Raphael Sassower – författare

The essays brought together in this volume are the product of a University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Colloquium on Science, Technology, and Society devoted to foundations of health care practices. Prescriptions contributes to the philosophy of medicine by redefining, redrawing, and resetting the respective domains of philosophy, medicine, and healthcare. It provides a conceptual point of departure, a point from which the radical changes that will be required of health care in the next century can be envisioned and acted upon.Part I consists of three essays that provide critical analyses of the conceptual apparatus that informs the many dimensions of health care practices. In general, the contributors challenge the fundamental relationships of authority that exist between patients and health care practitioners, question the tradition of using classical ethical theories within the domain of health care, and suggest a set of different directions in which health care should develop. These essays demonstrate why a reevaluation of the culture of health care, and not just specific practices, is necessary. The two essays in Part II explore the economic, technical, legal, and public policy dimensions of contemporary medicine. The novelty of these essays lies in their response to the challenges already posed by the three preceding essays: each essay attempts to provide a specific contextual analysis for articulating and testing the broad conceptual and axiological problems raised therein. Part III provides a more specific context for exploring the issues and themes articulated in Parts I and II. Drawing attention to the techniques used to diagnose and, supposedly, cure, the contributors directly attack the view that psychoanalysis can be understood in medical or scientific terms. Those interested in the philosophical aspects of health care will find this volume provocative reading.

Religion and Sports in American Culture explores the relationship between religion and modern sports in America. Whether found in the religious purpose of ancient Olympic Games, in curses believed to plague the Chicago Cubs, or in the figure of Tim Tebow, religion and sports have been and are still tightly intertwined. While there is widespread suspicion that sports are slowly encroaching on the territory historically occupied by religion, Scholes and Sassower assert that sports are not replacing religion and that neither is sports a religion. Instead, the authors look at the relationship between sports and religion in America from a post-secular perspective that looks at both discourses as a part of the same cultural web. In this way each institution is able to maintain its own integrity, legitimacy, and unique expression of cultural values as they relate to each other. Utilizing important themes that intersect both religion and sports, Scholes and Sassower illuminate the complex and often publicly contentious relationship between the two.Appropriate for both classroom use and for the interested non-specialist, Religion and Sports in American Culture brings pilgrimage, sacrifice, relics, and redemption together in an unexpected cultural continuity.

Religion and Sports in American Culture explores the relationship between religion and modern sports in America. Whether found in the religious purpose of ancient Olympic Games, in curses believed to plague the Chicago Cubs, or in the figure of Tim Tebow, religion and sports have been and are still tightly intertwined. While there is widespread suspicion that sports are slowly encroaching on the territory historically occupied by religion, Scholes and Sassower assert that sports are not replacing religion and that neither is sports a religion. Instead, the authors look at the relationship between sports and religion in America from a post-secular perspective that looks at both discourses as a part of the same cultural web. In this way each institution is able to maintain its own integrity, legitimacy, and unique expression of cultural values as they relate to each other. Utilizing important themes that intersect both religion and sports, Scholes and Sassower illuminate the complex and often publicly contentious relationship between the two.Appropriate for both classroom use and for the interested non-specialist, Religion and Sports in American Culture brings pilgrimage, sacrifice, relics, and redemption together in an unexpected cultural continuity.

In Cultural Collisions Raphael Sassower brings postmodernism face to face with technoscience and considers the viability of public works, such as the Superconducting Supercollider, in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodern technoscience vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th century science.

Contemporary society is rife with instability. Our active and invasive study of genetics has given life to one of the great specters of biological science: the clone. The scarcity of natural energy sources has led to an increased manipulation of atomic or nuclear energy and regressive environmental policies, resulting in a greater sense of danger for everyone. The promises of economic globalization have, in some cases, been delivered, but in many other ways globalization has created even greater gaps in social and economic life. Despite the expansion of our productive and technological capabilities, our workdays grow longer, not shorter. We find ourselves in exile from our families, our friends, and from other meaningful forms of social connection. And as "freedom" is bandied about in the popular press and media as the preeminent global social value, it actually seems that the reigning contemporary ethos of our time is stress and anxiety. While Raphael Sassower's previous work has focused extensively on science and technology, this book is significantly different. It is an urgent commentary in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man or even Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents; a culmination of many years of research and thought carefully arranged into an extended essay on our contemporary social, cultural, and existential orientation in the modern world. This book is written for advanced graduate students, informed and concerned citizenry, and especially the young student who, in the face of mounting anxiety, must be able to make critical choices towards an uncertain future.

