In the history of philosophy, few topics are so relevant to today's cultural and political landscape as philosophy in the Islamic world. Yet, this remains one of the lesser-known philosophical traditions. In this Very Short Introduction, Peter Adamson explores the history of philosophy among Muslims, Jews, and Christians living in Islamic lands, from its historical background to thinkers in the twentieth century.Introducing the main philosophical themes of the Islamic world, Adamson integrates ideas from the Islamic and Abrahamic faiths to (...) consider the broad philosophical questions that continue to invite debate: What is the relationship between reason and religious belief? What is the possibility of proving God's existence? What is the nature of knowledge? Drawing on the most recent research in the field, this book challenges the assumption of the cultural decline of philosophy and science in the Islamic world by demonstrating its rich heritage and overlap with other faiths and philosophies. (shrink)

Peter Adamson offers an accessible, humorous tour through a period of eight hundred years when some of the most influential of all schools of thought were formed. He introduces us to Cynics and Skeptics, Epicureans and Stoics, emperors and slaves, and traces the development of early Christian philosophy and of ancient science. A major theme of the book is in fact the competition between pagan and Christian philosophy in this period, and the Jewish tradition appears in the shape of (...) Philo of Alexandria. Ancient science is also considered, with chapters on ancient medicine and the interaction between philosophy and astronomy. Considerable attention is paid also to the wider historical context, for instance by looking at the ascetic movement in Christianity and how it drew on ideas from Hellenic philosophy. From the counter-cultural witticisms of Diogenes the Cynic to the subtle skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, from the irreverent atheism of the Epicureans to the ambitious metaphysical speculation of Neoplatonism, from the ethical teachings of Marcus Aurelius to the political philosophy of Augustine, the book gathers together all aspects of later ancient thought in an accessible and entertaining way. (shrink)

Film and the Emotions explores the complicated relationship between filmed entertainment, such as movies and television shows, and our capacity to feel emotions. This volume of The Midwest Studies in Philosophy covers topics such as the role of imagination in our capacity to respond emotionally to films, how emotions felt in response to films relate to emotions felt about real events, and the moral implications of responding emotionally to fictions, among others. This collection includes nineteen original articles from experts on (...) film and emotion, including Noel Carroll, Gregory Currie, Susan Feagin, Stacie Friend, Robert Hopkins, Peter Lamarque and Peter Goldie, Derek Matravers, Carl Plantinga, and Murray Smith. (shrink)

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture revolutionized the understanding of modernism in architecture, pushing back the sense of its origin from the early twentieth century to the 1750s and thus placing architectural thought within the a broader context of Western intellectual history. This new edition of Peter Collins's ground-breaking study includes all seventy-two illustrations of the original hard cover edition, which has been out of print since 1967, and restores the large format.

Peter Adamson presents the first full history of philosophy in the Islamic world for a broad readership. He traces its development from early Islam to the 20th century, ranging from Spain to South Asia, featuring Jewish and Christian thinkers as well as Muslim. Major figures like Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides are covered in great detail, but the book also looks at less familiar thinkers, including women philosophers. Attention is also given to the philosophical relevance of Islamic theology and mysticism--the (...) Sufi tradition within Islam, and Kabbalah among Jews--and to science, with chapters on disciplines like optics and astronomy. The first part of the book looks at the blossoming of Islamic theology and responses to the Greek philosophical tradition in the world of Arabic learning, the second discusses philosophy in Muslim Spain, and a third section looks in unusual detail at later developments, touching on philosophy in the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid empires. (shrink)

Peter Adamson presents a lively introduction to six hundred years of European philosophy, from the beginning of the ninth century to the end of the fourteenth century. The medieval period is one of the richest in the history of philosophy, yet one of the least widely known. Adamson introduces us to some of the greatest thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition, including Peter Abelard, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Roger Bacon. And (...) the medieval period was notable for the emergence of great women thinkers, including Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. Original ideas and arguments were developed in every branch of philosophy during this period - not just philosophy of religion and theology, but metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, moral and political theory, psychology, and the foundations of mathematics and natural science. (shrink)

School leaders are optimally positioned to identify teachers who would make strong and inspiring administrators. Today's Teachers, Tomorrow's Leaders: A Guide to Identifying and Developing Future Administrators by Peter Marshall guides leaders on how to spot teachers with the potential to lead and how to model the skills and behaviors that will make them successful. Marshall describes ten Ways of Being of the impactful school leader and presents his Situational Leadership Model to help leaders identify teachers who exhibit strong (...) leadership qualities and to inspire them to take the leap. Thoroughly researched with real-life applications, Today's Teachers, Tomorrow's Leaders is a practical guide full of sample meeting planners, planning pages, and other useful resources to streamline the selection process. (shrink)

At once provocative and inspiring_, Against the Flow_ is a work of polemic from an internationally respected writer and thinker on arts education. Peter Abbs argues that contemporary education ignores the aesthetic and ethical as a result of being in thrall to such forces as the market economy and managerial and functional dictates. He identifies the present education system as being inimical to creativity and authentic learning and instead, narrowly focused on the quantitative measuring of results. This absence of (...) a creative and ethical dimension in education has implications for art making in wider society. Art is shown as emerging from, and appealing to, the ironic postmodernist sensibility and mass media-led culture, while being devoid of philosophical significance. This book opens up a fresh and timely debate about the vital power of creativity in modern education. Drawing on examples from modern poetry, literature and visual art, it is an eloquent and passionate argument for the need to develop ethical and aesthetic energies to confront the growing vacuity of contemporary culture. (shrink)

This book explores the political, economic, social, and environmental health relations and politics of the global tech and electronics industry. Peter Little argues that, in the digital age, we need greater synthesis of political ecology, ethnography, and technocapital critique.

