New Releases by David Ross

A Portrait of Salespeople is a collection of comical, strange, and amusing sales stories. These tales impart wisdom the easy way. Whenever salespeople gather, it isn''t long before they''re swapping war stories. These informal lessons offer a fun and pleasurable way of refining the craft of salesmanship.

A concisely written overview of the major events in Scotland''s history in an easy-to-use format. This reference work provides essential historieal facts from the earliest times to the present day.

Explores the human propensity for owning and having.

Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

In this fourth volume of Stephen David Ross''s ongoing project reexamining the Western philosophical tradition, The Gift of Kinds explores the order of things, linking the kinds of the natural world to disciplinary distinctions and to social divisions by gender, race, class, and nationality. It pursues a local and contingent ethics that pervades human life and the earth that responds to the expressiveness of things everywhere, resisting the tyranny of kinds, human and otherwise. The book examines the idea of natural and human kinds as requisite to any thought of heterogeneity and any resistance to neutrality, developed in relation to ecological and environmental issues. The giving of the good is understood in terms of species and kinds, linked with genealogy: family, gender, race, kin, and kind. Levinas''s sense of exposure–expression and proximity–is interpreted as propinquity. Kinds are interpreted as intermediary figures between histories of domination and celebrations of responsibility, between essentialism and identity politics.

Traces Western ideas of corporeal bodies from Plato to contemporary feminist and postructuralist writings, with the purpose of reexamining the good, identified in Plato as that which gives authority to knowledge and truth.

Conventional historical and political analyses of South Africa have frequently neglected the vital role of sport in general, and rugby in particular. This book fills the gap through a critical interpretation of rugby''s role in the development of white society, its role in shaping significant social divisions, and its centrality to the apartheid era "power elite".

This volume traces the history of the idea of truth as an ethical movement, exploring those developments in Western thought, from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, when ethics was separated from science and philosophy. At the heart of the project is a reexamination of the good, found in Plato as that which makes being possible, which gives authority to knowledge and beckons to art, preserved in Levinas as infinite responsibility. The idea of the good is interpreted as nature''s abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts. It gives rise to an ethics of inclusion.

Traces the history of the idea of art as an ethical movement, interpreting the good as nature''s abundance, giving rise to an ethics of inclusion, expressed in art.

This book is an ethic of inclusion leading from gender and sexual difference through the social world of race and culture to the natural world.

This book addresses the nature and injustice of authority, retracing the ideas of reason and law from ancient Greece to the present, pursuing a line of thought begun with Anaximander, who speaks of the ordinance of time as restitution for immemorial injustice, and Heraclitus, who speaks of justice as strife. Predominantly philosophical, exploring the authority of Western philosophy in twentieth-century continental and pragmatist writings, the book explores alternative voices as challenges to authority, in feminist and multicultural writings, in Greek mythology and African narratives, in Greek drama and twentieth-century literature.

This book asks how we may undertake to represent representation.

From Descartes to the present, there has been a call for a new beginning in philosophy. Contemporary continental philosophy and American pragmatism continue to proclaim the end of one philosophic tradition and the beginning of another. The basis for many of these developments is the repudiation of metaphysics. The purpose of this book is to rethink the metaphysical traditions in terms of the continental and pragmatist critiques, rejecting a single view. The major works in the tradition are viewed as heretical. Philosophy has recurrently acknowledged aporia: "moments in the movement of thought in which it finds itself faced with unconquerable obstacles resulting from conflicts in its understanding of its own intelligibility." A chapter is devoted to each of the eight major philosophers and movements in the Western canonical tradition: the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, empiricism, Kant, and Hegel. The last three chapters are devoted to contemporary discussions of the end of metaphysics, including the development of a "local" metaphysics that is able to express its own locality and aporia.

