While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most ...

The book's two essays, 'Limited Inc.' and 'Signature Event Context, ' constitute key statements of the Derridean theory of deconstruction. They are perhaps the clearest exposition to be found of Derrida's most controversial idea.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

Something out of the ordinary -- The interminable Shakespearean text -- Fred Astaire asserts the right to praise -- Henry James returns to America and to Shakespeare -- Philosophy the day after tomorrow -- What is the scandal of skepticism? -- Performative and passionate utterance -- The Wittgensteinian event -- Thoreau thinks of ponds, Heidegger of rivers -- The world as things.

David E. Cooper elucidates Nietzsche's educational views in detail, in a form that will be of value to educationalists as well as philosophers. In this title, first published in 1983, he shows how these views relate to the rest of Nietzsche's work, and to modern European and Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns. For Nietzsche, the purpose of true education was to produce creative individuals who take responsibility for their lives, beliefs and values. His ideal was human authenticity. David E. Cooper sets Nietzsche's (...) critique against the background of nineteenth-century German culture, yet is concerned at the same time to emphasize its bearing upon recent educational thought and policy. (shrink)

This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark text, first published 20 years ago, provides a new preface that discusses the reception and influence of his work, which occupies a unique niche between philosophy and literary studies.

This paper explores Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘passionate utterance’, which acts as an extension of/departure from (we might read it as both) J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative. Cavell argues that Austin having made the revolutionary discovery that truth claims in language are bound up with how words perform, then gets bogged by convention when discussing what is done ‘by’ words. In failing to account for the less predictable, unconventional aspects of language, the latter therefore washes his hands of (...) the expressive passionate aspects of speech. To ignore such aspects is to ignore an important moral dimension of language. Finally, I bring Cavell’s approach to bear on the epistemic criterion, which Michael Hand applies in his paper ‘Should We Teach Homosexuality as a Controversial Issue?’. I suggest that Hand’s approach, by failing to account for the linguistic dimension of truth and the expressive quality that accompanies this dimension, presents an overly narrow conception of moral education. (shrink)