Lexington Books – Series in Philosophy
PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE
Lydia Amir, Tufts University
The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the power of philosophy to address everyday problems, on both an individual and a social scale. The outcome has been a theoretical and practical field called “philosophical practice,” an original approach that highlights the timely and perennial need for philosophy. This series aims to bring to the academic public the best reflections that bear on the relation of philosophy to everyday life and to the contemporary world, as grounded in experience or arguments or both. It honors the founders of this innovative field while calling for new ways of empowering philosophy by demonstrating its relevance to individual and social concerns both inside and outside academia. It thus hopes to strengthen philosophy by bringing its potency to the attention of philosophers and scholars from other disciplines, as well as to students and the general public.
Book: The Philosophy of Practical Affairs: An Introduction, by Joseph Agassi
The Philosophy of Practical Affairs: An Introduction addresses the problems of everyday life, problems that from time to time fate drops on normal twenty-first- century western individuals. Addressing both students and philosophers, Joseph Agassi considers the usefulness of the treatment of daily problems within academic philosophy, including rationalism and fundamental issues of practical wisdom, the community, and the individual’s relationship to community. Unlike most philosophy-of-life literatures from pop-philosophy—especially religious homilies or wisdom literature, including the (pseudo-)cabbalist or (pseudo-)Buddhist, and their like—the book acknowledges real, disturbing situations. Warning the reader against various kinds of intellectual dishonesty, and committed to their rational autonomy, the author thinks through philosophical concepts that are in the end practical issues of philosophy of life. When the book was publised, Joseph Agassi was professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and York University
Book: Wonder, Silence, and Human Flourishing: Toward a Rehumanization of Health, Education, and Welfare, Edited by Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, Solveig Botnen Eide, and Carlo Leget
The book approaches humanization and the process of re- enchantment in a radical new way. For more than a decade the call for rehumanization in education, care, and welfare has been heard and discussed primarily in critical thinking, political theory, and sociological discourses. This critique is mainly based on a social constructivist and naturalistic worldview that keeps the discussion in an anthropocentric perspective. By focusing on the phenomenology and ethics of wonder as an ontological and even spiritual event, and by listening to the silence that follows this contemplative wonder, the contributors offer an existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic way of understanding humanization. This book shows, from various perspectives, that the force of wonder and the silence that follows from it can nurture our ability to be receptive to and present in human relations and in resonance with the meaning-giving life phenomena that surround us. Finn Thorbjørn Hansen is professor in applied philosophy at the University of Aalborg. Carlo Leget is professor of care ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht. Solveig Botnen Eide is professor of ethics and social work at the University of Agder.