Reason and Unreason
Reason and Unreason

Author: Michael Rustin

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 056706722X

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The justification and legitimacy of psychoanalytic knowledge and its relevance to social and political questions.

Bioethics in Cultural Contexts
Bioethics in Cultural Contexts

Author: Christoph Rehmann-Sutter

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-03-08

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1402042418

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CHRISTOPH REHMANN-SUTTER, MARCUS DÜWELL, DIETMAR MIETH When we placed “finitude”, “limits of human existence” as a motto over a round of discussion on biomedicine and bioethics (which led to this collection of essays) we did not know how far this would lead us into methodological quandaries. However, we felt intuitively that an interdisciplinary approach including social and cultural sciences would have an advantage over a solely disciplinary (philosophical or theological) analysis. Bioethics, if it is to have adequate discriminatory power, should include sensitivity to the cultural contexts of biomedicine, and also to the cultural contexts of bioethics itself. Context awareness, of course, is not foreign to philosophical or theological bioethics, for the simple reason that the issues tackled in the debates (as in other fields of ethics) could not be adequately understood outside their contexts. Moral issues are always accompanied by contexts. When we try to unpack them – which is necessary to make them accessible to ethical discussion – we are regularly confronted with the fact that in removing too much of the context we do not clarify an issue, but make it less comprehensible. The context – at least some essential parts of it – is intrinsic to the issue. Unpacking in ethics is therefore a different procedure. It does not mean peeling the context off, but rather identifying which contextual elements are essential for an understanding of the key moral aspects of the issue, and explaining how they establish its particular character.

Thinking about Society: Theory and Practice
Thinking about Society: Theory and Practice

Author: Ian Jarvie

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 9400954247

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I. C. Jarvie was trained as a social anthropologist in the center of British social anthropology - the London School of Economics, where Bronislaw Malinowski was the object of ancestor worship. Jarvie's doctorate was in philosophy, however, under the guidance of Karl Popper and John Watkins. He changed his department not as a defector but as a rebel, attempting to exorcize the ancestral spirit. He criticized the method of participant obser vation not as useless but as not comprehensive: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the making of certain contributions to anthropology; rather, it all depends on the problem-situation. And so Jarvie remained an anthro pologist at heart, who, in addition to some studies in rather conventional anthropological or sociological molds, also studied the tribe of social scien tists, but also critically examining their problems - especially their overall, rather philosophical problems, but not always so: a few of the studies in cluded in this volume exemplify his work on specific issues, whether of technology, or architecture, or nationalism in the academy, or moviemaking, or even movies exhibiting excessive sex and violence. These studies attract his attention both on account of their own merit and on account of their need for new and powerful research tools, such as those which he has forged in his own intellectual workshop over the last two decades.

Critical Theory and Economics
Critical Theory and Economics

Author: Robin Maialeh

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-23

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1000853373

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This book expands upon a range of economic insights within the overall context of critical theory, particularly with respect to the question of socioeconomic inequalities, and presents an explanation of how critical theory provides a number of interesting perspectives for economists. Economic agents, deliberately imprisoned in their instrumental rationality as a means to survive under competitive relationships, are microscopic constituents of systemic forces which exist beyond their will. Despite the subjective rationality of such agents in terms of formally logical transitivity and consistency, aggregate market distributional mechanisms also display non-rational patterns. The crucial aspect of the dynamics of this system consists of the paralysing effect of the high level of socioeconomic inequality, which is driven by a permanent struggle for self-preservation under competitive rules; it is a reminiscence of natural, uncivilised relationships that constituted the reproduction process of the whole. These reified agents thus become instruments of their socially constructed powers on the one hand, and objects of their existential conditionality on the other. Hence, the dialectical approach adopted by the author aims to uncover the way in which structurally genetic market forces govern individual behaviour, as well as how individual behaviour shapes these structurally genetic forces, which, together, form the transcending principles of unequal distribution. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the political economy, philosophy and the methodology of the social sciences, especially those concerned with inequality issues. This book includes a preface written by Professor Martin Jay.

Sociology (Routledge Revivals)
Sociology (Routledge Revivals)

Author: T. B. Bottomore

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1136968776

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First published in 1962, this seminal work is an introduction to sociology in a world context, and a sophisticated guide to the major themes, problems and controversies in contemporary sociology. The book remains unique in its organisation and presentation of sociological ideas and problems, in it s lack of insularity (its wide coverage of diverse types of society and of sociological thought from various cultural traditions), and in its systematic connection of sociology with the broad themes of modern social and political thought.