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PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY-MORALITY-FAITH-IDEOLOGY

Posts in diversity
Race talk: Languages of racism and resistance in Neapolitan street markets

By Antonia Lucia Dawes

Race talk is about language use as an anti-racist practice in multicultural city spaces. The book contends that attention to talk reveals the relations of domination and subordination in heterogeneous, ethnically diverse and multilingual contexts, while also helping us to understand how transcultural solidarity might be expressed. Drawing on original ethnographic research conducted on licensed and unlicensed market stalls in heterogeneous, ethnically diverse and multilingual contexts, this book examines the centrality of multilingual talk to everyday struggles about difference, positionality and entitlement. In these street markets, Neapolitan street vendors work alongside documented and undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, China, Guinea Conakry, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal as part of an ambivalent, cooperative and unequal quest to survive and prosper. As austerity, anti-immigration politics and urban regeneration projects encroached upon the possibilities of street vending, talk across linguistic, cultural, national and religious boundaries underpinned the collective action of street vendors struggling to keep their markets open. The edginess of their multilingual organisation offered useful insights into the kinds of imaginaries that will be needed to overcome the politics of borders, nationalism and radical incommunicability.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020.

The Philosophy of Human Rights: Contemporary Controversies

Edited by Gerhard Ernst and Jan-Christoph Heilinger

The notion of "human rights" is widely used in political and moral debates. The core idea, that all human beings have some inalienable basic rights, is appealing and has an important practical function: It allows moral criticism of various wrongs and calls for action in order to prevent them. The articles in this collection take up a tension between the wide political use of human rights claims and some intellectual skepticism about them. In particular, three major issues call for clarification: the questions of how to justify human rights, how to determine their scope and the corresponding obligations, and how to overcome the tension between universal normative claims and particular moralities.

Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2011. 273p.

The Concept of Moral Progress

By Frauke Albersmeier

What is moral progress? Are we striving for moral progress when we seek to "make the world a better place"? What connects the different ways in which moral agents, their actions, and the world can become morally better? This book proposes an explication of the abstract concept of moral progress and explores its relation to our moral lives.

Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2022. 257p.

Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint For America's Faith- Based Future

By John J. Dilulio, Jr..

FROM THE JACKET: “Do you know is you are going to heaven?" Shortly after being appointed the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives--the "faith czar." John J. Dilulio, Jr., was asked this question. Suddenly Dilulio, a practicing Catholic and a New Democrat who had pioneered "faith factor" studis and founded programs for inner-city children, became acutely aware that he was no longer a private citizen who might have humored the television evangelist standing before him. Now he was an Assistant to the President, as he recalls in his introduction-"someone responsible for assisting President George W. Bush in faithfully upholding the Constitution, faithfully executing democratically enacted public laws, and faithfully acting in the public interest without regard to religious identities (and all contrary political purposes be damned). So I paused.*

Using his brief tenure in the Bush administration as a springboard, Dilulio leaps into the ongoing debate over whether as a nation America is Christian or secular and to what degree church-state separation is compelled by the Constitution. Avoiding political pieties, this lively, informative, and entertaining book makes an impassioned case for a middle way: one that recognizes the United States as a "Godly republic" under whose Constitution sacred institutions may be empowered to partner with the government…”

Berkeley Los Angeles. University Of California Press. 2007.

The Religions of Man

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By Huston Smith

FROM THE PREFACE: “In the spring of 1995 I gave a course on The Religions of Man over KETC, The St.Louis educational television station. The response revealed a real hunger on the part of Americans to know the great faiths that have motivated and continue to motivate the peoples of the world. Over 1200 men and women in this one community enrolled as tuition-paying students while the viewing audience rose to the neighborhood of 100,000. The second thing the response revealed was the need for a different kind of book on world religions, a book which without sacrificing depth would move more rapidly than the usual survey into the meaning these religions carry for the lives of their adherents…”

NY. Harper & Row. 1986.

