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Catastrophe And Philosophy
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Book Synopsis Catastrophe and Philosophy by : David J. Rosner
Download or read book Catastrophe and Philosophy written by David J. Rosner and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a different approach to the history of philosophy, exploring a neglected theme, the relationship between catastrophe and philosophy. The book analyzes this theme within texts from ancient times to the present, from a global perspective. The book’s focus is timely and relevant today, as the planet is certainly facing a number of impending catastrophes right now, e.g., environmental degradation, overpopulation, the threat of nuclear war, etc.
Book Synopsis Ethics for a Broken World by : Tim Mulgan
Download or read book Ethics for a Broken World written by Tim Mulgan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine living in the future in a world already damaged by humankind, a world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs and where a chaotic climate makes life precarious. Then imagine looking back into the past, back to our own time and assessing the ethics of the early twenty-first century. "Ethics for a Broken World" imagines how the future might judge us and how living in a time of global environmental degradation might utterly reshape the politics and ethics of the future. This book is presented as a series of history of philosophy lectures given in the future, studying the classic texts from a past age of affluence, our own time. The central ethical questions of our time are shown to look very different from the perspective of a ruined world. The aim of "Ethics for a Broken" World is to look at our present with the benefit of hindsight - to reimagine contemporary philosophy in an historical context - and to highlight the contingency of our own moral and political ideals.
Book Synopsis Catastrophe and Redemption by : Jessica Whyte
Download or read book Catastrophe and Redemption written by Jessica Whyte and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been "biopolitics" since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben's thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.
Download or read book After Fukushima written by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned philosopher offers “a powerful reflection on our times . . . and the fate of our civilization, as revealed by the catastrophe of Fukushima” (François Raffoul, Louisiana State University). In 2011, a tsunami flooded Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear meltdowns, the effects of which will spread through generations and have an impact on all living things. In After Fukushima, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy examines the nature of catastrophes in the era of globalization and technology. He argues that in today’s interconnected world, the effects of any disaster will spread in the way we currently associate only with nuclear risk. Can a catastrophe be an isolated occurrence? Is there such a thing as a “natural” catastrophe when all of our technologies—nuclear energy, power supply, water supply—are necessarily implicated, drawing together the biological, social, economic, and political? In this provocative and engaging work, Nancy examines these questions and more. Exclusive to this English edition are two interviews with Nancy conducted by Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Yuji Nishiyama and Yotetsu Tonaki.
Download or read book On Jean Améry written by Magdalena Żółkoś and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Jean Am ry provides a comprehensive discussion of one of the most challenging and complex post-Holocaust thinkers, Jean Am ry (1912-1978), a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. In the English-speaking world Am ry is known for his poignant publication, At the Mind's Limits, a narrative of exile, dispossession, torture, and Auschwitz. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in Am ry's writings on victimization and resentment, partly attributable to a modern fascination with tolerance, historical injustice, and reconciliatory ambitions. Many aspects of Am ry's writing have remained largely unexplored outside the realm of European scholarship, and his legacy in English-language scholarship limited to discussions of victimization and memory. This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Am ry. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Am ry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness. What emerges from the pages of this book is an image of Am ry as a difficult and perplexing-yet exceptionally engaging-thinker, whose writings address some of the central paradoxes of survivorship and witnessing. The intellectual and ethical questions of Am ry's philosophies are equally pertinent today as they were half-century ago: How one can reconcile with the irreconcilable? How can one account for the unaccountable? And, how can one live after catastrophe?
Book Synopsis Calamity Theory by : Joshua Schuster
Download or read book Calamity Theory written by Joshua Schuster and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse? A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical human extinction event in the near or distant future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent artificial intelligence, deploying a curious mix of utilitarian ethics, statistical risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all extinction scenarios. The proponents of existential risk thinking, led by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, have seen their work gain immense popularity, attracting endorsement from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, millions of dollars, and millions of views. Calamity Theory is the first book to examine the rise of this thinking and its failures to acknowledge the ways some communities and lifeways are more at risk than others and what it implies about human extinction. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Book Synopsis The Democracy of Suffering by : Todd Dufresne
Download or read book The Democracy of Suffering written by Todd Dufresne and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Democracy of Suffering philosopher Todd Dufresne provides a strikingly original exploration of the past, present, and future of this epoch, the Anthropocene, demonstrating how the twin crises of reason and capital have dramatically remade the essential conditions for life itself. Images, cartoons, artworks, and quotes pulled from literary and popular culture supplement this engaging and unorthodox look into where we stand amidst the ravages of climate change and capitalist economics. With humour, passion, and erudition, Dufresne diagnoses a frightening new reality and proposes a way forward, arguing that our serial experiences of catastrophic climate change herald an intellectual and moral awakening - one that lays the groundwork, albeit at the last possible moment, for a future beyond individualism, hate, and greed. That future is unapologetically collective. It begins with a shift in human consciousness, with philosophy in its broadest sense, and extends to a reengagement with our greatest ideals of economic, social, and political justice for all. But this collective future, Dufresne argues, is either now or never. Uncovering how we got into this mess and how, if at all, we get out of it, The Democracy of Suffering is a flicker of light, or perhaps a scream, in the face of human extinction and the end of civilization.