In order to better understand the conditions of the twenty-first century Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello revisit the twentieth century in Political Blind Spots: Reading the Ideology of Images. Sassower and Cicotello revisit some of the most significant periods in art and politics in the twentieth century paying close attention to the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

In this book, the authors explore images of war and their effect on society. The authors keep in mind that the experience of being at war is much different from the experience of viewing a war image. Thus it is our responsibility to engage war images critically and personally, because lives are at stake and the future of world peace lies in the balance. The iconic image of any war and its ideological underpinning must be more fully appreciated.This book suggests that consumers of war images must simultaneously pay attention to the details of any given image (and thereby uncover its ideology), while exploring other, alternative images related to the same war, in order to consider other perspectives. The effectiveness of the visual language is such that it demands a careful and critical analysis, such as the one that offered here. The emphasis on the pragmatic reading of images has more to do with the power of images to convey, most commonly, a single idea or value, rather than to engage the observer with an inconsistent or contradictory set of ideas and values. This is where pastiche and collage come into play as compositional strategies through which many images are juxtaposed against each other so as to break the uniformity of an artwork, poster, or photograph.The aesthetic experience, however intense, is not a war experience, and the one could never substitute the other. The visual landscape itself is open to ideological manipulation-selection, framing, focus-so that we end up having to deal with theories and ideas even when we refuse to deal with them at first, for they end up determining and informing what images find their way into our cultural memory.

Solo: Postmodern Explorations provides a postmodern approach to technoscience and economics. Sassower pulls together postmodern motifs and attitudes with his own experience to provide a unique perspective on political history and economics. Solo raises the question of whether it is possible to be an objective observer and what that means for scholarship, especially when it concerns making assessments of other cultures in the developing world. Sassower questions the usefulness of applying external economic measurements on the economic development of these countries.

This book critically examines the reliance of society on experts, specifically attacking the notion of the privilege of scientific expertise and defining the politics of this intellectual discourse. The extensive case material illustrates the consequences of claims of expert knowledge. Sassower questions the perception that scientific controversies are focused on epistemological concerns and demonstrates how the debates are often politically motivated. He proposes pedagogical models that would enhance the critical tools of the public - of citizens who must continuously scrutinize the positions of experts and their knowledge claims.

Since the 18th century, artists have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for this, argues this analysis, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. They can either paint scenes of worship of the golden calf or they can fabricate the idol themselves.

Since the 18th century, artists have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for this, argues this analysis, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. They can either paint scenes of worship of the golden calf or they can fabricate the idol themselves.

Narrative Experiments was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.In Narrative Experiments, Gayle Ormiston and Ralph Sassower bring a refreshing perspective to the domains of inquiry we call "science" and "technology," asserting that traditional definitions (like classical idealism and materialism) fail to suggest the rich and complex cultural/linguistic interplay occurring between them. This context is not merely a background, nor is Ormiston and Sassower's just one more interdisciplinary approach to the subject. Instead, their book argues, science, technology, and the humanities developed in concert with one another, and their reciprocity obliterates all traditional disciplinary boundaries.Ormiston and Sassower build their case by devoting a chapter to each of the four themes emerging from the etymological introduction. First, they look at the role fiction and other literary modes play in developing our attitudes toward science and technology -- how the visions of Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, Rousseau, Mary Shelley, and Orwell evoke both anxiety and hope. Next, they examine a series of eighteenth-century "fictions" -- the Enlightenment texts of Kant, Rousseau, and Hume -- and the elevated (but ambiguous) status science and technology associated with them. The last two chapters evaluate modes of discursive authority and its dissemination -- classical and modern extralinguistic approaches; the contemporary-linguistic view espoused by Rorty, Quine, and others; and their own avowedly experimental journey through the labyrinths of cultural and linguistic usage.

What is at stake in compromising the Enlightenment ideals of a liberal education with new educational policies engendered by a neo-liberalized, global marketplace? Richly grounding his arguments in the social philosophy of European and American intellectuals, Raphael Sassower explores Western culture's long-standing ambivalence toward 'the life of the mind.' He shows how and why this historical legacy contributes to today's confusion over goals and values in contemporary education. He sheds new light on many of today's controversies, showing why the demands of technology and a global economy increase society's need for 'educational sanctuaries' of liberal education, intellectual 'play' and social consciousness that may better serve the diverse and often conflicting needs of a changing world.

