Inhuman Reflections

This text asks what it is to be human. Spectres, cyborgs, clones, aliens - representations of the inhuman hybrid seem more various and multiform than ever before. It examines the impact of science and technology on culture and representation.

Om postmodernismen og en videreudvikling af forfatterens teorier med eksempler fra filosofi og malerkunst

In this major study, now available in paperback, Lyotard develops his analysis of the phenomenon of postmodernity, and examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, philosophy and the arts to bear witness to and explain the links between modernity, progress and humanity, and the difficult transition to postmodernity.

Jean-Francois Lyotard is one of Europe's foremost philosophers, known for his work The Postmodern Condition. In this study he develops his analysis of the phenomena of postmodernity.

Ashley Woodward demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are just discovering: that Lyotard's incisive work is essential for current debates in the humanities. Lyotard's ideas about the arts and the confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies are today known as 'posthumanism'. Woodward presents a series of studies to explain Lyotard's specific interventions in information theory, new media arts and the changing nature of the human. He assesses their relevance and impact in relation to a number of important contemporary thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Virilio.

Winner of the 2015 Best Scholarly Book Award presented by the Diopian Institute for Scholarly Advancement Afrocentricity is the most intellectually dominant idea in the African world, one that is having a growing impact on social science discourse. This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the "infrastructures of dominance and privilege," arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early fifteenth century, towards a new epistemological framework that will enable a more human humanity.

Reflections on Hanging is a searing indictment of capital punishment, inspired by its author’s own time in the shadow of a firing squad. During the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler was held by the Franco regime as a political prisoner, and condemned to death. He was freed, but only after months of witnessing the fates of less-fortunate inmates. That experience informs every page of the book, which was first published in England in 1956, and followed in 1957 by this American edition. As Koestler ranges across the history of capital punishment in Britain (with a focus on hanging), he looks at notable cases and rulings, and portrays politicians, judges, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, doctors, police, jailers, prisoners, and others involved in the long debate over the justness and effectiveness of the death penalty. In Britain, Reflections on Hanging was part of a concerted, ultimately successful effort to abolish the death penalty. At that time, in the forty-eight United States, capital punishment was sanctioned in forty-two of them, with hanging still practiced in five. This edition includes a preface and afterword written especially for the 1957 American edition. The preface makes the book relevant to readers in the U.S.; the afterword overviews the modern-day history of abolitionist legislation in the British Parliament. Reflections on Hanging is relentless, biting, and unsparing in its details of botched and unjust executions. It is a classic work of advocacy for some of society’s most defenseless members, a critique of capital punishment that is still widely cited, and an enduring work that presaged such contemporary problems as the sensationalism of crime, the wrongful condemnation of the innocent and mentally ill, the callousness of penal systems, and the use of fear to control a citizenry.

An important work offering a viable theory for the concept of "Sublime" in philosophy. This is a work of quite unusual philosophical interest, original and deeply insightful. Dr. Tsang argues on the one hand that sublimity is not a property of objects regarded as sublime, but belongs to our construal of objects, while on the other he also argues that when we so construe an object we are giving expression to some limit to our life, not an external barrier, but a limit internal to it. But what lies at the limit cannot be represented. So the sublime can be evoked by language, but not represented in it. This leads Dr. Tsang on to a philosophical analysis of evocation and of the evocative possibilities of a sublime object. What he says about evocation presupposes and requires for its completion an account of how affective elements are involved in the experience of the sublime and what he claims here is that there is no one feeling or type of feeling involved in the experience of the sublime, but that a wide range of different feelings may be involved on different occasions. The quality of the feeling is closely bound up with the character of the experience of the sublime as a limit-experience. Finally Dr. Tsang considers the cultural and social context of experiences of the sublime, both what is universally recognized as sublime, because bound up with the general conditions of human life, and what is specific to particular cultural and social contexts. He then moves to the conclusion to examine the relationship of the sublime to human willing. As a postscript there is an excellent treatment of Kant's theory of the sublime.