Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including 'Essay on Bentham' and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin

Including three of his most famous and important essays, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Essay on Bentham, along with formative selections from Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, this volume provides a uniquely perspicuous view of Mill's ethical and political thought.

• Contains Mill's most famous and influential works, Utilitarianism and On Liberty as well as his important Essay on Bentham.
• Uses the 1871 edition of Utilitarianism, the last to be published in Mill's lifetime.
• Includes selections from Bentham and John Austin, the two thinkers who most influenced Mill.
• Introduction written by Mary Warnock, a highly respected figure in 20th-century ethics in her own right.
• Provides an extensive, up-to-date bibliography with the best scholarship on Mill, Bentham and Utilitarianism.

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Utilitarianism

Surveying the historical development and the present condition of utilitarial ethics, Geoffrey Scarre examines the major philosophers from Mo Tzu in the fifth century BC to Richard Hare in the twentieth. Utilitarianism traces the "doctrine of utility" from the moralists of the ancient world, through the enlightenment and Victorian utilitarianism up to the lively debate of the present day. Utilitarianism today faces challenges on several fronts: it cannot warrant the drawing of adequate protective boundaries around the essential interests of individuals, and it does not allow them the space to pursue the personal concerns which give meaning to their lives. Geoffrey Scarre considers these and other charges, and concludes that while utilitarianism may not be a faultless moral doctrine, its positions are relevant, and significant today. Written with undergraduates in mind, this is an ideal course book for those studying and those teaching moral philosophy.

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Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy

Hannah Arendt's last philosophical work was an intended three-part project entitled The Life of the Mind. Unfortunately, Arendt lived to complete only the first two parts, Thinking and Willing. Of the third, Judging, only the title page, with epigraphs from Cato and Goethe, was found after her death. As the titles suggest, Arendt conceived of her work as roughly parallel to the three Critiques of Immanuel Kant. In fact, while she began work on The Life of the Mind, Arendt lectured on "Kant's Political Philosophy," using the Critique of Judgment as her main text. The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area.

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Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism: Themes from Harsanyi and Rawls

The utlitiarian economist and Nobel Laureate John Harsanyi and the liberal egalitarian philosopher John Rawls were two of the most eminent scholars writing on problems of social justice in the last century. The contributions to this volume, addressed to an interdisciplinary audience, pay tribute to them by investigating themes that figure prominently in their work. In some cases, the contributors explore issues considered by Harsanyi and Rawls in more depth and from novel perspectives. In others, the contributors use the work of Harsanyi and Rawls as points of departure for pursuing the construction of new theories for the evaluation of social justice. 

 

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Human Rights and Chinese Thought

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement. 

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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

  The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global free market has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to IraqIn her groundbreaking reporting over the past few years, Naomi Klein introduced the term disaster capitalism. Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic shock treatment, losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman s free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement s peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

  Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn't just some relic from the bad old days. It's alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you. "At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq'' civil war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves… Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the 'War on Terror' to Halliburton and Blackwater… After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts… New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be re-opened." Klein not only kicks butt, she names names, notably economist Milton Friedman and his radical Chicago School of the 1950s and 60s which she notes "produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today." Stand up and take a bow, Donald Rumsfeld. There's little doubt Klein's book--which arrived to enormous attention and fanfare thanks to her previous missive, the best-selling No Logo, will stir the ire of the right and corporate America. It's also true that Klein's assertions are coherent, comprehensively researched and footnoted, and she makes a very credible case. Even if the world isn't going to hell in a hand-basket just yet, it's nice to know a sharp customer like Klein is bearing witness to the backroom machinations of government and industry in times of turmoil. --Kim Hughes

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Abortion In Judaism

Abortion in Judaism presents a complete Jewish legal history of abortion from the earliest relevant biblical references through the end of the twentieth century. For the first time, almost every Jewish text relevant to the abortion issue is explored in detail. These texts are investigated in historical sequence, thereby elucidating the development inherent within the Jewish approach to abortion. The work considers the insights that this thematic history provides into Jewish ethical principles, as well as into the role of halakhah within Judaism.

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Nietzsche's Aesthetic Turn

"This clearly written book, intended for both specialists and nonspecialists, focuses on Nietzsche's later writings, where he appears unsystematic and indifferent to questions of truth. "This book undertakes three important and related tasks. The first is a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche's notoriously slippery writings; the second is a critique of several major positions in Nietzsche interpretation; and the third is a proposal for a kind of philosophizing 'beyond the truth standard,' a philosophy without nostalgia for the lost grounds of truth. These topics are important today, and form the basis for a considerable debate about the significance of Nietzsche in particular and his role in shaping the twentieth century in general."--(cover book)

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A Defense of Abortion

The central thesis of philosopher David Boonin is that the moral case against abortion can be shown to be unsuccessful on terms that critics of abortion can and do accept. Critically examining a wide array of arguments that have attempted to establish that every human fetus has a right to life, Boonin posits that all of these arguments fail on their own terms. He then argues that even if the fetus does have a right to life, abortion can still be shown to be morally permissible on the critic of abortion's own terms. Finally, Boonin considers a number of arguments against abortion that do not depend on the claim that the fetus has a right to life, including those based on the golden rule, considerations of uncertainty and a commitment to certain feminist principles, and asserts that these positions, too, are ultimately unsuccessful. The result is the most thorough and detailed case for the moral permissibility of abortion that has yet been written. David Boonin is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (Cambridge, 1994).

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The Road Since Structure : Thomas S. Kuhn

The title refers to Kuhn's seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Published in 1962, in which he argued that the history of science is not gradual and Cumulative but instead is punctuated by a series of more or less radical "paradigm shifts." The new book reprints 11 essays in which Kuhn defends, develops and, in some cases, modifies the views he put forward in Structure. Trained as a physicist, Kuhn as a young man turned his interest to the history and philosophy of science. He discussed that change in an absorbing three-day interview that he had with three Greek scholars in 1995, the year before he died. "I think I would have been a damn good physicist," he remarked, but increasingly the field seemed to him to be "fairly dull, the work was not interesting." Of Structure, he said: "I wanted it to be an important book; clearly it was being an important book--I didn't like most of the ways in which it was being an important book." And, surprisingly for such an influential writer, he said that he had always found it "very hard to write." 

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Kontrak Sosial

Kontrak sosial adalah sebuah perjanjian antara rakyat dengan para pemimpinnya, atau antara manusia-manusia yang tergabung di dalam komunitas tertentu. Secara tradisional, istilah kontrak sosial digunakan di dalam argumentasi yang berupaya menjelaskan hakikat dari kegiatan berpolitik atau menjelaskan tanggung jawab dari pemimpin kepada rakyat. Beberapa filsuf yang memakai teori kontrak sosial adalah Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, dan Kant.

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Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them.

Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling.

For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives"

Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

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Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition)

Annette Michelson’s contributions to art and film criticism over the last three decades have been unparalleled. This volume honors her unique legacy with original essays by some of the many scholars who have been influenced by her work. Some continue her efforts to develop theoretical frameworks for understanding modernist art, while others practice her form of interdisciplinary criticism in relation to avant-garde and modernist art works and artists. Still others investigate and evaluate Michelson’s work itself. All in some way pay homage to her extraordinary contribution.

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Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag’s On Photography.

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