits to God.

Paine's respect and adoration for God was pure, unadulterated by human contraption. In other words, he worshipped God without all the baggage. And all the while, Christians called him an atheist for not helping them carry theirs.

It's worth noting that Thomas Paine's contemplation of God was not some kind of nebulous feel-good meditation. He was moved to action. In addition to defending God's reputation, Paine personally worked to end slavery, particularly with his 1775 essay, "African Slavery in America." That makes Paine a better person than the biblical God, and not by a little; I mean, God isn't even neutral on slavery, he encourages it (emphatically and repeatedly, according to the Bible). And, of course, while Paine worked to end slavery, his biggest obstacle was Christians who defended the practice on clear biblical grounds. They got their understanding of God through a written description, while Paine got an entirely different understanding of God merely by contemplating God's real revelation, the creation.

Would Paine still believe in God today? Who knows? When he died, Charles Darwin was but a four-month-old baby. In that day, there simply was no plausible explanation for the origin of species.* Nearly everyone, including Paine, chalked it all up to God--the source of all things existing. Things of mystery have always been affairs of the gods.

*(It is a common misconception among Christians that evolution attempts to explain the origin of life, but it does not.)

But for the fact that Paine was not an atheist, one might consider The Age of Reason a foreshadowing of today's popular works by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others. They and Paine all easily demonstrate how the writings that eventually got voted into the canon that is our present-day Bible could not possibly be a revelation from God. But unlike the others, Paine's purpose was to defend God, not doubt his existence.

This book affords an additional plus. We get a fascinating glimpse of Paine's life and times in the 18th century, 200+ years ago. I was especially interested in his arrest over the nature of his writings. And while this review is an overview, Paine's meticulous tribute to "the age of reason" is a thing of real substance--you'll find detailed arguments not routinely employed by today's writers. You'll also get a more balanced view of deism than we usually get from Christians, who typically misrepresent it as a message of gloom and doom (God created us and then just "abandoned" us). The founding fathers of the United States were more deist than anything else, and thus not Christian, contrary to popular belief.

Editorial Review:

Thomas Paine is a seminal figure in American History. An Englishman by birth, Paine immigrated to America in 1774 where he quickly took up the cause of the independence of the American colonies from England. His famous work "Common Sense" helped to gain great public support for the American Revolution and firmly established him as a central figure among the founding fathers. In "The Age of Reason" Paine turns his attention to a philosophical examination of Christianity. Within the work Paine lays the foundation of his Secularist Deist philosophy, which greatly influenced many of the founding fathers and the writing of the constitutional law of the United States of America.

Pathology: Implications for the Physical Therapist

Catherine Cavallaro Goodman, William G. Boissonnault

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great book for a student going into PT! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have read about 5 chapters of this book so far. I am extremely happy with the text, the authors give a good description about the various pathologies throughout the chapters and also give a section after a topic on how to apply the information listed to physical therapy. I am sure this will be a book that is frequently visited to refreshen my memory on a specific disease/illness and will rarely collect dust.

Pathology: Implications for the Physical Therapist 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The book came in perfect condition and was exactly as I ordered it. I received it in a decent amount of time, and have good experience with my orders on Amazon.

Very in depth book 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I purchased this book for my PTA program for Penn State early before the fall semester. I started reading this in early June and the book goes clearly in depth into potentially all Pathological conditions you can encounter in a PT clinic.

Excellent book, a bit wordy and a little more along the doctoral level than PTA level, but great nonetheless.

Editorial Review:

B. Saunders. Univ. of Montana, Missoula. Text on clinical pathology as it relates to practice. By a Brandon/Hill author. For the student and therapist. Two-color illustrations. Extensively referenced. 5 U.S. contributors. DNLM: Pathology.