At a time when the metaphysical tradition is being called profoundly into question by proponents of pragmatism and continental philosophy, Inexhaustibility and Human Being examines a specific aspect of metaphysics: the nature of being human, acknowledging the force of these critiques and discussing their ramifications. Exploring the possibility of a systematic metaphysics that acknowledges the limits of every thought, the book offers a metaphysics of human being based on locality and inexhaustibility. Its major focus is on a corresponding "anthropology" in which human being is both local and exhaustive - that is, based on limitation and on the limitation of limitation. Among the book''s major topics are: being as locality and inexhaustibility; human being as judgment and perspective; knowing and reason as query; language and meaning as semasis; emotion; sociality; politics; life and death. Clearly written, and wide-ranging in scope, Inexhaustibility and Human Being covers a multitude of subjects - history, love, sexuality, consciousness, suffering, the body, instrumentality, government, and law - in the development of its thesis. The book will appeal not only to philosophers - but also to those involved in studying the various arenas of human activity Professor Ross examines.

Stephen David Ross presents an extensive, detailed, and critical interpretation of Whitehead''s mature thought, emphasizing the fundamental role of perspective in Whitehead''s cosmology, and tracing the conflicts and difficulties therein to tensions involving perspective in relation to other central features of Whitehead''s thought. Ross isolates four principles as having a fundamental role in whitehead''s metaphysics: perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He argues that many of Whitehead''s difficulties can be eliminated by raising the principle of perspective to prominence and by revising the other central features of Whitehead''s theory accordingly. This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead. The discussion ranges over most of Whitehead''s theory in Process and Reality, and offers a number of significant and, in some cases, novel views on different aspects of Whitehead''s theory: perception, prehension, causation, objective immortality, self-causation, the extensive continuum, natural order, possiblity, concreteness, and God. Ross''s concluding suggestions for modifying Whitehead''s system promise to occasion much debate among process philosophers, theologians, and anyone concerned with Whitehead''s thought.

The richness of art is manifested in contrast: contrast with other works of art, other features of human experience, other times and places, and other forms of judgment and understanding. The possibilities of contrast are inexhaustible. Every being shares this inexhaustibility of openness to novel possibilities, although inexhaustibility is most fully realized in art. The general theory of art and aesthetic value developed in this book is based on the notions of inexhaustibility and contrast and has important forebears in Kant, Coleridge, and Whitehead. The theory allows art to be located relative to otheR spheres of judgment--science, action, and philosophy. The theory allows a new perspective on interpretation and criticism. Ross presents and defines a new synthetic form of understanding works of art that offers an alternative to the skepticism that haunts so many theories of interpretation.

"This is my major thesis. Mystery is inherent in both the nature of things and the nature of rationality. I will sustain this thesis by a review of some of the central issues of philosophy to elucidate their mysterious qualities. More important, however, I will develop in detail an explanation of mystery and trace some of its important ramifications." "I will argue that an ordinal metaphysics, with its associated theory of query, provides an account of mystery that no other theory can provide. "While the theory presented here is a theory of philosophical mystery, it has fundamental implications for all branches of knowledge, including the physical and social sciences. "In short, I speak against a simplistic view of the world and of experience based on a simplistic and narrow conception of understanding and rationality. Mystery calls not for veneration and awe, but for a full and complex activity of mind, broaching all established conditions in its pursuit of answers....Reason is fulfilled as completely in mysteries which persevere throughout our efforts to resolve them as in mysteries which are resolved and dissipated, passing into new questions to which we must find new answers, in an unterminating process of rational interrogation." — From the Preface by Stephen David Ross

This book presents the principles and categories of an ordinal metaphysics in relation to the metaphysical tradition and contemporary issues. It represents the only current systematic and metaphysical effort to resolve the difficulties that have made metaphysics suspect through most of the twentieth century. Ross begins with a summary of Justus Buchler''s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, where the theory was first formulated, and then expands and develops Buchler''s ideas in important new directions. He seeks to replace the "cosmological view" that reality is single-valued and wholly determinate with a plural, functional, and ordinal ontology that avoids the major deficiencies of the metaphysical tradition and resolves many contemporary issues.

Includes political cartoons about Andrew Johnson''s 1866 "Swing around the circle" speaking campaign and (beginning on page [13]) and a parody biography of Johnson''s life: "Androo Johnson, his life : includin'' his infancy, his boyhood, and his dimocrisy and abolitionism, separate and mixed / by Petroleum V. Nasby, a Dimmicrat uv thirty years standin'', who never skratched his ticket and allaz took his likker strats.