David Goicoechea - Böcker

23 contributors investigate the meaning of humanism today, its range of perspectives, and how humanists can deal with the challenges of contemporary life and those it will face as the new century approaches. This absorbing collection of original essays examines the abundant variety of historical and contemporary humanist philosophies, with special emphasis on the work of Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Focusing on the need for an awareness of humanist tradition, these essays offer blunt, progressive self-appraisals to illustrate how humanism will continue to grow as a vital and compelling intellectual force.

Singer's approach to love in philosophy, literature, music and psychology is classical throughout, and never far from the question of eros and agape as it gives rise to the Western tradition. His exploration of Sigmund Freud and George Santayana guide his thinking, his historical philosophising moves with an abiding respect for science and art. The essays of this volume, which are the proceedings of a conference on the importance of Singer's work, reflect his broad interests and yet focus on his key distinction between love as appraisal and love as bestowal. They assess Singer's view of love as growing from the primitive, naturalism idealising of sex to the transcendental idealising of Christian Platonism to the humanistic idealising of post-romanticism.

A proposal for individual responsibility in communal life.In this book, Adamczewski has given a proposal for individual responsibility in communal life, the depth and content of which we have barely touched. It contains a subtlety of insight that most contemporary criticisms of nihilism have not approached, and a detailed appreciation for agency and community that many contemporary ethicists in the continental tradition have failed to understand.The primary contribution of this book is found in the way in which it defines and describes ethos as the basis of interpreting ethical agency. Ethos identifies human occurrence as "an open temporal issue." Ethos is a synonym for human being in its time, and ethical agency refers to individual efforts to establish communal ways of living that are more or less appropriate to the way in which human being occurs. Adamczewski contends that propriety for human being in our time requires primary attention to search, quest, and question; it requires emphasis on our lineages in their passing away-ours is a time of basic ways of dwelling that "properly" come to pass away; and it-our time-requires an emphasis on upcoming times, times that are not controlled by present conclusions but rather by the questions that emerge in our ways of being now, and that give rise to what he calls pro-posals for living that are appropriate to human, temporal occurrence. Pro-posing, in Adamczewski's terms, constitutes a conduct, a poetic (as distinct to a technological or manipulative or prescriptive) manner of thinking in which one learns how to release oneself from determinations that are debilitating for human being.