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One of the defining features of being human is the ability to communicate with others; yet, human beings often find it difficult to make themselves heard and to interpret one another. Given our increasingly interconnected and crowded world, the ability to communicate across differences of culture and identity is perhaps more important than ever. In this course, we will explore some of the philosophical issues involved in cross-cultural communication and miscommunication, including topics such as prejudice, “common sense,” contrasting background assumptions, truth, trust, cultural identity, and dialogue. Culminating projects will involve experiential application of philosophical theories.
John L. Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. This book is a collection of lectures presenting Austin’s conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin’s original lecture notes, emending the printed text where it seemed necessary. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin’s work.
This book, a landmark work on the philosophy of humanistic studies, establishes the field of philosophical hermeneutics. Exploring the nature of knowledge, the book rejects traditional quasi-scientific approaches to establishing cultural meaning that were prevalent after the war. In arguing that truth and method acted in opposition to each other, it examines the ways in which historical and cultural circumstance fundamentally influenced human understanding. This is an approach that would become hugely influential in the humanities and social sciences and remains so to this day in the work of Jurgen Habermas and many others.
This book is a collection of 15 essays by Clifford Geertz published between 1957 and the mid-1960s. In these essays, Geertz clarified the object of cultural study- not hidden subjectivities or whole ways of life but publicly available symbols. Other issues dealt with in these essays include the incompleteness of human nature without culture to organize action and experience, different conceptions of the continuity of human personality in different cultures, the resurgence of ethnic particularisms in the new nations, and the problem of when and why ritual practices break down or fail, etc.
This book is a collection of Annette Baier’s essays concerning moral prejudices. Most of the essays present views that draw from Baier’s reflections on her experience as a woman and as a woman philosopher, making the book a masterpiece of feminist philosophy. Taking its title from David Hume’s early essay “Of Moral Prejudices,” this book interweaves anecdotes and autobiography with readings of both Hume and Kant. Topics range from violence to love, from cruelty to justice, and are linked by a preoccupation with vulnerability and inequality of vulnerability, with trust and distrust of equals, with cooperation and isolation.
In this book, Appiah argues that cosmopolitan ethics comprises two assertions. First, our obligations to people extend beyond kith and kin, even beyond the realm of shared citizenship. Second, we have to vest value in “humanity” not just in the abstract, but in the particular lives of individual people; people we may never know. As a corollary to the second assertion, Appiah makes clear that we must value people not merely categorically, as in the Kantian injunction that people must be ends in themselves. Rather, Appiah urges that we value others because of the enrichment we derive from one another.
