Search

This volume offers the first systematic philosophical study of esotericism and late modern philosophy. It addresses fundamental philosophical questions related to esotericism and reveals that esoteric ideas have had decisive impact on countless important philosophers, even if this fact has been neglected in contemporary philosophy. The first part of the book is dedicated to substantial and methodological questions. What is philosophy, what is esotericism, and how should we think about their relationship? The second section is more historically oriented, and it is divided in two parts. Part I is concerned with German romanticism and idealism, with a specific focus on the influence of esotericism on Hegel and Schelling, as well as the connection between romanticism and Kabbalah in the work of Gershom Scholem. Part II explores esotericism in phenomenology, pragmatism, and post-idealism, specifically in the work of William James, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, and Roy Bhaskar. Philosophical Perspectives on Esotericism will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and religious studies.

As a research field, social movement and political project, degrowth is a multifaceted phenomenon. It brings together a range of practices including alternative forms of living and transformative initiatives in civil society, business and the state. Yet no comprehensive theory of degrowth transformations has so far been developed. Deep Transformations fills this gap. It develops a theory of degrowth transformations drawing on insights from multiple fields of knowledge, such as political economy, sociology and philosophy. The book offers a holistic perspective that brings into focus transformation processes on various scales and points to various mechanisms that can facilitate degrowth. These include, for instance, eco-social policies, transformative initiatives in business and civil society and alternative modes of being in and relating with the world.

Ecological Democracy offers an original, thought-provoking, and engaging treatment of why and how democracy should be re-imagined in reaction to today’s ecological crisis. The book explains that one need to re-imagine both the view on nature and democratic ideals within the same framework in the Anthropocene, the present geological epoch of human-made instability in the Earth system and its planetary boundaries. This book proposes unique and challenging readings of green political theory and its development of ecological democracy in the last four decades. The book is the first to offer a systematic and detailed interpretation of the role of critical theory vis-à-vis green political theory through an update regarding current non-anthropocentric critical theorists and how they may contribute to the further development of ecological democracy. Ecological Democracy builds further on deep ecology, ecophenomenology, and animism by articulating an ecocentric view on nature which defends an intrinsic moral value of all existence as well as formulating the democratic principle of all ecologically affected parties. This book provides a sophisticated, convincing, and accessible argument for how to re-imagine ecological democracy as ecocentrism in practice: ecological love. To love ecologically means caring for and encountering all existence on the Earth and in the cosmos. This book is multi-disciplinary and will be of great value to researchers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students from many disciplines.

This is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations. It does this by examining concepts as acquired dispositions, and then focuses on perhaps the most important of these: the concept of learning. This concept is important because everything that we know and do in the world is predicated on a prior act of learning. A concept can have many meanings and can be used in a number of different ways, and this creates difficulty when considering the nature of objects and the relationships between them. To enable this, David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. Some of these questions are: What is learning? What different meanings can be given to the notion of learning? How does the concept of learning relate to other concepts, such as innatism, development and progression? The book offers a counter-argument to empiricist conceptions of learning, to the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment, and to the denial that values are central to understanding how we live. It argues that values permeate everything: our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures and our relations with other people. Praise for On Learning 'Provides a nuanced and layered understanding of the complex concept and practice of learning to students and researchers.' Educational Review

Wie sähen Wirtschaftswissenschaften aus, die sich konsequent den Praktiken wirtschaftender Akteur*innen zuwenden? Um diese Frage zu beantworten, entwickelt Lukas Bäuerle einen konzeptuellen Rahmen aus Institutionen- und Praxistheorien, kritischem Realismus und Sozialphänomenologie, den er stringent zu einer praxeologischen Institutionenforschung zuspitzt. Am Beispiel der Subjektivierungspraktiken von Studierenden der Wirtschaftswissenschaften dekliniert er seinen Ansatz durch und deutet die empirischen Ergebnisse in Anlehnung an Friedrich Hayek, Karl Marx und Roberto Unger. Das Ergebnis: Wirtschaftswissenschaften sollten nicht nur grundlegend neu gemacht werden, sondern können es auch!

Since the relational turn, scholars have combated methodological universalism, nationalism, and individualism in researching social-spatial transformations. Yet, when leaving the gaps between the traveling and local epistemic assumptions unattended, engaging relational spatial theories in empirical research may still reproduce established theoretical claims. Following the sociology of knowledge tradition and taking Critical Realism as a meta-theoretical framework, Xiaoxue Gao takes relational spatial theories as traveling conceptual knowledge and develops meaningful and context-sensitive ways of engaging them in studying the complex urban phenomenon in China. She offers conceptual elucidations and methodological roadmaps, which leap productively from employing plural causal hypotheses to generating effect-based explanations for locally observable events. They are exemplified by manifold interrogations of Beijing's Artworld as a conjuncture of particular events.

This book explores the ways in which social relations are profoundly changing modern society, arguing that, constituting a reality of their own, social relations will ultimately lead to a new form of society: an aftermodern or relational society. Drawing on the thought of Simmel, it extends the idea that society consists essentially of social relations, in order to make sense of the operation of dichotomous forces in society and to examine the emergence of a "third" in the morphogenetic processes. Through a realist and critical relational sociology, which allows for the fact that human beings are both internal and external to social relations, and therefore to society, the author shows how we are moving towards a new, trans-modern society – one that calls into question the guiding ideas of Western modernity, such as the notion of linear progression, that science and technology are the decisive factors of human development, and that culture can entirely supplant nature. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, economists, political scientists, and social philosophers with interests in relational thought, critical realism, and social transformation.

This is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations. It does this by examining concepts as acquired dispositions, and then focuses on perhaps the most important of these: the concept of learning. This concept is important because everything that we know and do in the world is predicated on a prior act of learning. A concept can have many meanings and can be used in a number of different ways, and this creates difficulty when considering the nature of objects and the relationships between them. To enable this, David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. Some of these questions are: What is learning? What different meanings can be given to the notion of learning? How does the concept of learning relate to other concepts, such as innatism, development and progression? The book offers a counter-argument to empiricist conceptions of learning, to the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment, and to the denial that values are central to understanding how we live. It argues that values permeate everything: our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures and our relations with other people.

Wieso wandelt sich Kooperation in Konflikt? Wie lässt sich der dynamische Wechsel in der deutsch-amerikanischen Sicherheitsstruktur in Afghanistan und im Irak erklären? Dieses Problem geht weit über den konkreten Gegenstand hinaus, berührt es doch auch grundlegende Fragen: etwa die nach der menschlichen Natur oder jene nach dem Verhältnis von Akteur und Struktur bzw. von Ideen und Materie. Auch die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen wissenschaftlicher Analysen bedürfen einer Reflexion. Auf Basis des #on("i")#Critical Realism#off("i")# stellt sich Tim Griebel diesen Fragen und rekonstruiert die Dynamik von Liebe und Macht innerhalb einer historischen Sicherheitsstruktur mithilfe einer korpuslinguistischen kritisch-realistischen Diskursanalyse.