Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

    Professor Douglas makes points which illuminate matters in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science and help to show the rest of us just why and how anthropology has become a fundamentally intellectual discipline.

    Combining examples with activities and selected readings it offers a unique resource for teachers and students in cultural studies and related fields as an introduction to this complex and central theme.

    But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller and Mozart, he also believed that art was in terminal decline.To resolve this apparent paradox, as Michael Inwood explains in his incisive Introduction, we must understand the particular place of aesthetics in Hegel's vast intellectual edifice. Its central pillars consist of logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Art derives its value from offering a sensory vision of the God-like absolute, from its harmonious fusion of form and content, and from summing up the world-view of an age such as Homer's. While it scaled supreme heights in ancient Greece, Hegel doubted art's ability to encompass Christian belief or the reflective irony characteristic of modern societies. Many such challenging ideas are developed in this superb treatise; it counts among the most stimulating works of a master thinker.Table of ContentsIntroductory Lectures on Aesthetics Introduction A Note on the Translation and CommentaryINTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON AESTHETICSChapter I: The Range of Aesthetic Defined, and Some Objections against the Philosophy of Art Refuted[α Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Artβ Does Art merit Scientific Treatment?γ Is Scientific Treatment appropriate to Art?δ Answer to βε Answer to γ]Chapter II: Methods of Science Applicable to Beauty and Art[1. Empirical Method - Art-scholarship(a) Its Range(b) It generates Rules and Theories(c) The Rights of Genius2. Abstract Reflection3. The Philosophical Conception of Artistic Beauty, general notion of]Chapter III: The Conception of Artistic BeautyPart I - The Work of Art as Made and as Sensuous1. Work of Art as Product of Human Activity[(a) Conscious Production by Rule(b) Artistic Inspiration(c) Dignity of Production by Man(d) Man's Need to produce Works of Art]2. Work of Art as addressed to Man's Sense[(a) Object of Art - Pleasant Feeling?(b) Feeling of Beauty - Taste(c) Art-scholarship(d) Profounder Consequences of Sensuous Nature of Art(α) Relations of the Sensuous to the Mind(αα) Desire(ββ) Theory(γγ) Sensuous as Symbol of Spiritual(β) The Sensuous Element, how Present in the Artist(γ) The Content of Art Sensuous]Part II - The End of Art3. [The Interest or End of Art(a) Imitation of Nature?(α) Mere Repetition of Nature is -(αα) Superfluous(ββ) Imperfect(γγ) Amusing Merely as Sleight of Hand(β) What is Good to Imitate?(γ) Some Arts cannot be called Imitative(b) Humani nihil - ?(c) Mitigation of the Passions?(α) How Art mitigates the Passions(β) How Art purifies the Passions(αα) It must have a Worthy Content(ββ) But ought not to be Didactic(γγ) Nor explicitly addressed to a Moral Purpose(d) Art has its own Purpose as Revelation of Truth]Chapter IV: Historical Deducation of the True Idea of Art in Modern Philosophy1. Kant[(a) Pleasure in Beauty not Appetitive(b) Pleasure in Beauty Universal(c) The Beautiful in its Teleological Aspect(d) Delight in the Beautiful necessary though felt]2. Schiller, Winckelmann, Schelling3. The IronyChapter V: Division of the Subject[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence of Matter and Plastic Form2. Part I - The Ideal3. Part II - The Types of Art(α) Symbolic Art(β) Classical Art(γ) Romantic Art4. Part III - The Several Arts(α) Architecture(β) Sculpture(γ) Romantic Art, comprising(i) Painting(ii) Music(iii) Poetry5. Conclusion]Commentary

    But his penetrating work of political philosophy - now fully revised and with a new introduction for this edition - opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world.

    The speech is significant both because its topic remains timely and because its arguments illustrate the applicability of the principle of utility to questions of large-scale social policy.

    But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This 50th anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second Look (in which Snow responded to the controversy four years later) features an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed.

    Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book of great originality and scholarship serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also encompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence.

    The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor's goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

    In a philosophical approach to color, William Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

    In seventy-six chapters he traces philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization to the emergence of logical analysis in the twentieth century. Among the philosophers considered are: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Plotinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Benedict, Gregory the Great, John the Scot, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey, and lastly the philosophers with whom Lord Russell himself is most closely associated -- Cantor, Frege, and Whitehead, co-author with Russell of the monumental Principia Mathematica.

    The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition - justice as fairness - and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

    The Golden Bough" describes our ancestors' primitive methods of worship, sex practices, strange rituals and festivals. Disproving the popular thought that primitive life was simple, this monumental survey shows that savage man was enmeshed in a tangle of magic, taboos, and superstitions. Revealed here is the evolution of man from savagery to civilization, from the modification of his weird and often bloodthirsty customs to the entry of lasting moral, ethical, and spiritual values.

    Ricoeur here examines the creation of meaning at the textual level, with narrative rather than metaphor as the ruling concern.Ricoeur finds a "healthy circle" between time and narrative: time is humanized to the extent that it portrays temporal experience. Ricoeur proposes a theoretical model of this circle using Augustine's theory of time and Aristotle's theory of plot and, further, develops an original thesis of the mimetic function of narrative. He concludes with a comprehensive survey and critique of modern discussions of historical knowledge, understanding, and writing from Aron and Mandelbaum in the late 1930s to the work of the Annales school and that of Anglophone philosophers of history of the 1960s and 1970s."This work, in my view, puts the whole problem of narrative, not to mention philosophy of history, on a new and higher plane of discussion."—Hayden White, History and Theory "Superb. . . . A fine point of entrance into the work of one of the eminent thinkers of the present intellectual age."—Joseph R. Gusfield, Contemporary Sociology

    Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, "The Black Atlantic" also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.