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Exercises in Constructive Imagination

  • Book
  • © 2001

Overview

Authors:
  1. Ermanno Bencivenga

    1. University of California, Irvine, USA

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Part of the book series: Topoi Library (TOPI, volume 3)

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Table of contents (21 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages I-VII
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 1-5

  3. Knowledge Versus Belief

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 7-15

  4. A Strange (?) Quantum World

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 17-23

  5. Promissory Names

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 25-30

  6. What is Logic About?

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 31-42

  7. Dialectical Logic at Work in the Elective Affinities What We Can Learn From Goethe About Hegel

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 43-56

  8. Discriminating from Within

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 57-62

  9. The Poetics of (Philosophical) Interpretation

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 63-74

  10. Kant’s Sadism

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 75-81

  11. Respect for Structure

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 83-87

  12. The End of Analysis

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 89-95

  13. Being-Idle

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 97-100

  14. Taking Care of Ethical relativism

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 101-107

  15. Montaigne’s Pre-And Post-Modern Notion of Subjectivity

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 109-119

  16. An Oblique View

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 121-123

  17. Beyond Tolerance?

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 125-136

  18. An Answer to the Question “Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?”

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 137-147

  19. Machiavelli, for Example

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 149-165

  20. The Degradation of Talent

    • Ermanno Bencivenga
    Pages 167-169
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Keywords

About this book

Philosophy in this century has often self-consciously presented itself as aiming at the destruction or deconstruction of the philosophical tradition or even of theorizing as such. The basis for such self-description may well be a deep-seated anxiety about death; but whatever its grounds, the procession of distinguished intellectuals who seem mostly concerned with who gets to turn off the light on philosophy on his/her way out is one main reason why philosophy seems to have lost its grip on public opinion and public policy. Which is ironical, because there is often considerable constructive work going on under the pretence of all this `destruction', but the superficial rhetoric has more currency and impact than the substance of that work. This book brings back the spirit of bold, imaginative, even outrageous theorizing into philosophy, and contains a series of examples of it, venturing playfully into quantum mechanics and political theory, psychoanalysis and environmental ethics, philosophy of language and sociology, without any attempt at `systematically exhausting' these disparate fields but rather using them as suggestive excuses and arenas for the display of intellectual creativity. There are numerous echoes among the various pieces, and between them and other works by the same author; but again these resonances are not systematized. The result is more to be seen as a collection of snapshots of an intellectual landscape than as a hierarchical regimentation of it.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of California, Irvine, USA

    Ermanno Bencivenga

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Exercises in Constructive Imagination

  • Authors: Ermanno Bencivenga

  • Series Title: Topoi Library

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0952-2

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2001

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7923-6702-4Published: 31 December 2000

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-94-010-3801-0Published: 04 October 2012

  • eBook ISBN: 978-94-010-0952-2Published: 06 December 2012

  • Series ISSN: 1389-689X

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: VII, 211

  • Topics: Modern Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy, general, Logic, Metaphysics

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