Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the (...) broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds. (shrink)

“Here is the first Kant-biography in English since Paulsen’s and Cassirer’s only full-scale study of Kant’s philosophy. On a very deep level, all of Cassirer’s philosophy was based on Kant’s, and accordingly this book is Cassirer’s explicit coming to terms with his own historical origins. It sensitively integrates interesting facts about Kant’s life with an appreciation and critique of his works. Its value is enhanced by Stephen Körner’s Introduction, which places Cassirer’s Kant-interpretation in its historical and contemporary context.”—Lewis White Beck (...) “The first English translation (well done by James Haden) of a 60-year-old classic intellectual biography. Those readers who know Kant only through the first _Critique_ will find their understanding of that work deepened and illuminated by a long explication of the pre-critical writings, but perhaps the most distinctive contribution is Cassirer’s argument that the later _Critiques_, and especially the _Critique of Judgment_, must be understood not as merely applying the principles of the first to other areas but as subsuming the latter into a larger and more comprehensive framework.”—Frederick J. Crown, _The Key Reporter_ “_Kant’s Life and Thought_ is that rare achievement: a lucid and highly readable account of the life and work of one of the world’s profoundest thinkers. Now for the first time available in an admirable English translation, the book introduces the reader to two of the finest minds in the history of philosophy.”—Ashley Montagu. (shrink)

An analysis of the 1784 essays by immanuel kant and moses mendelssohn on the question "what is enlightenment?" emphasis is placed on discussions of the nature and limits of enlightenment within the berlin "aufklarung" as evidenced by debates within the berlin "mittwochsgesellschaft" (a secret society of "friends of the enlightenment") and articles in the "berlinische monatsschrift". Among the views surveyed are those of the publicists johann erich biester, Friedrich gedike, And friedrich nicolai, The jurists karl gottlieb svarez and ernst ferdinand (...) klein, The physician johann karl wilhelm mohsen, And the theologian johann friedrich zollner. (shrink)

This devastating polemical critique of the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger is a monumental study in Adorno's effort to apply qualitative analysis to the content and impact of cultural phenomena.

Kant replies to the claim that there is conflict between what moral theory demands and what we can do in practice.

The question concerning technology.--The turning.--The word of Nietzsche: "God is dead."--The age of the world picture.--Science and reflection.

The original edition of Kant: Political Writings was first published in 1970, and has long been established as the principal English-language edition of this important body of writing. In this new, expanded edition two important texts illustrating Kant's view of history are included for the first time, his reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind and Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, as well as the essay What is Orientation in Thinking?. In addition to (...) a general introduction assessing Kant's political thought in terms of his fundamental principles of politics, this edition also contains such useful student aids as notes on the texts, a comprehensive bibliogaphy and a new postscript, looking at some of the principal issues in Kantian scholarship that have arisen since the first edition. (shrink)

While visiting a friend's family in Cornwall during the traditional May Day celebrations, eighteen-year-old Laura becomes involved in an old family mystery concerning the disappearance of ancient heirlooms.

This is the first full-length biography in more than fifty years of Immanuel Kant, one of the giants amongst the pantheon of Western philosophers as well as the one with the most powerful and broad influence on contemporary philosophy. It is well known that Kant spent his entire life in an isolated part of Prussia living the life of a typical university professor. This has given rise to the view that Kant was a pure thinker with no life of his (...) own, or at least none worth considering seriously. In this biography, Manfred Kuehn debunks that myth once and for all. Taking account of the most recent scholarship Professor Kuehn allows the reader to follow the same journey that Kant himself took in emerging as a central figure in modern philosophy. (shrink)

