"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
The occasion for this work was provided by the recent Marxist-Leninist philosophic pUblications on problems involving the term 'information' and by the extensive discussions of ideas originating in cybernetics. Thus, the issues are quite recent, which explains some peculiarities of our ap proach. Our main effort has been toward the clarification and systematiza tion of questions on information, which arise in the context of cybernetics. Where basic questions are involved, one is brought back to traditional issues as is often the case when dealing with a novel subject. Stress on questions drawn from physics is due to the author's professional involve ment in this field. This work was written under the direction of Professor J.M. Bochenski, principally in the context of a special program at the Institute of East European Studies of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland); a program carried out by Professor Bochenski with the collaboration of Dr. S. Muller-Markus. Participation in the special program was made possible by a grant from the West German 'Innenministerium'. Completion of the work was subsidized by the Bundesinstitut fUr ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien in Cologne. Our thanks go to these persons and organisations, who are in no way responsible for the content of the work. Givisiez, May 1967 TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Although we have made use of the works of Cherry and MacKay, cited in the bibliography, our translation of many terms may still seem some what arbitrary to some readers. The explanation for this is threefold.
In Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism Levant and Oittinen provide a window into the subterranean tradition of ‘creative’ Soviet Marxism, which developed on the margins of the Soviet academe and remains largely outside the orbit of contemporary theory in the West. With his ‘activity approach’, E.V. Ilyenkov, its principal figure in the post-Stalin period, makes a substantial contribution toward an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject, which should be of interest to contemporary theorists who seek to avoid economic and cultural reductionism as well as the malaise of postmodern relativism. This volume features Levant’s translation of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal (2009), which remained unpublished until thirty years after the author’s tragic suicide in 1979. Contributors include: Evald Ilyenkov, Tarja Knuuttila, Alex Levant, Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen, Paula Rauhala, and Birger Siebert.
Tests the views and metaphor of 19th-century utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick against a variety of contemporary views on ethics, determining that they are defensible and thus providing a defense of objectivism in ethics and of hedonistic utilitarianism.