Marcia Morgan - Böcker

This book advocates for the philosophical import of care in re-evaluating problems of humanitarianism in the context of the ongoing international refugee and forced migration situation. In doing so, it rethinks the human capacity to care about the suffering of distant others.At a time when emotional resources are running low, there is a need to recast what it means to care, with the aim of generating a productive movement against the rise of value fundamentalism globally—embraced in mantras of ‘good and evil’ and ‘us and them’—and to confront xenophobia and oppressive politics. The author draws upon a wide array of rich traditions, including historical and contemporary writings on self-care and care of the other, to re-examine the intersection of care ethics and justice. She also rethinks the relationship between care and contestation, here analyzed in the aesthetic, ethical, political, and religious domains of human experience. From within the context of this contingent historical repetition of political oppression, the book constructs a reminder not only of what it feels like to care, but how and why we should act upon our care.Care Ethics and the Refugee Crisis is an important contribution to the growing literatures on care ethics and immigration/forced migration in philosophy. It will also appeal to scholars and advanced students working in other disciplines such as political science, refugee and migration studies, and social anthropology.

Critical Theory is an interdisciplinary framework of analysis that was founded by a group of intellectuals working at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. While the Institute itself was established in 1923, the program of 'critical theory' was not formalized until 1937 when Max Horkheimer, the Director of the Institute at that time, dubbed it as such in his essay, "Traditional and Critical Theory." The Institute is frequently referred to simply as ‘The Frankfurt School’. Its significance cannot be underestimated. To this day there have been three generations of Frankfurt School academics, but ‘critical theory’ refers to something broader than just the work of the Institute for Social Research. Critical theory now indicates a theoretical approach that is studied all over the world. However, the main interests and goals of the founding Institute still remain integral. Foremost among these interests is the primary focus on the individual human being as the locus for social change. Over the years many debates have ensued as to how the individual can achieve social change. While these debates took Critical Theory in diverse directions, Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth century Danish religious thinker who emphasizes the individual's self-imposed obligation to society at large, played a major role. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard's impact on the development of Critical Theory has received scant study. I aim to fill this scholarly lacuna. My intention is to expose the complexity not only of Kierkegaard but of the Frankfurt School and their cohort. Kierkegaard’s relationship to Critical Theory suffered from the misappropriation of his works by philosophers and theologians associated with National Socialism. This caused the Critical Theorists to view the content of Kierkegaard's philosophy itself as fascistic. Ultimately, I will highlight the ways in which Kierkegaard has been redeemed for a multiculture activist ethics today, working vigorously in spirit with the fundamental aims of the Frankfurt School.

The main purpose of this book is to explicate the problematic relationship between the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful and the homogeneity of the conceptualization of that experience, or attempt at such a conceptualization in the era of modern philosophy. While the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful was permitted, and indeed celebrated, in the dominant ancient conception—for example, in the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato—the need for homogenization in the later appropriation of Plato and in the Enlightenment period relegated the beautiful to the privileged domain of artworks. In her analysis Agnes Heller provides a unique and significant emphasis on the original 'life content' of the experience of the beautiful, which becomes lost in the modern system of the arts. This book details the history of the concept of the beautiful, starting with what Agnes Heller distinguishes between the 'warm' metaphysics of beauty and the 'cold' one—inspired by Plato's Janus-faced relationship to beauty—and ending with a fragmented yet hopeful vision propagated by Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, among others. In between these two historical parentheses—the metaphysical Plato on one hand and the post-metaphysical Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno on the other hand—lay a plenitude of figures and intellectual developments, all of which contributed to the demise of the concept of the beautiful in the Western metaphysical tradition. The most important of these figures and developments are examined in this book.