Manorial Capitalism, Enslavement, and the Logic of Dividuation proffers three perspectives on the plantation slave economy of the Antebellum South. The first explores the paternal function as exemplified in the structural authority of the lord of the manor both symbolically and operationally. This figure of masculine authority persisted from the Medieval period to orchestrate what is called here Manorial Capitalism. The second examines the exploitation and alienation that epitomize the logic of capitalism from the plantation economy to the present. And the third deploys retroactively the logic of dividuation to the plantation, a logic that draws its inspiration from neoliberal financial capitalism as well as from anthropological accounts (which distinguish the dividual from the Cartesian-Kantian individual). This book argues that reducing individuals to dividuated components continues to enable a dehumanizing capitalist mindset to fixate on abstracted labor power rather than seeing laboring individuals.

Manorial Capitalism, Enslavement, and the Logic of Dividuation proffers three perspectives on the plantation slave economy of the Antebellum South. The first explores the paternal function as exemplified in the structural authority of the lord of the manor both symbolically and operationally. This figure of masculine authority persisted from the Medieval period to orchestrate what is called here Manorial Capitalism. The second examines the exploitation and alienation that epitomize the logic of capitalism from the plantation economy to the present. And the third deploys retroactively the logic of dividuation to the plantation, a logic that draws its inspiration from neoliberal financial capitalism as well as from anthropological accounts (which distinguish the dividual from the Cartesian-Kantian individual). This book argues that reducing individuals to dividuated components continues to enable a dehumanizing capitalist mindset to fixate on abstracted labor power rather than seeing laboring individuals.

Debates over the role of government have intensified in the wake of America's deepest financial crisis since the Depression. This book suggests new ways of moving forward based on the policies and principles that have worked in the past. Sassower shows how American pragmatism has guided the more successful financial policies undertaken during the past century. This means that from the workplace to foreign aid, Americans benefit when they collaborate with each other rather than only pursue their self-interest in competitive ways. Drawing on thinkers from Adam Smith to Keynes to Bernanke, Sassower shows how a new era of postideological capitalism can emerge in the wake of the current economic crisis-renewing America's leadership for the future.

Debates over the role of government have intensified in the wake of America's deepest financial crisis since the Depression. This book suggests new ways of moving forward based on the policies and principles that have worked in the past. Sassower shows how American pragmatism has guided the more successful financial policies undertaken during the past century. This means that from the workplace to foreign aid, Americans benefit when they collaborate with each other rather than only pursue their self-interest in competitive ways. Drawing on thinkers from Adam Smith to Keynes to Bernanke, Sassower shows how a new era of postideological capitalism can emerge in the wake of the current economic crisis-renewing America's leadership for the future.

Envisioning a different mode of economic relations requires a rethinking of the classical frames of references we commonly take for granted. The implicit assumptions that we carry into critical debates are the stumbling blocks for finding useful solutions to age-old economic problems. And these impediments constrict our political imagination. This book asks what are these frames of references? How many of them are worthy of retaining, while others might be discarded? And what new framings should be adopted in order to bring about a less crisis-prone and morally acceptable mode of human interaction? Each chapter interrogates a different frame of reference, including culturally-embedded concepts of human nature, scarcity and abundance, markets, and the human condition. Examining their historical anchoring and the ways in which they have become confining for the realities of the postmodern world in which we currently live, it is shown that they have become so familiar that they are assumed rather than critically examined in most discussions of political economy.

Envisioning a different mode of economic relations requires a rethinking of the classical frames of references we commonly take for granted. The implicit assumptions that we carry into critical debates are the stumbling blocks for finding useful solutions to age-old economic problems. And these impediments constrict our political imagination. This book asks what are these frames of references? How many of them are worthy of retaining, while others might be discarded? And what new framings should be adopted in order to bring about a less crisis-prone and morally acceptable mode of human interaction? Each chapter interrogates a different frame of reference, including culturally-embedded concepts of human nature, scarcity and abundance, markets, and the human condition. Examining their historical anchoring and the ways in which they have become confining for the realities of the postmodern world in which we currently live, it is shown that they have become so familiar that they are assumed rather than critically examined in most discussions of political economy.

To what extent is neoliberalism undermining democracy and distorting the values of science? Can and should science be treated as an exemplar for a more dialogic democracy? Are universities and public intellectuals able to develop a more dialogically engaged public? What role should there be for ‘experts’ in a more dialogic democracy? Does information and communications technology present a potential to enhance democracy or increase the control and manipulation of knowledge and the public by corporations? This timely volume explores these pressing questions, in a dialogue based on developing and applying the recovery of the ‘critical Popper’, which highlights his contemporary relevance to the critique of neoliberal political economy in the age of technocapitalism. This book will be discussed in an online roundtable on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Information about the SERRC can be found here: https://social-epistemology.com/