The mystical and spiritual authors of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries provided rich inspiration for Kierkegaard's religious thought. Kierkegaard owned numerous works by these authors, who are associated with the spiritual traditions of Rheno‐Flemish mysticism, Devotio Moderna, post‐Tridentine and Baroque Catholicism, and Reformed Pietism. The accurate spiritual diagnostics and the apt methods of spiritual formation found in (Pseudo‐)Tauler, Theologia Deutsch, Abraham a Sancta Clara, and François Fénelon deeply impressed Kierkegaard. He adopted and further developed motifs from the mystical and spiritual (...) authors in a variety of his writings, and his journals contain abundant reflections on themes from Thomas à Kempis, Ludovicus Blosius, and Gerhard Tersteegen, such as the imitation of Christ, spiritual guidance, or divine pedagogy. The best testimony to the importance of spiritual literature for Kierkegaard is the fact that he sought counsel in it in a personal crisis when he was deciding on the future of his religious authorship. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an explication and defense of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of concept formation. I argue that at the core of this theory is a distinction between concepts proper and the kinds of generalities characteristic of perceptual experience, which I call “pre-conceptual generalities.” According to Merleau-Ponty, concepts are developed through a two-stage process: first, the establishment of such pre-conceptual generalities, and second, the clarification of these generalities into concepts. I provide phenomenological evidence for the existence of pre-conceptual generalities and (...) explain how they can serve to ground concept formation. To motivate Merleau-Ponty’s account, I consider objections raised by Husserl, Cassirer, and Sellars to the classical philosophical account of empirical concept formation, abstraction. I show that Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between concepts and pre-conceptual generalities provides a philosophically viable account of the formation of empirical concepts while avoiding the problems faced by accounts that rely on abstraction. (shrink)

Josif Hechter, die onder de naam Mihail Sebastian een bekende Roemeense schrijver en essayist werd, wilde zijn joodse achtergrond van zich afschudden en zich met hart en ziel aan de Roemeense cultuur wijden. Het altijd aanwezige, maar na 1925 steeds heviger wordende antisemitisme in zijn land maakte dit streven heel moeilijk. In zijn oorlogsdagboek, dat pas in de jaren tachtig gepubliceerd werd, is een schokkende getuigenis van de moordpartijen op joden, die door de Roemeense fascisten werden uitgevoerd.

In what follows, I argue that the semantic approach to scientific theories fails as a means to present the Wright—Fisher formalism (WFF) of population genetics. I offer an account of what population geneticist understand insofar as they understand the WFF, a variation on Lloyd's view that population genetics can be understood as a family of models of mid-level generality.

This essay offers a psychoanalytic perspective on ethics utilizing Jean Laplanche and Søren Kierkegaard. It proposes a homology between Kierkegaard’s ”God” and Laplanche’s “primal adult” as well as between Kierkegaard’s account of the indirection of love and the role of the analyst in the transference relationship. Both Kierkegaard and Laplanche center scenes of second-person relation in which a seductive asymmetry calls forth a rigorous ethics of unknowing.

(1994). Slovakia. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 149-154.

I want to suggest in this essay that there are some problems in the interpretation of Descartes’ views about persons, minds, the mental, and the physical—about so-called “Cartesian dualism” in general—which have not been in any explicit or systematic way noticed or confronted. There are two primary problems I shall explore. They are both at least apparent inconsistencies in Descartes’ views. The first of them may be only a terminological inconsistency, and fairly easily resolved. The second is far more crucial, (...) and not merely terminological. If it really is an inconsistency, then we must either abandon Cartesian dualism as hopelessly confused, or give up at least one of the Cartesian assertions that leads to the contradiction. I shall argue that there is a real inconsistency between a claim Descartes on one occasion makes and the rest of what he says or seems to say about persons, minds, the mental, and the physical—“Cartesian dualism”—but that this inconsistency is not fatal to Cartesian dualism. It is removed by suppressing the single isolated statement, and what remains is a coherent, consistent, and highly plausible view about persons and their states. (shrink)

A unique treasury contains more than 1,000 quotations by spiritual masters, writers, artists, poets and wise men and women from throughout history on such topics as joy and despair, enlightenment, love and nature, in a book that includes contributions from more than 500 people, including Lao Tzu, William Shakespeare and more. Original.

The well-known passage Mark 4:1-34 is no stranger to New Testament scientific scrutiny, not to even mention the hotly debated phrases in Mark 4:10-12. To avoid repetition, the aim with this article is to determine the extent of the impact the Isaiah 6:9-10 citation in Mark 4:12 might have had on the interpretation and understanding of Mark 4:1-34 and the Gospel as a whole. The theory is that the citation in Mark 4:12, especially within Mark 4:1-34, is foundational for understanding (...) the Markan gospel as a 'parable'. Moreover, the redactional inclusion of the concept of 'the Twelve' will prove to be a vital contribution in understanding the Markan gospel as a 'parable'. Arguing this theory will include evaluating the parable theory in Mark 4:10-12, followed by determining the interpretative effect the explicit citation in Mark 4:12 had on Mark 4:10-12 and its larger literary context. This will be followed by concluding remarks and suggestions. (shrink)