Book Synopsis Averting Catastrophe by : Cass R. Sunstein
Download or read book Averting Catastrophe written by Cass R. Sunstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible? Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the “maximin rule,” which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of “Knightian uncertainty,” found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. Sunstein brings foundational issues in decision theory in close contact with real problems in regulation, law, and daily life, and considers other potential future risks. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.
Book Synopsis How to Think About Catastrophe by : Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Download or read book How to Think About Catastrophe written by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last century humanity acquired the ability to destroy itself. The direct approach to destruction can be seen in such facts as the ever-present threat of nuclear war, but we have also developed the capacity to do indirect harm by altering conditions necessary for survival, including the looming cloud of climate change. How can we look forward and work past the dire position we now find ourselves in to achieve a sustainable future? This volume presents a new way of thinking about the future as it examines catastrophe and the human response. It examines different kinds of catastrophes that range from natural (e.g., earthquakes) to industrial (e.g., Chernobyl) and concludes that the traditional distinctions between them are only becoming blurrier by the day. This book aims to build a general theory of catastrophes—a new form of apocalyptic thinking that is grounded in science and philosophy. An ethics for the sake of the future is what is required, which in turn necessitates a new metaphysics of temporality. If a way out of the imminent danger in which we find ourselves is to be found, we must first look to radically alter our ethics.
Book Synopsis Tickle Your Catastrophe! by : Frederik Le Roy
Download or read book Tickle Your Catastrophe! written by Frederik Le Roy and published by Academia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that takes stock of the current impact of the image and imagination of the catastrophe in art, science and philosophy
Book Synopsis From Communism to Capitalism by : Michel Henry
Download or read book From Communism to Capitalism written by Michel Henry and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both a unique witness of transformative events in the late 20th century, and a prescient analysis of our present economic crises from a major French philosopher, Michel Henry's From Communism to Capitalism adds an important economic dimension to his earlier social critique. It begins by tracing the collapse of communist regimes back to their failure to implement Marx's original insights into the irreplaceable value of the living individual. Henry goes on to apply this same criticism to the surviving capitalist economic systems, portending their eventual and inevitable collapse. The influence of Michel Henry's radical revision of phenomenological thought is only now beginning to be felt in full force, and this edition is the first English translation of his major engagement with socio-economic questions. From Communism to Capitalism reinterprets politics and economics in light of the failure of socialism and the pervasiveness of global capitalism, and Henry subjects both to critique on the basis of his own philosophy of life. His notion of the individual is one that, as subjective affect, subtends both Marxist collectivism and liberalism simultaneously. In addition to providing a crucial economic elaboration of Henry's influential social critiques, this work provides a context for understanding the 2008 financial shock and offers important insights into the political motivations behind the 'Arab spring'.
Book Synopsis Heidegger and Marcuse by : Andrew Feenberg
Download or read book Heidegger and Marcuse written by Andrew Feenberg and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book The Precipice written by Toby Ord and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker
Download or read book Catastrophe written by David Keys and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2000-10-02 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Crops failed in Asia and the Middle East as global weather patterns radically altered. Bubonic plague, exploding out of Africa, wiped out entire populations in Europe. Flood and drought brought ancient cultures to the brink of collapse. In a matter of decades, the old order died and a new world—essentially the modern world as we know it today—began to emerge. In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago. The Roman Empire, the greatest power in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, lost half its territory in the century following the catastrophe. During the exact same period, the ancient southern Chinese state, weakened by economic turmoil, succumbed to invaders from the north, and a single unified China was born. Meanwhile, as restless tribes swept down from the central Asian steppes, a new religion known as Islam spread through the Middle East. As Keys demonstrates with compelling originality and authoritative research, these were not isolated upheavals but linked events arising from the same cause and rippling around the world like an enormous tidal wave. Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland. In the book's final chapters, Keys delves into the mystery at the heart of this global catastrophe: Why did it happen? The answer, at once surprising and definitive, holds chilling implications for our own precarious geopolitical future. Wide-ranging in its scholarship, written with flair and passion, filled with original insights, Catastrophe is a superb synthesis of history, science, and cultural interpretation.
Book Synopsis Catastrophizing by : Gerard Passannante
Download or read book Catastrophizing written by Gerard Passannante and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.
Book Synopsis In the Shadow of Catastrophe by : Anson Rabinbach
Download or read book In the Shadow of Catastrophe written by Anson Rabinbach and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time. Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known Critique of the German Intelligentsia, Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought.
Book Synopsis Spinal Catastrophism by : Thomas Moynihan
Download or read book Spinal Catastrophism written by Thomas Moynihan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and “organic memory” that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from “railway spine” to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.
