Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’
Epic change: how to make ‘today’ a moment of vision
The French philosopher Michel Foucault spent his life engaging the present with a passion for epic change. Foucault was not a system-builder, but a philosopher of the present. No matter how abstract or erudite his topics of inquiry, he was fundamentally concerned with the changing world about him. Most philosophers start (if only implicitly) with a point of view on truth and the metaphysical nature of things. Foucault started with a situated vision on how things are changing today. Foucault would ask how he might contribute to these changes so that he too was changed by the experience. This was the point of doing philosophy, for Foucault: to learn to engage with change in such a way that one was transformed in the process.
Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry
Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgments. Yet, despite the important role intuitions play in philosophy, there has been little reflection on fundamental questions concerning the sort of data intuitions provide, how they are supposed to lead us to the truth, and why we should treat them as important. In addition, recent psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical inquiry. Rethinking Intuition brings together a distinguished group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these important issues. Students and scholars in both fields will find this book to be of great value.
Graphing the history of Philosophy
Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. The node and text are sized according to the number of connections (both in and out). The algorithm that visualises the graph also tends to put the better connected nodes in the centre of the diagram so we see the most influential philosophers, in large text, clustered in the centre. It all seems about right with the major figures in the western philosophical tradition taking the centre stage. A shortcoming however is that this evaluation only takes into account direct lines of influence. Indirect influence via another person in the network does not enter into it. This probably explains why Descartes is smaller than you’d think. It would also be better if the nodes were sized only by the number of outward connections although I think overall the differences would be slight. I’ll get round to that.
Thinking Through Thucydides
The ancient Greek historian Thucydides famously claimed that his work would be ‘a possession for all time’: not just the history of a single war between the Athenians and the Spartans, but a guide to the way that the world works, and especially to politics and war. He was right. Over the last two hundred years, Thucydides has been one of the most frequently quoted ancient writers. His ideas have influenced historians, politicians, international relations experts and soldiers; all agree that his work is useful and important.
Thucydides does not offer simple lessons, but a training course in analysis and deliberation. He demands that his readers follow his narrative of events and think about how things could have turned out differently; he asks them to listen to opposing arguments and to weigh up the issues – and then to think about how those arguments relate what actually happened. He shows how the world is complicated – and how we can make sense of that complexity. In brief, he aims to help his readers to develop the skills that every citizen of a democracy needs.
Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry
Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgments. Yet, despite the important role intuitions play in philosophy, there has been little reflection on fundamental questions concerning the sort of data intuitions provide, how they are supposed to lead us to the truth, and why we should treat them as important. In addition, recent psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical inquiry. Rethinking Intuition brings together a distinguished group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these important issues. Students and scholars in both fields will find this book to be of great value.
Life Changing – A Philosophical Guide
Timothy Rayner – Life Changing marks the end of a personal journey. For the past fifteen years, I have been studying, teaching, and applying transformative philosophy in my own life, first as a doctoral student at the University of Sydney, then as a lecturer at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales, and more recently in my Philosophy for Change course, which I’ve run at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney. My guiding intuition throughout has been that it is possible to distil from philosophical ideas a kernel of practical wisdom, and that this practical wisdom can be communicated through simple exercises that students can apply to their own lives.
This intuition is core to Life Changing. The book is structured about five practical exercises. Each incorporates a life-changing insight. The exercises show you how to muster the courage to change; how to control yourself like a Stoic philosopher; how to cultivate your Nietzschean will to power; and how to use Spinoza’s philosophy to supercharge your social life. They show you how to take adventure from the heart of crisis and fulfilment from the struggle with adversity.
What is philosophy and why should I care?
Philosophy is the love of wisdom. We associate philosophy with dry academic arguments and impenetrable books. But these are features of a professionalized academic tradition that has grown up within a competitive university environment. They are not features of philosophy itself. The fact is anyone can be a philosopher. Philosophy is associated with critical thinking; but critical thinking is not philosophy. Critical thinking is a set of strategies and techniques that philosophers have invented to help them get clear on things. Philosophy is what we do when we slow things down and take a good hard look at the meaning of it all. My definition of philosophy? In the end, philosophy is care. Philosophy is care for what exists and for existence itself. It hinges on a care for truth, meaning ‘the way that things really are’. Philosophy is a simple thing, really. To philosophize is to care for life.
The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change
Through network diagrams and sustained narrative, Randall Collins traces the development of philosophical thought in China, Japan, India, ancient Greece, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a general theory of intellectual life, one that avoids both the reduction of ideas to the influences of society at large and the purely contingent local construction of meanings. Instead, Collins focuses on the social locations where sophisticated ideas are formed: the patterns of intellectual networks and their inner divisions and conflicts. According to his theory, when the material bases of intellectual life shift with the rise and fall of religions, educational systems, and publishing markets, opportunities open for some networks to expand while others shrink and close down. It locates individuals — among them celebrated thinkers like Socrates, Aristotle, Chu Hsi, Shankara, Wirt Henstein, and Heidegger — within these networks and explains the emotional and symbolic processes that, by forming coalitions within the mind, ultimately bring about original and historically successful ideas.
Chaos, Territory, Art – Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
This paper is about the ontology, the materiality and logical structure of Art. While I am not trained in the visual arts or architecture, nonetheless I see there are many points of overlap, regions of co-occupation, that concern art and philosophy, and it is these shared concerns that I want to explore. I want to discuss the ‘origins’ of art and architecture, but not the historical, evolutionary or material origins of art – an origin confirmable by some kind of material evidence or research – but rather, the conceptual origins of art, what concepts art entails, assumes and elaborates. These of course are linked to historical, evolutionary and material forces, but are nevertheless conceptually, that is to say, metaphysically or ontologically separable from them. Art, according to Deleuze, does not produce concepts, though it does address problems and provocations. It produces sensations, affects, intensities, as its mode of addressing problems, which sometimes align with and link to concepts, the object of philosophical production, the way philosophy deals with problems. Thus philosophy may have a place, not in assessing art, but in addressing the same provocations or incitements to production as art faces, through different means and with different effects and consequences.
