From Yugoslav Praxis To Global Pathos

McBride (philosophy, Purdue U.) traces the history of the Yugoslav philosophers known as the Praxis Group who sought a third approach to society and government during the Cold War. He describes briefly their journal Praxis, and notes that the group had considerable influence beyond its small number and especially made hard line Soviet ideologues nervous. c. Book News Inc.

This encyclopedia provides a premier reference guide for students, scholars, policy makers, and others interested in assessing the moral consequences of global interdependence and understanding the concepts and arguments that shed light on the myriad aspects of global justice.

Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as a teacher, mentor, and scholar without peer. The author of seven books and more than two hundred book chapters, articles, and reviews, he is a world-renowned expert on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and a leader in the international community of philosophers. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students. Together, they pay tribute to the intellectual, philosophical, and professional achievements of one of the most esteemed and accomplished scholars of his generation.

Darko Suvin’s ‘X-Ray’ of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism.

Moral Images of Freedom resurrects the Kantian project of affirmative political philosophy and traces its oft-forgotten influences found in thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Benjamin. Drucilla Cornell responds to nihilistic claims about the empty purpose of critical theory in a world so utterly captured by violence in all of its worst forms: economic, social, political, and cultural. Cornell instead draws together a sweeping thread of hope in the varied symbolic forms of freedom persistent throughout the work of a broader range of critical theorists and addresses the burning challenge for such work to respond seriously to the need for a decolonization of critical theory itself and a sustained commitment to the possible future of socialism.

Seeking to expand critical theory beyond the frontiers represented by Habermas (on the one hand) and postmodern cultural studies (on the other), 12 essays describe the aims and methods of this pursuit, and apply it to the resistance to colonialism, critiques of technology, race relations, and queer theory. The work of Marcuse is given particular consideration. Contributors are American scholars of philosophy and English. c. Book News Inc.

This clear and concise book examines social movements and transnational networks in the context of globalization in all its forms--economic, political, cultural, and technological alike. Deftly combining nuanced theory with rich empirical examples, leading scholar Valentine M. Moghadam focuses especially on three transnational social movements--Islamism, feminism, and global justice. Now updated to explore the European anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street, the book considers the ways in which these socio-political protests were affected especially by the role of young people and social networking media. The book also includes a new chapter on the democratic nature of social movements, or the ways in which social movements contribute to democratization at both national and global levels. Defining globalization as a complex process in which the movement of capital, peoples, organizations, movements, and ideas takes on an increasingly international form, the author shows how growing physical and electronic mobility has helped to create dynamic global social movements. Exploring the historical roots of Islamism, feminism, and global justice, the book also shows how these movements have been stimulated by relatively recent globalization processes. Moghadam examines similarities and differences among the three movements, along with internal differentiation within each. Her argument is informed by feminist, world-systems, world polity, and social movement theories in a seamlessly integrated framework that will be essential reading for all students of globalization.

Philosophy after Hiroshima offers a philosophical analysis of the issues surrounding war and peace, and their challenges to ethics. It reminds us that the threat posed to civilization by nuclear weapons persists, as does the need for continuing philosophical reflection on the nature of war, the problem of violence, and the need for a workable ethics in the nuclear age. The book recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the beginning of the nuclear age, the Cold War, and subsequently of the hegemonic unilateralism of the sole superpower. Reviewing early critical responses to the first atomic bombings by such figures as Camus, Sartre, Russell, Heidegger, Jaspers and others, the authors themselves respond to contemporary threats to peace, including the US “global war on terrorism,” the recrudescence of militarism, and the continuation of imperial power politics by other means. In the nuclear age, the use of military force as a political instrument threatens the future of humanity. This poses formidable challenges to philosophy and calls for its transformation. In using memories of the atomic bombings to help us to grasp the moral implications of the current escalation of global violence, the authors hope to show the urgent relevance of nonviolence in the contemporary context. Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions—Taoist and Western—the contributors take up a welter of philosophical and political concerns of topical interest, including human rights, toleration, the politics of memory, intercultural dialogue, the ethics of co-responsibility, and the possibility of a cosmopolitan order of law and peace. Going beyond postmodernism and deconstruction, several of the authors develop a post-critical, constructive paradigm of thinking—a philosophy of the possible and a new methodology for the realization of the creative potential of the humanities. Philosophy is viewed as a peace-promoting global dialogue.