Mythology: Timeless Tales Of Gods And Heroes

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By Edith Hamilton

FROM THE COVER: “The Classic Of Classics ...A father and husband caught up in a quarrel between gods and who finds his short sail home turning into a twenty-year journey filled with witches, storms, and one-eyed monsters. A family cursed by the sacrifice of a daughter in return for favorable sailing wnds a curse that can only be expiated in blood. A worried goddess who exacts a promise from all living things never to harm her son--but who misses one little, fatal shrub ….

"Classical mythology has long needed such a popular exposition as Miss Edith Hamilton has given us in this volume, which is at once a reference book and a book which may be read for stimulation and pleasure." -New York Times Book Review.

NY. Warner Books. 1942. 347p.

The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

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By Sam Harris

FROM THE COVER: “In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs- even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic.

"The End of Faith is a genuinely frightening book. ... Read Sam Harris and wake up." -Richard Dawkins, The Guardian

NY. W•W• Norton. 2004. 341p.

Freethinkers: A History Of American Secularism

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By Susan Jacoby

FROM THE JACKET: At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers celebrates the noble and essential secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, Susan Jacoby offers a powerful defense of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth-century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with tolerant and liberal religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for social reforms opposed by reactionaries in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow--as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great Agnostic"-Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanist champions. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the unique combination of secular government and religious liberty that is and always has been the glory of the American system.

NY. Henry Holt and Company. 2004. 441p.

Who Moved the Stone?

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By Frank Morison

FROM THE COVER: “I wanted to take this last phase of the life of Jesus, with all its quick and pulsating drama, its sharp, clear-cut background of antiquity, and its tremendous psychological and human intersEt - -to strip it of its overgrowth of primitive beliefs, dogmatic suppositions, and to see this supremely great Person as He really was.”

Such was English journalist Frank Morison's drive to learn of Christ. The strangeness of the Resurrection story had captured his attention, and, influenced by skeptic thinkers at the turn of the century, he set out to prove that the story of Christ's Resurrection was only a myth. His probings, however, led him to discover the validity of the biblical record in a moving, personal way. Who Moved the Stone? is considered by many to be a classic apologetic on the subject of the Resurrection. Morison includes a vivid and poignant account of Christ's betrayal, trial, and death as a backdrop to his retelling of the climactic Resurrection itself.”

Grand Rapids. Michigan. Lamplighters Books. 1958 (1930) 192p.

Martin Luther's 95 Theses

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By Martin Luther

“Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred & Theology, and ordinary lecturer therein at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following state- ments and to dispute on them in that place. There fore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.”

The Saint and the Boy: And Twenty Other Stories For Children

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By John Leale

“'Saint,' said a boy as they were having a walk together. 'If you went home andfound that a bad man was in your house, what would you do about it?'

'I would try to make friends with him,' replied the saint.

'Yes, but supposing that he didn't want to make friends with you, what would you do then?” asked the boy.

'I would go on trying to make friends with him,' said the saint.

'Yes, but supposing he stamped his foot and thumped the table with his fist, and said: "Saint, I won't be friends with you." What would you do then?*

'I would ask the Good Lord what I ought to do.'

…..

London. The Epworth Press. 1957. 104p.

The Church and the Age of Reason 1648-1789

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By Gerald R. Cragg

FROM THE PREFACE: “This span in the history of the Christian church stretches from the age of religious and civil strife which existed before the middle of the seventeenth century to the age of industrialism and republicanism which followed the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic wars. The church in general, reacting strongly against the turbulences of the Civil War and the Thirty Years' War, placed a premium on order, moderation, and stability. Movements suspected of enthusiasm, such as Puritanism, Quietism, and Jansenism, fell into disrepute, and the authority exercised by the state in religious affairs became more pronounced. It was an age dominated by Reason, which, until it provoked a reaction in such movements as Pietism and Evangelicism, posed a formidable challenge to Christianity.”

London. Penguin. 1960. 297p.

