Review 'Some thinkers are influential, a few create schools, a very few characterize a period... it is possible that just as we speak of the age of Aquinas or of Goethe, later ages will speak of our time as the age of Levi-Strauss... he is a maker of the modern mind.' - James Redfield
Review 'To us Richards was infinitely more than a brilliantly new literary critic: he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World.' - Christopher Isherwood
Product Description This survey of the philosophers and philosophies from the founding father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, to Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 20th century, aims to make the history of modern philosophy cogent and intelligible to anyone wishing to understand this subject.
Modernity in Spanish America has been viewed by a 'postmodern' cultural studies as a condition of the first half of the twentieth century whose major political, philosophical and cultural assumptions the region would do well to leave behind. This book explores a corpus of Spanish-American literary texts from that 'modern' period which dramatize the constitutive dynamics of modernity, in particular the legacy of the French Revolution, the logic of nationalism, the founding of the modern city, and the awkward relationship to both Western and indigenous traditions. Its argument is that one cannot so easily take leave of modernity.
Added by: westlife | Karma: 733.12 | Fiction literature | 18 February 2009
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The Prince
When Lorenzo de' Medici seized control of the Florentine Republic in 1512, he summarily fired the Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Signoria and set in motion a fundamental change in the way we think about politics. The person who held the aforementioned office with the tongue-twisting title was none other than Niccolo Machiavelli, who, suddenly finding himself out of a job after 14 years of patriotic service, followed the career trajectory of many modern politicians into punditry. Unable to become an on-air political analyst for a television network, he only wrote a book. But what a book The Prince is. Its essential contribution to modern political thought lies in Machiavelli's assertion of the then revolutionary idea that theological and moral imperatives have no place in the political arena. "It must be understood," Machiavelli avers, "that a prince ... cannot observe all of those virtues for which men are reputed good, because it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity, against frankness, against religion, in order to preserve the state." With just a little imagination, readers can discern parallels between a 16th-century principality and a 20th-century presidency. --Tim Hoga
