This book offers a copious selection of insights about the world and life, crafted in engaging language by Jewish sages, scholars, rabbis, and literary luminaries, from ancient to modern times. These remarkable explanations, queries, and proposals are connected by expository comments and comparisons by the author. The passionate care for human values which underlies much of Jewish thinking is made accessible in this comprehensive work. In it the reader may find counsel on how to achieve a good and satisfying life while responding to the joys and sorrows that touch us all.
This book offers a copious selection of insights about the world and life, crafted in engaging language by Jewish sages, scholars, rabbis, and literary luminaries, from ancient to modern times. These remarkable explanations, queries, and proposals are connected by expository comments and comparisons by the author. The passionate care for human values which underlies much of Jewish thinking is made accessible in this comprehensive work. In it the reader may find counsel on how to achieve a good and satisfying life while responding to the joys and sorrows that touch us all.
From the Eye of the Storm: Regional Conflicts and the Philosophy of Peace presents to the reader a cross section of an emerging field of study: the philosophy of peace. The editors bring together articles that explore the philosophic implications of many recent regional conflicts. Reflecting the diversity and vitality and any new field of study, this volume contains five sections: Conceptual Foundations; America's Homefront; Desert Storm Assessments; Jihad, Intifada, and Other Mideast Concerns; and Latin American Issues. The topics of the articles include war, militarism, patriotism, nationalism, nonviolence, conscientious objection, feminist peace, the media, the ethics of the Gulf War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Islamic pacifism, and Latin American resistance. A concluding postscript assesses prospects for achieving peace and change within our fast changing international scene. This volume has an extensive bibliography of writings concerning peace and conflict and is suited to professional and student audiences.
This book discusses Process Pragmatism, the view that whatever is, derives from interactions. The contributors examine and defend its merits by focusing on major topics, including truth, the existence of unobservables, the origin of knowledge, scientific activity, mathematical functions, laws of nature, and moral agency.
This book philosophically discusses the educational challenges of dwelling poetically, which, according to Martin Heidegger, means learning from great poems how to live a worthy life and relate authentically to beings and to Being. The gifts of great poetry are carefully described and concrete approaches are presented that the educator can adopt.
This book extends the study of homelessness beyond the need of shelter. Philosophical exploration exposes the fragility of human fulfillment in contemporary society. The authors weave the moral fabric of what it means to be human. They show how economic and political values compromise the dignity of homeless persons. They argue for recognition of rights for the homeless, who otherwise would be voiceless and without membership in the moral community. This pioneering contribution instills our moral sensitivity to the homeless condition and justifies our moral responsibility to change that condition.
This book is a study of the theory of legal interpretation that underlies the legal systems of Europe, England, and the United States. The principles of interpretive jurisprudence are traced through Greek and Latin philosophers and legal theorists and Renaissance Italian glossators and commentators. In addressing human nature, these principles have a self-sustaining logical integrity. They are defensible as a worthy tradition of legal respect for the value of the individual.
Ugo Spirito's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is the intellectual autobiography of one of the most original and anticonformist contemporary Italian philosophers. In it, Spirito makes an evaluation of his long career (spanning from the decade of the 20's to that of the 70's of the twentieth century) as a thinker who was never satisfied with any theoretical or philosophical system, while constantly aiming at finding a definitive truth: the “incontrovertible” or absolute. The various stages of his search deal with different philosophical and scientific systems - from positivism to actual idealism, from problematicism to omnicentrism, from scientism to neoproblematicism - revealing at the same time an inherent antinomic procedure that does not permit him to take any truth for granted. At the end of his life, Spirito realized that he could only be sure of his present state of “unawareness,” thus challenging the validity of his lifelong investigative activity. “Man cannot know himself,” Spirito wrote. Confronted with the manifestations of life and universe, he could not help but feel a sense of “surprise and astonishment.” Throughout his life, he was only a spectator of his destiny, not the conscious creator of it, as he believed in the early stage of his career. Consequently, he reached a position of negating any value system, bordering on skepticism and nihilism. Within this context, he offered a post-modern interpretation of life. This interpretation was also Spirito's conclusion, and as such, implied a rethinking about other faiths, both political and ideological, that for more than fifty years would develop parallel to philosophical faith. Consequently, he revisited some of the most important philosophical and political personalities who interpreted or materialized those faiths, from Benedetto Croce to Gentile, from Benito Mussolini to Giovanni Bottai, from Togliatti to Pope Paul VI. Spirito was not a thinker who remained secluded within the ivory tower of pure investigation, but in an effort to modify society according to principle of the identification of philosophy with life, he tried to act upon it by following thoughts with action. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is divided in two parts: one purely autobiographical and theoretical, and the other more historical, where Spirito narrates his relationship with the above-mentioned personalities, as a way of testing the validity of his beliefs. Indeed, one can perceive his moment of adherence to each of the different approaches expounded, only to subsequently detach himself from them. For the English-speaking reader, the second part will appear more interesting and poignant, since Spirito's involvement with history foretells the intellectual fate of a nation. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is a reflection on life, in which personal history serves as a vehicle for judgment upon an entire century.
This book presents a creative approach to the problem of individual authenticity. What is authenticity? What are its necessary conditions? How is an authentic self possible in society? What are the relationships of authenticity, morality, and happiness? The book examines a wide range of questions in Eastern and Western thought, to which it gives novel answers.
This study of axiology explores the axiocentricity of being human. Human beings dwell in the realm of value. Values are not simply what persons have; values in large part are what persons are. The mystique of values is analyzed here in terms of their cultural, phenomenological, and ontological status. The relationship between science and values is debated. Values should not be submitted to reductionism. Postmodernism raises new problems for the future of a philosophy of values. Yet, we may direct our hopes toward happiness, universalism, and humanism as inseparable from value-life.
