From Plato To Nato

The end of the Cold war and the imminent unification of Europe raises urgent questions about the future of the "Western Alliance". FROM PLATO TO NATO analyses European civilisation's legacy from its inception and traces the ongoing debate about the West through to the present day. David Gress assesses historical accounts of the West and argues that while often attacked as a cover for exploitation, the legitimacy and unity of the West appears to contain both the rationality of the enlightenment and the mythological visions of fascism. It will be up to the Westerners to choose which 'West' they want to embrace. FROM PLATO TO NATO is the first book to make sense of the enduring value of Western politics and culture at a time when the West is facing its greatest challenge since World War Two - how to include new democracies in a world order that is struggling to preserve the egalitarian values of the Western Tradition.

A collection of 14 essays on political thought. They span thinkers such as Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Marx, and end with views of 20th-century philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt.

This book should be of interest to undergraduate courses in political science.

The author takes the general reader on a tour of the mathematical puzzles and paradoxes inherent in voting systems, such as the Alabama Paradox, in which an increase in the number of seats in the Congress could actually lead to a reduced number of representatives for a state, and the Condorcet Paradox, which demonstrates that the winner of elections featuring more than two candidates does not necessarily reflect majority preferences. Szpiro takes a roughly chronological approach to the topic, traveling from ancient Greece to the present and, in addition to offering explanations of the various mathematical conundrums of elections and voting, also offers biographical details on the mathematicians and other thinkers who thought about them, including Plato, Pliny the Younger, Pierre Simon Laplace, Thomas Jefferson, John von Neumann, and Kenneth Arrow.

Published to accompany the BBC Radio series 'Plato to NATO'.

In this concise text, Roy Bhaskar sets out to diagnose, explain and resolve the "problems of philosophy". Plato Etc. reviews all the main areas of the subject: the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science; the philosophy of logic and language; the philosophies of space, time and causality; the philosophy of the social and life sciences and of dialectic; ethics, politics and aesthetics; and the history and sociology of philosophy. Among the issues discussed are the problems of induction and universals, the question of relativism, Heidegger’s "scandal of philosophy" (the search for a proof of the reality of the external world), the nature of moral truth and the conundrum of free will and determinism. The last two chapters consist of a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to poststructuralism. Plato Etc. seeks to revindicate the philosophical project, and to demonstrate that the author’s "dialectical critical realism" has the categorical power to remedy the problem fields of philosophy. The book serves both as a critical introduction to philosophy and as an invaluable resource for the scholar.

This book explores the concept of cultural chauvinism as the sense of superiority that ethnic or national groups have of themselves relative to others, particularly in the context of international relations. Minabere Ibelema shows the various ways that academics, statesmen, and especially journalists, express their cultural groups’ sense of superiority over others. The analysis pivots around the notion of “Western values” given its centrality in international relations and diplomacy. To the West, this stands for an array of largely positive political and civic values; to a significant portion of the global community, it embodies degeneracies. Ibelema argues that often the most routine expressions go under the radar, even in this age of hypersensitivity. This book throws a unique light on global relations and will be of particular interest to scholars in international relations, communication studies and journalism studies.