Discursive accounts of the body have been prominent recently. While acknowledging the usefulness of these, the author, drawing upon specific philosophers of the body and a wide range of other theorists, focuses attention on the experiencing body which she refers to as 'creatural existence’. Thinking in terms of the creatural, she argues, can better situate human beings in their environment, thus emphasizing a kind of 'ecological notion of subjectivity’, in which place-based existence is understood anew. The educational implications of focusing (...) on what bodies 'do' and not so much in terms of how they are socially inscribed, presents them as practico-sensory totalities which should perhaps be seen as systems rather than an as mere organisms or entities. Such an articulation of creatural existence emphasizes animality, and in so doing reminds us of the centrality of the senses in all knowing and doing, including crucially, in relation to those practices which we have understood as 'work'. Multi-sensorial education is a major sub-theme of the book and the author argues persuasively for this by means of a critical analysis of the ocularcentrism that is characteristic of contemporary culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Scale of the Nation in a Shrinking WorldJoan Ramon Resina (bio)The 1990s saw the rise of political issues that, although by no means new, generated a great deal of discourse based on a semantic rupture with the past. The need to inscribe political analysis with a feeling of historical acceleration was nowhere as patent as in George W. Bush's New World Order. Although the "New World Order" quickly (...) gave way to the euphemism "globalization," it soon became obvious that political agendas would change considerably as would the terms of engagement with realities that had once seemed straightforward and now appeared riddled with theoretical problems.Nationalism was salient among those realities. Although it had driven decolonization in the fifties and sixties and throughout the Vietnam era, it seemed to flare up roughly at the time when Bush pronounced the bipolar order dead. As the political map was being redrawn after the breakdown of the Soviet empire, other foci of political struggle caught the world's attention. National struggles in other regions were interpreted as collateral of that breakdown rather than long-standing symptoms of similar tensions at different scales. Once more, the European continent was caught in the incongruity of its historical processes. While Western Europe was cautiously advancing toward economic and political integration, Eastern Europe found itself returning from a "posthistorical" experiment in supranationalism to the "historical" horizon of polities being reconfigured according to such social tangibles as a common language and religion, a traditional relation to place, and shared identifying memories.Until the 1990s the West smugly believed that it had consolidated state borders around seemingly homogeneous societies. Cultural integration was flaky in spots (Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Corsica); those resistances, however, were looked on mostly as archaic irrelevances bound to disappear. But as nationalism began to haunt the cozy dream of a posthistorical balance of power, nonchalance gave way to a glut of intellectual exorcisms meant to conjure the evil that had caught at Europe's edges. In this new context, the Balkans represented for Europe, in Žižek's words, "the peculiar status of a ghost that haunts it." If the Balkans "are always somewhere else, a little bit more toward the southeast" [3], in the 1990s the danger of Balkanization seemed ubiquitous. At the time, a true Balkan hysteria rang out in the most self-satisfied European nations. In France and Spain, long-standing conflicts between center and periphery were recast in terms of the horror seen on CNN. Europe spatialized its fears, turning geographic distance into a metaphor for the racism directed against its internal others.Europe's internal others did not consist only of immigrants from non-EU countries, for whom liberals always had a soft spot, but also of those peoples and territorial units capable and culpable of tearing admirable nations apart. It was in those territorial units, which had been incorporated but not assimilated in the course of nation-state building, that nationalism was "raising its ugly head." It was here that "'reflexive' Politically Correct racism" (Žižek) applied the Balkans metaphor, projecting every conceivable horror into the intentions of unsuspecting citizens. As Žižek observed at the time, "[t]he [End Page 46] Balkans constitute a place of exception with regard to which the tolerant multiculturalist is allowed to act out his/her repressed racism" [6]. This perverse acting out was all the more acceptable, inasmuch as the peoples subjected to the logic of displaced racism were after all white and developed, and thus free game for the tolerant multiculturalist, who could always bring forward less-developed regions as potential victims of the centrifugal region's egotism. When the Balkans war broke out in May of 1991, the first Western European reactions were predominantly pro-Serbian. Never mind that Slovenia and Croatia were pro-Western and democratic. Western intelligentsias accused them of pettiness and lack of solidarity and began to restrain their large-state bias only when Serbian annexationists directed their all-out war against Bosnian Muslims, who, although white and no less developed than their attackers, were, by virtue of their religion, a patent instance of otherness. Overnight politically correct racism swung from tolerance for... (shrink)