A reprint of the popular 1969, Prentice-Hall edition, the principal innovation of this philosophical introduction to value theory is its focus upon values as they are dealt with in everyday life situations, and have sometimes been studied by sociologists and social psychologists, rather than upon value as has been standard in the philosophical tradition.

George Soros is a legend in the world of finance. His Quantum Fund has been the best-performing investment fund in history and his foundations have helped reshape the post-Cold War world. Now Soros applies all of his wisdom, expertise and insight to explain what's happening in the collapsing global economy. The Russian economy has collapsed, leading to punishing inflation and economic hardship; scores of Japanese banks are in ruin; the once-booming economies of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have imploded; and even (...) in Europe and America the markets lurch violently, wiping out gains with each passing week. In THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM Soros dissects the current crisis and economic theory, revealing how theoretical assumptions have combined with human behaviour to lead to today's calamities. He shows how unquestioning faith in market forces blinds us to crucial instabilities, and how those instabilities have chain-reacted to cause the current crisis which has the potential to get much, much worse. Offering brilliant solutions to the global meltdown, this is essential reading for anyone involved with the new economy - that is, all of us. (shrink)

In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of (...) pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Needs, Values, Truth brings together of some of the most important and influential writings by a leading contemporary philosopher, drawn from twenty-five years of his work in the broad area of the philosophy of value. The author ranges between problems of ethics, meta-ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of logic and language, looking at questions relating to meaning, truth and objectivity in judgements of value. For this third edition he has added a new essay on incommensurability, in addition to making (...) minor revisions to the existing text. The volume will stand as a definitive summation of his work in this area. (shrink)

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.".

A comprehensive anthology of the leading thinkers of Gaia theory, which views the earth as a living organism.

In late August 2002, a general practitioner in London, Dr Bhagat Singh Makkar, 62, was struck off the medical register after he was discovered to have bragged to an undercover journalist about being able to obtain a kidney from a live donor in exchange for a fee. He told the journalist, who posed as the son of a patient with renal failure: “No problem, I can fix that for you. Do you want it done here, do you want it done (...) in Germany or do you want it done in India?” The price he quoted included payment to the donor and “my administration costs”. Dr Makkar said he regretted giving “stupid answers” to the journalist. He had been “tired, confused, and upset after a long day dealing with emotional patients”.1Deliberation about ethics is often muddied by the personalities involved in a particular issue. Many people are uninspired by Richard Seed or Jack Kevorkian. This contaminates their view about the much broader and important issues such as cloning or euthanasia that Seed and Kevorkian, whom some people might describe as mavericks, have shoved their finger in.Discussion of the sale of organs is …. (shrink)

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly ofthe United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a truly historic document, the full text of which is reproduced here. Following this historic act, the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories." Jacques Maritain was (...) actively involved in the drafting of the Declaration, especially its clauses regarding freedom of conscience and religious expression. (shrink)

My paper responds to certain themes of Professor John McMurtry's recent book, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Although I am in general sympathy with McMurtry's penetrating critique of conventional market theory and practice, I find Unequal Freedoms ambivalent on the critical question of whether endorsing and enacting the life-value code McMurtry proposes would require only a mitigation of the principles and definitive activities of the competitive market system or whether significant reforms within the system would have (...) to be deep structural ones. It is argued that the second alternative is inescapable. I defend my perspective from the point of view of a philosophical analysis of orthodox or neo-classical theory-construction about the competitive market order. In particular, I examine three fundamental principles of such modelling: the maximization of the satisfaction of self-interest, the unboundedness of consumer desire for material goods, and the distribution of monetized wealth. In order for McMurtry's "civil commons" to survive, the practice of each of these principles would need to be radically modified. However, in doing so, competitive capitalism would lose its essential identity as a socio-economic order. (shrink)

About the Author:Jeff Noonan is associate professor, philosophy, the University of Windsor. He is the author of Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference.

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author's views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort (...) the meaning of May 1968 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, and others in his report on 'The State and Subject Today'. Finally he examines how Aristotle's original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and even Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Intimacy, choice, movement: these are the elements that make up the desirable lifestyle in the mainstream of affluent societies. They also undermine traditional forms of power and control, and create a web of connections between individuals all over the world, which promises to be more flexible and less restrictive than any that has existed before. But, Bill Jordan argues, our present global institutions have shut out the majority of the world's population, who are left to rely on quite different bonds (...) - of blood, soil and faith. (shrink)

This article reviews the recent contributions of Amartya Sen and John McMurtry to theory of international development and social justice. The author argues that both fail to give an adequate account of the current transformation of collective life and the provision of collective goods. Without such an analysis, theories of justice are incomplete.