A Meaningful World

Meaningful or meaningless? Purposeful or pointless? When we look at nature, whether at our living earth or into deepest space, what do we find? In stark contrast to contemporary claims that the world is meaningless, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt reveal a cosmos charged with both meaning and purpose. Their journey begins with Shakespeare and ranges through Euclid's geometry, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the periodic table of the elements, the artistry of ordinary substances like carbon and water, the intricacy of biological organisms, and the irreducible drama of scientific exploration itself. Along the way, Wiker and Witt fashion a robust argument from evidence in nature, one that rests neither on religious presuppositions nor on a simplistic view of nature as the best of all possible worlds. In their exploration of the cosmos, Wiker and Witt find all the challenges and surprises, all of the mystery and elegance one expects from a work of genius.

You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive--in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn't Help), he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day.

This book reflects on the nature of business management to contribute to the development of a philosophy and ethics of management. It engages in conceptual engineering of management to delineate the phenomenon of management and, as a result, to open a new perspective on management beyond its self-evident conceptualization. After questioning the self-evident concept of management, the author develops a philosophy of management with six dimensions of the nature of management: management as participation; management as resistance and responsive action; management as constitution of meaning; management as politico-economic governance; management as non-reductive stakeholder engagement; and management as epistemic insufficient entrepreneurship. These six dimensions of management are taken as points of departure to develop an integrated concept of business ethics, an individual competence for ethical business management, and a concept of ethical codes for corporate social responsible behavior. This new conception of philosophy of management and business ethics can guide future philosophical and empirical work on the nature of management. The Critique of Management is an excellent resource for researchers, students, and professionals interested in philosophy of management, business ethics, and corporate social responsibility.

This text interprets and evaluates the topic of Martin Heidegger's philosphy in the context of the full range of Heidegger's thought. With this comprehensive approach, Herman Philipse distinguishes the center from the periphery, the essential from the incidental in Heidegger's philosophy. Among other achievements this allows him to shed light on the controversial relationship between Heidegger's life and thought - in particular the connections between his philosophy and his involvement with Nazism.

This scrupulously researched and rigorously argued book is the first to interpret and evaluate the central topic of Maritn Heidegger`s philosophy his celebrated question of being in the context of the full range of Heidegger`s thought. With this comprehensive approach Herman Philipse distinguishes in unprecedented ways the center from the incidental in Heidegger`s philosophy. Phillopse begins by explaining which problems an interpretation of Heidegger;`s question of being should solve and he specifies which type of interpretation is the best basis for an evaluation of Heidegger`s idea of being and shows.

Heidegger and Gadamer are typically read by different theologians. Heidegger tends to be read by philosophical theologians examining his contribution to matters of doubt, existential finitude, and atheism. Gadamer tends to be read by those with an interest in interpreting the Bible, especially by those with more confessional or epistemically optimistic sensibilities. In both cases, Heidegger and Gadamer have well-established associations with specific theological positions. Joshua Broggi challenges this arrangement by re-reading the primary texts as theological resources; he defends an alternative theological appropriation of their philosophical work through a close engagement with portions of their argument. What emerges from Broggi's examination is an account of the unity of tradition, reason, and scriptural language. This account goes beyond claims of their relatedness, which are uncontroversial, and advances the stronger argument that they name the very same thing. Although initially counterintuitive, the central task set by both Heidegger and Gadamer is the investigation of that one phenomenon. This argument challenges the pervasive image in which Christians rely on 'tradition' to 'reason' about the meaning of 'scripture'. It puts into question the injunction that theologians should balance the resources of scripture, tradition, and reason. Broggi offers an account of Christian life as more fundamental than certain entities which are distilled out of it, namely: scripture, tradition and reason.

What does "meaningless" mean? On the one hand, it signifies simply the absence or lack of meaning. "Zabool" is meaningless just because it doesn't happen to mean anything. "Green flees time lessly" is meaningless, despite a certain semblance of sense, because it runs afoul of certain fundamental rules of linguistic construction. On the other hand, "meaningless" characterizes that peculiar psycho logical state of dread and anxiety much discussed, if not discovered, by the French shortly after the Second World War. The first is primarily linguistic, focusing attention on emotionally neutral questions of linguistic meaning. The second is nonlinguistic, indicating a painful probing of the social psychology of an era, a clinical and literary analysis of 20th century Romanticism. On the one hand, a job for the professional philosopher; on the other hand, a task for the literary critic and the social historian. Is any useful purpose served in trying to combine these two, very different concerns? As the title of this book suggests, I think there is.

Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger’s critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger’s analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger’s disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency. Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.