New Releases by David Ross

Explores the idea of human and natural kinds, pursuing an ethics of the earth responsive to social, political, and environmental issues.

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.

Textbook

Ross explores the developments in Western thought, from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, when art 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, calling us to respond. It gives 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.

Stephen David Ross presents an extensive, detailed, and critical interpretation of Whiteheadu0092s mature thought, emphasizing the fundamental role of perspective in Whiteheadu0092s cosmology, and tracing the conflicts and difficulties therein to tensions involving perspective in relation to other central features of Whiteheadu0092s thought. Ross isolates four principles as having a fundamental role in whiteheadu0092s metaphysics: perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He argues that many of Whiteheadu0092s difficulties can be eliminated by raising the principle of perspective to prominence and by revising the other central features of Whiteheadu0092s theory accordingly. This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead. The discussion ranges over most of Whiteheadu0092s theory in Process and Reality, and offers a number of significant and, in some cases, novel views on different aspects of Whiteheadu0092s theory: perception, prehension, causation, objective immortality, self-causation, the extensive continuum, natural order, possiblity, concreteness, and God. Rossu0092s concluding suggestions for modifying Whiteheadu0092s system promise to occasion much debate among process philosophers, theologians, and anyone concerned with Whiteheadu0092s 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

“THE LATE PROFESSOR JOACHIM had been working on this study of Spinoza’s essay for many years, and though at his death he had not quite completed it, it has been possible to publish it in an almost final form. After an introduction which discusses the text and the circumstances of its composition, the work goes on to study the leading philosophical ideas in Spinoza’s essay. It is concerned principally with Spinoza’s teaching in regard to knowledge and its method; in regard to truth, supposal, doubt and error; and in regard to the nature, powers, and limitations of the knowing mind.”- Publisher