by Bruce Aune (1991)
Contemporary philosophy is marked by a setting aside or dissolution of the traditional problems of modern philosophy. Thus the problem of our knowledge of the external world is widely believed to have been disposed of or dissolved by Wittgenstein and others. In this book, Bruce Aune challenges this assumption. In the first half of Knowledge of the External World, Aune considers the history of the problem in the work of the great modern philosophers, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, and Mill. Then turning to current debates, he argues that the problem has re-emerged and that an entirely new approach is needed. By examining the attempted dissolutions, Aune shows that the fundamental problem remains as a serious intellectual issue: one concerning the nature of permissible experimental or `inductive' inference. To resolve this issue, he undertakes a revision of empiricist epistemology and the development of the required theory of inference. Knowledge of the External World is an excellent historical systematic analysis of a central problem of philosophy and a fine introduction to the theory of knowledge. It will be essential reading for students of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy -- Publisher's description.
Michel Foucault
When one defines 'order' as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear what Foucault is doing here. He weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology.
Jason L. Powell
"Social Theory and Aging is a new work that explores both conceptual and theoretical issues that impinge on our understanding of aging in postmodern society. Jason L. Powell analyzes how knowledge formation of aging is socially constructed and positioned by powerful assumptions that are often taken for granted. He demonstrates how assumptions of aging have provided a power and knowledge base for bio-medical disciplines, the legitimacy of political economic discourses, and practices of professional experts, and questions these suppositions by introducing modernist scientific models and theories of gerontology as well as mapping out alternative postmodern deconstructions of aging."--Jacket.
Kathleen Lundeen
"In Knight of the Living Dead, Kathleen Lundeen investigates Blake's work in the context of his spiritualistic practices, and shows how he attempts to create a discourse that circumvents the binary of natural and arbitrary signs. Her examination of his word-image art demonstrates that, in Blake's view, what we recognize as word or image depends upon our epistemological orientation, just as what we term "matter" or "spirit" is determined by our state of perception. It further shows how Blake critiques textual theory in both his songs and prophecies by stabilizing the two sets of parameters that are used to define and classify signs: the general and particular, and the literal and figurative. Moreover, she argues, Blake provides an epistemological alternative to empiricism and rationalism in his poetry and art. Through verbal and visual experiments he defies the logic that is rooted in sense perception and reason, and he attempts through those experiments to return textuality to a divinely literal condition. By treating spiritualism as an aesthetic practice and art as an otherworldly communication, he undermines the institutionalized boundaries in art and life, and presents a formidable challenge to the whole matter/spirit dualism upon which Western culture is based."--BOOK JACKET.
Genevieve Lloyd
In this lucid and elegantly written book, Genevieve Lloyd reads Spinoza's philosophy as a profound articulation of ideas of individuality, selfhood, and freedom. Focusing on Spinoza's Ethics, Lloyd illuminates as well his transformation of Descartes's concepts of substance, mind, and body, and the relations between Spinoza's metaphysics and his ethical views. Spinoza's doctrine of the uniqueness of substance has been interpreted as absorbing individual self-consciousness into an all-embracing whole. Here, Lloyd addresses the dilemmas posed by the Cartesian legacy of what it means to be a self: the sense of isolation of a contained intellectual substance trying to establish contact with an "external" world, the limitations of an idea of knowledge that sharply distinguishes between reason and the passions, problems in thinking about time and mortality in ways that allow no middle ground between an afterlife and annihilation, and tensions in ideals of personhood that claim to transcend sexual difference. Throughout, Lloyd emphasizes the ethical importance of Spinoza's metaphysics. Out of his treatment of substance and its modes emerge new ways of thinking about self-consciousness, freedom, gender difference, the passions, and time. As the influence of Descartes wanes, Lloyd suggests that Spinoza's philosophy may help us rethink some of the most troubling issues surrounding our understanding of the self.