Documents Of The Christian Church

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Selected and Edited by Henry Bettenson

FROM THE COVER FLAP: This book presents a selection from the most important records of the history of the Christian Church from its beginning. It goes in all cases to official documents and other sources, and provides the general reader with many extracts, about most of which he may have heard, though he will have seen very few and will certainly not have them conveniently to his hand in one volume. The book opens with references to Christianity in the Classical authors, and continues with, among other subjects, the Relation of Church and State in the Roman Empire, the Formation of the Creeds, the Development of Doctrine, the Breach between East and West, the Empire and the Papacy, the Relations between Church and State….”

London. Oxford University Press. 1959. 479p.

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews

By James Carroll

FROM THE COVER: In this "rare book that combines searing passion ... with a subject that has affected all of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture. A courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths that will touch every reader, Constantines Sword is truly a book for our times.

A Mariner Boo.k Houghton Mifelin Company. 2002. 757p. USED BOOK. CONTAINS MARK-UP.

Altruism, Morality, and Economic Theory

Edited by Edmund S. Phelps

From the Preface: “The self-interest model has had sweeping success over recent decades in the study of both economics and politics. Yet the inner ambiguities and limitations of that model could not indefinitely escape notice and examination. Self interest in some interpretation is some of the story some of the time, never the whole story. On March 3 and 4, 1972, a number o fsocial scientists met at Russell Sage Foundation to speculate and theorize on the roles that altruism and morality in a society may play in shaping human behaviorand institutions within it. The nine papers presented at the conference are by economists. The commentaries on them were drawn from representatives of other disciplines, primarily philosophy and law. This volume is a rough. approximation to the proceedings of the conference. An introduction by the editor has been added to announce some of the main themes and to bring out some of the interrelations among the papers.”

NY. Russell Sage Foundation. 1975. 225p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

Evolutionary Ethics

By A. G. N. Flew

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: The obvious and the right place from which to begin a study of evolutionary ethics is the work of Charles Darwin. For, primarily, it is his ideas - or what have been thought to be his ideas which advocates of evolutionary ethics or evolutionary politics have tried to apply more widely. This is not, of course, to say that Darwin hadn ointellectual ancestors; any more than it is to suggest that biological theory has since his death stood still. To say or to suggest either thing would be absurdly wrong…”

NY. St. Martinn’s Press. 1967. 78p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

The Calendar of Saints

Compiled By Vincent Cronin

From the introduction: “…With the portrayal of saints, on the other hand, artists have felt no nced to transcend the limitations of time and place. Such portraits accurately reflect the ciilization which gave them birth, without, however, being merely local or national. Hagio-iconography has scldom been tainted by chauvinism. St George, a martyr in Palestine, is patron saint of England, while St Nicholas is honoured no less in Italy than in Russia. I can remember my surprise and delight in finding a stained- glass window of St Thomas à Becket in a church in Sicily, and a picture of St Theresa of Lisieux in a peasant cottage in the depths of Yugoslavia. The portrayal of saints, though some may regard it as merely a side-line in the history of Western civilization, can actually claim to be one of its most central and distinctive features…”

Westminster. Newman Press. 1963. 381p.

Conjectures And Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge

By Karl R. Popper

Conjectures and Refutations is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

NY. Harper Torchbooks. 1963. 423p.

Dying with Dignity: A Legal Approach to Assisted Death

By Giza Lopes

From the series foreword by Graeme R. Newman: “ Lopes convincingly argues that not only have the clergy as the shepherds of Death been replaced by modern medicine’s doctors and technologies, but that the rule of law has intervened to codify the ways and rights of helping people to die. She catalogues, with fascinating case studies and detailed historical observation, the quite different ways that the United States and European countries have tackled this problem of all problems. This is an erudite book that leaves no detail untouched; relentlessly unravels the moral, judicial, and political events that arguably precede—seen and unseen—not only every assisted death but arguably every single death on earth; and shows how these events have relentlessly set the stage for the coming movement to quicken the time it takes to die.”

Santa Barbara. Praeger. 2015. 256p.