To what extent is neoliberalism undermining democracy and distorting the values of science? Can and should science be treated as an exemplar for a more dialogic democracy? Are universities and public intellectuals able to develop a more dialogically engaged public? What role should there be for ‘experts’ in a more dialogic democracy? Does information and communications technology present a potential to enhance democracy or increase the control and manipulation of knowledge and the public by corporations? This timely volume explores these pressing questions, in a dialogue based on developing and applying the recovery of the ‘critical Popper’, which highlights his contemporary relevance to the critique of neoliberal political economy in the age of technocapitalism. This book will be discussed in an online roundtable on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Information about the SERRC can be found here: https://social-epistemology.com/

The work of Karl Popper has had extraordinary influence across the fields of scientific and social thought. Widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century, he was also a highly influential social and political philosopher, a proponent and defender of the "open society". "Popper's Legacy" examines Popper in the round, analysing in particular his moral and psychological insights. Once Popper's scientific legacy is couched in political and moral terms, it becomes apparent that his concern for individual autonomy does not come at the expense of institutional guidelines and social conventions. Instead, these guidelines turn out to be essential sanctions for individual freedom. Popper envisions the conduct of the scientific community as paralleling the conduct of any democratically established community. Critical rationality guides the words and actions of all participants and leadership can be replaced without violence. In presenting a critical overview, "Popper's Legacy" reveals the debt many intellectual movements - such as Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism - still owe to Popper.

The work of Karl Popper has had extraordinary influence across the fields of scientific and social thought. Widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century, he was also a highly influential social and political philosopher, a proponent and defender of the "open society". "Popper's Legacy" examines Popper in the round, analysing in particular his moral and psychological insights. Once Popper's scientific legacy is couched in political and moral terms, it becomes apparent that his concern for individual autonomy does not come at the expense of institutional guidelines and social conventions. Instead, these guidelines turn out to be essential sanctions for individual freedom. Popper envisions the conduct of the scientific community as paralleling the conduct of any democratically established community. Critical rationality guides the words and actions of all participants and leadership can be replaced without violence. In presenting a critical overview, "Popper's Legacy" reveals the debt many intellectual movements - such as Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism - still owe to Popper.

"Ethical Choices in Contemporary Medicine" jettisons the standard medical ethics models of "rights" language and shows how the bioethical problems that receive attention from the media and the public are related to and are explicable in terms of the epistemological foundations of science and medicine. These epistemological concerns include how medical knowledge is established (scientific validity), how medical protocols are administered (checks and balances), how medical certainty is evaluated (probability) and medical responsibility is framed (personal or collective), and how medical knowledge is transmitted (popular media versus professional journals) and how medical care is allocated (insurance policies and government subsides). The book examines the present predicaments of medicine within a broad cultural context and suggests that rational discourse and parochial ethical dialogue may be futile in the face of competing and incommensurable frameworks and agendas, attitudes and wishes. The authors show that, in the postmodern age, two interrelated issues surface when it comes to medicine. On the one hand, there is a strong critique of science and the privileges associated with the scientific discourse and, on the other, there is still a deep-seated quest for certainty in all medical matters.

"Ethical Choices in Contemporary Medicine" jettisons the standard medical ethics models of "rights" language and shows how the bioethical problems that receive attention from the media and the public are related to and are explicable in terms of the epistemological foundations of science and medicine. These epistemological concerns include how medical knowledge is established (scientific validity), how medical protocols are administered (checks and balances), how medical certainty is evaluated (probability) and medical responsibility is framed (personal or collective), and how medical knowledge is transmitted (popular media versus professional journals) and how medical care is allocated (insurance policies and government subsides). The book examines the present predicaments of medicine within a broad cultural context and suggests that rational discourse and parochial ethical dialogue may be futile in the face of competing and incommensurable frameworks and agendas, attitudes and wishes. The authors show that, in the postmodern age, two interrelated issues surface when it comes to medicine. On the one hand, there is a strong critique of science and the privileges associated with the scientific discourse and, on the other, there is still a deep-seated quest for certainty in all medical matters.

In this Festschrift, contributors from a range of interests and disciplines engage with the Popperian legacy and Jarvie’s scholarly and editorial work in Critical Rationalism to contextualize it in the broader, contemporary intellectual landscape.

Raphael Sassower examines the concept of hypocrisy for its strategic potential as a means of personal protection and social cohesion.

Raphael Sassower examines the concept of hypocrisy for its strategic potential as a means of personal protection and social cohesion.

In this Festschrift, contributors from a range of interests and disciplines engage with the Popperian legacy and Jarvie’s scholarly and editorial work in Critical Rationalism to contextualize it in the broader, contemporary intellectual landscape.