Imagining Irreality

2003
Imagining Irreality

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  • Author: Nicholas Rescher
  • Publisher: Open Court Publishing
  • ISBN: 9780812695656
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 324

Nicholas Rescher surveys and analyzes the different kinds of unreal possibilities and nonexistent objects, tying together all the diverse ways in which this area has been approached by philosophers. As he surveys the field and clarifies the kinds of unreality, he also makes a sustained argument against the philosophical fashion for dealing with nonexistent possible world as though they were authentic objects. The author holds that, while we may discuss possibilities, we ought not to accord them ontological status. The possibility of existence of a certain sort of world is not the existence of possible world of a certain sort. While we may reasonable discuss possibilities at the generic level, such as a world where dogs have horns, this does not require a commitment to a possible world where they do. The work that theorists of logic and language want to accomplish with possible worlds and individuals can be managed with propositional manifolds, stories or scenarios, while the modalities of necessity and possibility that modal logicians want to analyze in terms of realization in possible worlds can be handled by turning instead to figuring in stories or scenarios.

History and Future

2010
History and Future

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  • Author: David J. Staley
  • Publisher: Lexington Books
  • ISBN: 0739117548
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 191

Perhaps the most important histiographic innovation of the twentieth century was the application of the historical method to wider and more expansive areas of the past. Where historians once defined the study of history strictly in terms of politics and the actions and decisions of Great Men, historians today are just as likely to inquire into a much wider domain of the past, from the lives of families and peasants, to more abstract realms such as the history of mentalities and emotions. Historians have applied their method to a wider variety of subjects; regardless of the topic, historians ask questions, seek evidence, draw inferences from that evidence, create representations, and subject these representations to the scrutiny of other historians. This book severs the historical method from the past altogether by applying that method to a domain outside of the past. The goal of this book is to apply history-as-method to the study of the future, a subject matter domain that most historians have traditionally and vigorously avoided. Historians have traditionally rejected the idea that we can use the study of history to think about the future. The book reexamines this long held belief, and argues that the historical method is an excellent way to think about and represent the future. At the same time, the book asserts that futurists should not view the future as a scientist might--aiming for predictions and certainties--but rather should view the future in the same way that an historian views the past.

Animation – Process, Cognition and Actuality

2017-08-24
Animation – Process, Cognition and Actuality

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  • Author: Dan Torre
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
  • ISBN: 1501308157
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 312

Animation - Process, Cognition and Actuality presents a uniquely philosophical and multi-disciplinary approach to the scholarly study of animation, by using the principles of process philosophy and Deleuzian film aesthetics to discuss animation practices, from early optical devices to contemporary urban design and installations. Some of the original theories presented are a process-philosophy based theory of animation; a cognitive theory of animation; a new theoretical approach to the animated documentary; an original investigative approach to animation; and unique considerations as to the convergence of animation and actuality. Numerous animated examples (from all eras and representing a wide range of techniques and approaches – including television shows and video games) are examined, such as Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Madame Tutli-Putli (2007), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), The Peanuts Movie (2015), Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist (1995–2000). Divided into three sections, each to build logically upon each other, Dan Torre first considers animation in terms of process and process philosophy, which allows the reader to contemplate animation in a number of unique ways. Torre then examines animation in more conceptual terms in comparing it to the processes of human cognition. This is followed by an exploration of some of the ways in which we might interpret or 'read' particular aspects of animation, such as animated performance, stop-motion, anthropomorphism, video games, and various hybrid forms of animation. He finishes by guiding the discussion of animation back to the more tangible and concrete as it considers animation within the context of the actual world. With a genuinely distinctive approach to the study of animation, Torre offers fresh philosophical and practical insights that prompt an engagement with the definitions and dynamics of the form, and its current literature.

Poetics of Imagining

2019-07-31
Poetics of Imagining

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  • Author: Kearney Richard Kearney
  • Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
  • ISBN: 147446971X
  • Category : Imagination (Philosophy)
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 256

Richard Kearney has produced a new and revised paperback edition of his classic book Poetics of Imagining. This volume offers an accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life of phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeuneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur) and post-modernism (Vattimo, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture.

Alternative Universities

2019-03-26
Alternative Universities

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  • Author: David J. Staley
  • Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
  • ISBN: 1421427419
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 281

Pairing a critique tempered to our current moment with an explanation of how change and disruption might contribute to a new "golden agefor higher education, Alternative Universities is an audacious and essential read.

Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination

2018-05-30
Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination

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  • Author: Saulius Geniusas
  • Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
  • ISBN: 1786604353
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 256

This innovative collection traces the heretical development of productive imagination in post-Kantian philosophy. The book offers an original study that comprises unprecedented investigations into the kinaesthetic, pre-linguistic, poetic, historical, artistic, social and political dimensions of the productive power of imagination.

Reality and Its Appearance

2011-11-03
Reality and Its Appearance

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  • Author: Nicholas Rescher
  • Publisher: A&C Black
  • ISBN: 1441188908
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 140

In Reality and Its Appearance, Nicholas Rescher aims to address the conceptual and analytical question: how does the concept of reality function and how should we think with regard to the issue of reality's relations to appearances? Rescher argues that the distinction between reality and its appearance is not a substantive distinction between two types of being, but rather relates to different ways of understanding one selfsame mode of being. The book proposes that while realism is a sensible and tenable position, nevertheless there is something to be said for idealism as well. In the cognitive as in the moral life, perfection is beyond our human grasp and we have no choice but to rest content with the best that we can manage to achieve in practice. This perspective shifts the approach from a cognitive absolutism to a pragmatism that is prepared to come to terms with the limitations inherent in our situations. On this basis Rescher defends a substantive realism that itself rests on a justificatory rationale of a decidedly pragmatic orientation.

Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary

2019-12-12
Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary

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  • Author: Donna Kornhaber
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • ISBN: 022647271X
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 333

In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats—an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film itself. The world’s very first animated movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world’s richest archives of wartime memory and witness. Generation after generation, artists have turned to this most fantastical of mediums to capture real-life horrors they can express in no other way. From Chinese animators depicting the Japanese invasion of Shanghai to Bosnian animators portraying the siege of Sarajevo, from African animators documenting ethnic cleansing to South American animators reflecting on torture and civil war, from Vietnam-era protest films to the films of the French Resistance, from firsthand memories of Hiroshima to the haunting work of Holocaust survivors, the animated medium has for more than a century served as a visual repository for some of the darkest chapters in human history. It is a tradition that continues even to this day, in animated shorts made by Russian dissidents decrying the fighting in Ukraine, American soldiers returning from Iraq, or Middle Eastern artists commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, or the ongoing crisis in Yemen. Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film vividly tells the story of these works and many others, covering the full history of animated film and spanning the entire globe. A rich, serious, and deeply felt work of groundbreaking media history, it is also an emotional testament to the power of art to capture the endurance of the human spirit in the face of atrocity.

On Philosophy in American Law

2009-03-23
On Philosophy in American Law

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  • Author: Francis J. Mootz III
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 1139478850
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 311

In recent years, there has been tremendous growth of interest in the connections between law and philosophy, but the diversity of approaches that claim to be working at the intersection of these disciplines might suggest that this area of inquiry is so fractured as to be incoherent. This volume gathers leading scholars to provide focused and straightforward articulations of the role that philosophy might play at this juncture of the history of American legal thought. It marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Karl Llewellyn's essay 'On Philosophy in American Law' in which he rehearsed the broad development of American jurisprudence, diagnosed its contemporary failings and then charted a productive path opened by the variegated scholarship that claimed to initiate a realistic approach to law and legal theory. It is written in the spirit of Llewellyn's article: they are succinct and direct arguments about the potential for bringing law and philosophy together.

Tourism and the Night

2021-05-18
Tourism and the Night

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  • Author: Andrew Smith
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1000390306
  • Category : Business & Economics
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 140

Over recent decades, municipal authorities have promoted their cities as places boasting desirable night-time activities. Light festivals, museum lates, nightclubbing, and night markets extend the typical tourist experience into the night and have become a key part of the way some cities are branded. This anthology draws together research addressing the relationship between tourism and the night, facilitating a better understanding of nocturnal city destinations. Tourism and the Night: Rethinking Nocturnal Destinations covers an array of different tourist activities taking place at night and a range of European cities. The challenges facing late-night workers, the relationship between tourists and residents, and the effects of local policies on the expansion of late-night entertainment are examined in the first part of the book. The latter part focuses on the significance of night-time events, addressing the rising popularity of light art festivals and established religious rituals. Ultimately, this ground-breaking collection of papers examines how the night has become an important setting for city tourism. This trend means there is a need to rethink the management of urban districts and destinations, but there are also important implications for our understanding and experiences of the urban night. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.