This book advocates for the philosophical import of care in re-evaluating problems of humanitarianism in the context of the ongoing international refugee and forced migration situation. In doing so, it rethinks the human capacity to care about the suffering of distant others.At a time when emotional resources are running low, there is a need to recast what it means to care, with the aim of generating a productive movement against the rise of value fundamentalism globally—embraced in mantras of ‘good and evil’ and ‘us and them’—and to confront xenophobia and oppressive politics. The author draws upon a wide array of rich traditions, including historical and contemporary writings on self-care and care of the other, to re-examine the intersection of care ethics and justice. She also rethinks the relationship between care and contestation, here analyzed in the aesthetic, ethical, political, and religious domains of human experience. From within the context of this contingent historical repetition of political oppression, the book constructs a reminder not only of what it feels like to care, but how and why we should act upon our care.Care Ethics and the Refugee Crisis is an important contribution to the growing literatures on care ethics and immigration/forced migration in philosophy. It will also appeal to scholars and advanced students working in other disciplines such as political science, refugee and migration studies, and social anthropology.

Thinking The Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy is a text devoted to highlighting, scrutinizing, and deploying Bernstein’s philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. Collecting essays written explicitly for the volume from former students of Bernstein’s, the book shows the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship. In light of urgent contemporary ethical and political problems, the papers collected here show the continuing relevance of Bernstein’s lifelong focus on democracy, dialogue, pragmatism, fallibilism, and pluralism. Bernstein has always contested the supposed Analytic/Continental divide, insisting on the pluralism of philosophical discourses and styles that contribute to genuine debate and save philosophy from stale academicism. This book enacts Bernstein’s pluralistic spirit by crossing traditions and generating new avenues for ongoing research. A central argument of the book is that thinkers of different backgrounds, using diverse, and even clashing methodologies, contribute to the understanding of a given problem, issue, or theme. This argument lies at the heart of Bernstein’s published works and is central to the fallibilistic pragmatism of his pedagogy. This book therefore does not rest on a single answer to a question or a univocal theme, but shows the differentiation of Bernstein’s scholarship through the extension of pluralism into territory Bernstein himself did not enter. The chapters, individually and collectively, demonstrate the force of Bernstein’s pluralism beyond mere commentary on his works.This book will be of interest to many people: 1) scholars, students and others in American philosophy who have worked on or with Richard J. Bernstein or in the tradition of American Pragmatism widely construed, 2) those interested in the intersections between American and European philosophy or between the Analytic and Continental traditions, 3) professional philosophers, philosophy students, and public intellectuals concerned with the application of theory to contemporary ethical and political problems, and 4) those interested in an introduction to the key concepts animating Bernstein’s work and their relationship to the history of philosophy.

Thinking The Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy is a text devoted to highlighting, scrutinizing, and deploying Bernstein’s philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. Collecting essays written explicitly for the volume from former students of Bernstein’s, the book shows the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship. In light of urgent contemporary ethical and political problems, the papers collected here show the continuing relevance of Bernstein’s lifelong focus on democracy, dialogue, pragmatism, fallibilism, and pluralism. Bernstein has always contested the supposed Analytic/Continental divide, insisting on the pluralism of philosophical discourses and styles that contribute to genuine debate and save philosophy from stale academicism. This book enacts Bernstein’s pluralistic spirit by crossing traditions and generating new avenues for ongoing research. A central argument of the book is that thinkers of different backgrounds, using diverse, and even clashing methodologies, contribute to the understanding of a given problem, issue, or theme. This argument lies at the heart of Bernstein’s published works and is central to the fallibilistic pragmatism of his pedagogy. This book therefore does not rest on a single answer to a question or a univocal theme, but shows the differentiation of Bernstein’s scholarship through the extension of pluralism into territory Bernstein himself did not enter. The chapters, individually and collectively, demonstrate the force of Bernstein’s pluralism beyond mere commentary on his works.This book will be of interest to many people: 1) scholars, students and others in American philosophy who have worked on or with Richard J. Bernstein or in the tradition of American Pragmatism widely construed, 2) those interested in the intersections between American and European philosophy or between the Analytic and Continental traditions, 3) professional philosophers, philosophy students, and public intellectuals concerned with the application of theory to contemporary ethical and political problems, and 4) those interested in an introduction to the key concepts animating Bernstein’s work and their relationship to the history of philosophy.