Author: David Alderson
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780745336190
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The restoration of humanism to the radical left
Author: Christopher Britt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2021-05-24
Total Pages: 168
ISBN-13: 3030731065
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. The modern intellectual--who had once been associated with humanism and enlightenment—has in our day been replaced by media stars, talking heads, and technical experts. At issue is the ongoing crisis of democracy, under the aegis of the société du spectacle and its vast networks of politically-induced idiocy, industrially-produced biocide, and militarily-provoked genocide. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum with electronic technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. This postmodern tyranny reduces intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models of inquiry, while increasing the segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence; it also accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition.
Author: Guy Stevenson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2020-10-21
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 3030477606
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of icons in the counterculture – the controversial sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its centre: between romantic optimism and modernist pessimism; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, Stevenson argues, help explain the cultural and political worlds these writers shaped – in their time and beyond.
Author: Graham Good
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 128
ISBN-13: 0773521860
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In Humanism Betrayed Graham Good offers a defence of liberal humanism against the illiberal trends, political and intellectual, that dominate today's university. He uses the McEwen Report episode at the University of British Columbia to illustrate the current political climate in universities, showing how due process was neglected in favour of ideological inquisition.
Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-04-19
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 1107377943
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Stanley Fish, one of the foremost critics of literature working today, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Milton. This book brings together his finest published work with brand new material on Milton and on other authors and topics in early modern literature. In his analyses of Renaissance texts, he meditates on the interpretive problems that confront readers and offers a sustained critique of historicist methods of interpretation. Intention, he argues, is key to understanding which pieces of historical data are relevant to literary criticism. Lucid, provocative, direct and inimitable, this new book from Stanley Fish is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Milton and early modern literary studies.
Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-09-11
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1134832834
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Martin Heidegger's impact on contemporary thought is important and controversial. However in France, the influence of this German philosopher is such that contemporary French thought cannot be properly understood without reference to Heidegger and his extraordinary influence. Tom Rockmore examines the reception of Heidegger's thought in France. He argues that in the period after the Second World War, due to the peculiar nature of the humanist French Philosophical tradition, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, he contends that this reception - first as philosophical anthropology and later as postmetaphysical humanism - is systematically mistaken.
Author: Harrison Fluss
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2022-02-01
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 1839980206
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Prometheus and Gaia examines the ideological positions of Futurism and Eco-Pessimism. While these are rarely spoken about in mainstream discourse, they do have strong resonances in today’s popular politics and culture. In light of existential threats posed by climate change, disruptive technologies and economic crises, many have grown weary of the “small fixes” offered by mainstream policy-makers. Radical change thus appears necessary, as Futurism and Eco-Pessimism emerge as two fundamental challenges to the status quo. The Futurist claims that the current dynamism of technology is incompatible with human limitations, while the Eco-Pessimist sees the climate crisis as symptomatic of a broader human domination over nature. What these seemingly opposite currents have in common is a shared rejection of the human frame as grounding politics; each seeks to subordinate the human in favor of a wholly alien other, either in the form of an anarchic nature or a dynamic technology. To transcend this strange coincidence of opposites, Prometheus and Gaia makes the positive case for a humanism that is rationalist without being anthropocentric.
Author: Andi Zimmerman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-02-15
Total Pages: 375
ISBN-13: 0226983463
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there, Andrew Zimmerman argues, that the battle lines of today's "culture wars" were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge. Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of "freak shows," Zimmerman demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies. Scholars of anthropology, European and intellectual history, museum studies, the history of science, popular culture, and colonial studies will welcome this book.
Author: Tony Davies
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-03-28
Total Pages: 177
ISBN-13: 1134104340
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Tony Davies offers students a clear, introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of concepts.