Semantics vs. pragmatics

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Janet Riehecky

An overview of the past and present lives of the Cree, including a description of their homes, clothing, family life, religion, and government.

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Alan Ryan

This collection of essays by philosophers, political theorists, and social critics ranges over two millennia--from the ideas of Plato and Aristotle to those of contemporary thinkers such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. It examines the nature of justice, its importance in human life, and its place among the other virtues. The scope of the collection gives a clear picture of the differences and continuities that have marked the debate: Plato's emphasis on the ideal of "sticking to one's task" contrasts with the modern emphasis on individual rights, while the account of justice as part of the law of nature offered by Aristotle and Cicero contrasts with Hume's analysis of justice as an artificial virtue. Alan Ryan's introductory essay emphasizes the stringency of justice--showing how its demands can conflict with considerations of the general welfare. The book concludes with a discussion of Marx's view that justice is perhaps merely a concession to a world of scarcity and selfishness created by capitalist necessities. An excellent guide to interpretations of one of the central values of political life and thought, this book will interest students and scholars of political theory and philosophy.

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Louis Althusser

Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) There can be little doubt that Louis Althusser was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and his work lives on in many of the concepts currently deployed in disciplines such as cultural studies, social theory and literary criticism. Yet Althusser was also a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party and a foremost participant in the debates in the human sciences that are marked by the names of Claude Le;vi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Georges Canguilhem. His writings were major interventions in a specific political and theoretical conjuncture and it is this that this new collection of previously untranslated texts seeks to reflect. Consisting of writings from the very height of Althusser's intellectual powers, during the period 1966–67, this book covers, amongst other themes, the critique of Le;vi-Strauss's structuralism, the theory of discourse and its relationship to psychoanalysis, the tasks of Marxist philosophy, and the famous "humanist controversy".

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Peter Poellner

This book offers a new and comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished in English. The author examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. Throughout the book, considerable attention is paid both to the historical context of his writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy - English-language as well as Continental European. Among the themes discussed are Nietzsche's relation to scepticism and to evolutionary epistemology; his analysis of 'objective reality' and the associated 'perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's 'will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the 'ascetic ideal'; his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Dr Poellner, while recognizing the originality of Nietzsche's influential new philosophical paradigm, shows that his thought has closer affinities to the philosophical tradition than is often supposed.