LITMIR.BIZ

This book offers an important new perspective on the Western tradition of musical aesthetics through an examination of Anicius Boethius and Immanuel Kant. Within the trajectory illuminated by these two thinkers, musical meaning is framed by and formed through the concept of beauty–a concept which is shaped by prior understandings about notions of the self and the world. Beauty opens up a space within which the boundary between the self and the world, subject and object, is negotiated and configured. In doing so, either the subject or the object is asserted to the detriment of the other, and to the physicality of music. This book asserts that the uniqueness of music's ontology emerges from its basis in sound and embodied practice. It suggests that musical beauty is generated by the mutuality of subject and object arising within the participation that music encourages, one which involves an ekstatic mode of attention on the part of the subject.

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–Has modern science made philosophy obsolete? –Is the soul real? –Do we have a free will? –Why should we be moral? –Does God exist, and if so, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? –What is the relation between faith and reason?
Ric Machuga takes a holistic approach to these questions. No philosophical idea, no matter how small, can live alone. Ideas always gain their force, power, and life from their surroundings–their «ecosystem.»
The ecosystem of ideas defended in this book comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and his medieval interpreter, Thomas Aquinas. The ongoing relevance of their philosophical thought to twenty-first century issues is opened up in fascinating ways.
Life, the Universe, and Everything is the product of thirty years of teaching introductory courses in philosophy. Assuming no prior background, it only requires of readers an enquiring mind and a willingness to think carefully. An ideal guide to the big questions we face.

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This book is a collection of nine articles by the twentieth century's leading medievalist, Etienne Gilson. A major participant in the revival of Thomistic philosophy, Gilson was a member of the French Academy and, after a university career culminating at the Sorbonne and the College de France, he turned down an invitation from Harvard University to become the guiding spirit of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto for several decades.
Several of the articles stand on their own as making a significant contribution to topics like St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. Likewise, «The Middle Ages and Naturalism» contrasts Renaissance Humanists and Reformers with the medievals on the defining issue of their attitude toward nature in order to understand who actually stands closer to the ancient Greeks.
All of the articles give an insight into the great synthetic visions articulated by the better-known works of Gilson like The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. We see Gilson's meticulous spadework for the broader theme of Christian philosophy in his examination of the Latin Averroist Boethius of Dacia's book on the eternity of the world. Gilson finds that Boethius never expresses the view attributed to Latin Averroism that there are contradictory truths in religion and philosophy, although he does think that Boethius is unsuccessful in his account of the relations between philosophy and theology.
The opening piece revisits a battle now won (and won in great measure by Gilson's efforts), namely the fight to acknowledge the very existence of medieval philosophy and win its place in the academic world. But the article also makes the effort–which becomes a connecting thread throughout the nine articles-to pinpoint the uniqueness of what Gilson calls Christian philosophy. The closing article studies the profound influence of the great Muslim thinker Avicenna on Latin Europe drawing a parallel between Avicenna's work and that of the great Christian medievals like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.
When Gilson died in 1978, a great deal of his work on the history of philosophy, and specifically God, the primacy of existence or esse over essence, and the impact of Christianity on philosophy had been translated. A significant amount of material, however, has not yet appeared in English. The publication of Medieval Studies represents a vital step in bringing these important works into the English-speaking world.

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What is truth? Philosophical explorations have merely presupposed truth, rather than define it. The inscrutable nature of truth is a recognition of human finitude, which is both Socratic (the recognition that one does not know) and non-Socratic (the recognition that truth has to be given from without). This opens the way to locating truth outside the individual, which can be appropriated only when the condition to recognize it is given. For Kierkegaard, the incarnation of Christ is the point when both revelation and the condition to recognize it, are given. However, incarnation, being historical, raises the question of objectivity and evidence. This book explores what truth implies for the individual and examines the value of historical research for Christian faith.

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The idea of «salvation» tends to be interpreted as an exclusively religious category. The author of this essay believes that philosophy, the quintessence of human thinking, possesses a salvific power, as it offers the possibility of broadening the horizons of humanity, leading us out of the oppressive limits of our «hic et nunc.» However, philosophical salvation needs to be found in time and space. The edification of a society based upon the ideal of solidarity, in which history may be meaningful for everyone, is its preeminent manifestation.

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The Perfection of Freedom seeks to respond to the impoverished conventional notion of freedom through a recovery of an understanding rich with possibilities yet all but forgotten in contemporary thought. This understanding, developed in different but complementary ways in the German thinkers Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, connects freedom, not exclusively with power and possibility, but rather most fundamentally with completion, wholeness, and actuality. What is unique here is specifically the interpretation of freedom in terms of form, whether it be aesthetic form (Schiller), organic form (Schelling), or social form (Hegel). Although this book presents serious criticisms of the three philosophers, it shows that they open up new avenues for reflection on the notion of freedom; avenues that promise to overcome many of the dichotomies that continue to haunt contemporary thought–for example, between freedom and order, freedom and nature, and self and other. The Perfection of Freedom offers not only a significantly new interpretation of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, it also proposes a modernity more organically rooted in the ancient and classical Christian worlds.

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How does biotechnology touch on human destiny? What are its promises and challenges? In search for a response, the present volume turns to the thought of Hans Jonas, one of the pioneers and founding fathers of bioethics. The continued relevance of his ideas is exemplified by the way Jurgen Habermas applies them to the current debate. The chief promise of biotechnology is to increase our freedom by overcoming the limits of the human condition. The main risk of biotechnology, as both Jonas and Habermas see it, is to diminish or outright abolish our capacity for responsibility and morality. It is argued that the greater freedom is not simply freedom from constraints but freedom for our destiny: the freedom to be the benevolent, responsible, and spontaneous authors of our lives, capable of communion and love. The touchstone for evaluating any biotechnological procedure has to be this greater freedom.

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"The totalitarian state clearly intends to eliminate all those forms of organic community that rival the absolute loyalty of the individual to the state. This god is a jealous god. . . . Mrowczyński-Van Allen's diagnosis is therefore no less relevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And his proposed cure is no less salutary. He appeals to the work of Grossman and other voices from the East to oppose the idolatry of the deified self with the icon, which opens up a distance in which giving and forgiving can occur. Eastern voices are so helpful because they refuse to quarantine theological questions; the borders between theology, politics, and literature are fluid and porous, because they are all a part of an integrated life. The holism of totalitarianism must be opposed by another kind of holism that replaces the idol with the icon. At the same time, the aspiration of secularism to separate politics from theology, and power from love, must be opposed by a politics based on an opening of human persons to God and to each other, the kind of self-donation found in Grossman, and for Christians, on the Cross."
–From the Foreword by William T. Cavanaugh

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The acclaimed, readable history of the Situationist International by the author of A Hacker Manifesto Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles. McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can.

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The role of sexual repression in class domination, and the struggle for sexual liberation. This volume contains the first complete translations of Wilhelm Reich’s writings from his Marxist period. Reich, who died in 1957, had a career with a single goal: to find ways of relieving human suffering. And the same curiosity and courage that led him from medical school to join the early pioneers of Freudian psychoanalysis, and then to some of the most controversial work of this century—his development of the theory of the orgone—led him also, at one period of his life, to become a radical socialist.The renewed interest in Reich’s Marxist writings, and particularly in his notions about sexual and political liberation, follows the radical critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon and Paul Goodman, the political protest movements toward personal liberation in the present decade.

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