In this path-breaking and controversial book, Harry Redner provides a systematic study of how the epistemologically interesting features of contemporary science are to be understood. Taking “science†to include knowledge from the social sciences and humanities as well as the physical sciences, Redner shows how the history of science, philosophical theory, and current scientific research reveal connections between scientific developments and features of the social organization of science. ...

This book deals with representation in science, politics and art both in its historical dimensions and in its contemporary expression. It aims to reveal the current trends of culture and guide these towards the goal of a future culture for the coming global technological civilization.

The tragedy of European civilization is a protracted historical event spanning the twentieth century and in many ways is ongoing. During this time some of the greatest modern thinkers were active, producing works that both reflected what was happening in history and contributed towards shaping it. This work is a critique of their ideas. Harry Redner establishes where and how they went wrong, in some cases with apocalyptic consequences for Europe and the world.The great intellectual...

The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University is an intellectual history of research in the humanities and social sciences. It scrutinizes the priorities, values, objectives and publishing agendas of the modern university in order to assess the institutional pressures on research in major disciplines such as literature, history, sociology and economics. It argues that all these disciplines are currently experiencing a deep malaise – though to different degrees – due to lo...

Ulysses and Faust: Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present examines the most important authors of Western literature: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Marlowe, Goethe, Joyce, Eliot, Mann, Bulgakov and Pasternak, who based their works on one or other of the two key myths of the West, Ulysses and Faust. This volume provides a synoptic view of Western literature, as a foundation text for literary studies at all levels and as a way of encouraging people to once more en...

For Harry Redner, the phrase "beyond civilization" refers to the new and unprecedented condition the world is now entering‘specifically, the condition commonly known as globalization. Redner approaches globalization from the perspective of history and seeks to interpret it in relation to previous key stages of human development. His account begins with the Axial Age (700 300 BC) and proceeds through Modernity (after AD 1500) to the present global condition.What is globalization doi...

This fourth instalment of Harry Redner's tetralogy on the history of civilization argues that intellectuals have a brilliant past, a dubious present, and possibly no future. He contends that the philosophers of the seventeenth century laid the ground for the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. They, in turn, promoted a fundamental transformation of human consciousness: they literally intellectualized the world. The outcome was the disenchantment of the world ...

The century that began in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War was catastrophic. Over the course of that one-hundred-year span, civilizations were destroyed in the Old World, the New World, and the Third World, the latter represented by China, India, and Islam.In Europe the main agent of destruction was totalitarianism; in America it was globalization, ushered in by modernity; and in the non-Western world it was colonialism, followed later by totalitarianism and globalization. Har...

This is primarily, but not exclusively, a book on Lindblom. All the pieces in it bear on his work, either as direct commentary on it or criticism of it, or as extensions of his ideas. But at the same time every piece follows the trajectory of its own ideas into the subject matter in which it delves. And these subjects are many and varied. Indeed, the prime purpose of this volume is to make the broad public aware of the full scope and amplitude of Lindblom' s thought and to convey something...

The thinkers who have been most influential on the attitudes of the New Left are examined in this study by one of the leading critics of leftist orientations in modern Western civilization. Scruton begins with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concludes with a critique of the key strands in its thinking. He conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as: E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Z...

What is Romanticism? In this Very Short Introduction Michael Ferber answers this by considering who the romantics were and looks at what they had in common -- their ideas, beliefs, commitments, and tastes. He looks at the birth and growth of Romanticism throughout Europe and the Americas, and examines various types of Romantic literature, music, painting, religion, and philosophy. Focusing on topics, Ferber looks at the 'Sensibility' movement, which preceded Romanticism; ...

“A skilled exploration” of why 6 notable 20th-century philosophers—from Martin Heidegger to Michel Foucault—succumbed to “a narcissistic embrace of totalitarian politics” (The Washington Post).European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it? Here,...