Какое место занимают композиторы в мире современной музыкальной культуры и каковы их перспективы в будущем? В своей предыдущей книге Владимир Мартынов — исследователь и композитор — вынес окончательный приговор: время композиторов ушло в прошлое. Закончилась ли вместе с ними музыка? Ответ на этот вопрос содержит новая книга Мартынова — «Зона opus posth». Какая музыка зазвучит в новой, «посткомпозиторской» реальности, каковы законы, по которым она создается и функционирует, какой она станет — музыкальная культура будущего, — обо всем этом Мартынов рассуждает не только как «футуролог» и музыковед, но и как философ и социолог.

Richard Dawkins has an opinion on everything biological, it seems, and in A Devil's Chaplain, everything is biological. Dawkins weighs in on topics as diverse as ape rights, jury trials, religion, and education, all examined through the lens of natural selection and evolution. Although many of these essays have been published elsewhere, this book is something of a greatest-hits compilation, reprinting many of Dawkins' most famous recent compositions. They are well worth re-reading. His 1998 review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense is as bracing an indictment of academic obscurantism as the book it covered, although the review reveals some of Dawkins' personal biases as well. Several essays are devoted to skillfully debunking religion and mysticism, and these are likely to raise the hackles of even casual believers. Science, and more specifically evolutionary science, underlies each essay, giving readers a glimpse into the last several years' debates about the minutiae of natural selection. In one moving piece, Dawkins reflects on his late rival Stephen Jay Gould's magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and clarifies what it was the two Darwinist heavyweights actually disagreed about. While the collection showcases Dawkins' brilliance and intellectual sparkle, it brings up as many questions as it answers. As an ever-ardent champion of science, honest discourse, and rational debate, Dawkins will obviously relish the challenge of answering them.

Т. 3 : Universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1800–1945). - 2004. - 774 p.

This book is a result of my increasing irritation at the colonization of our life-world by fear. Books motivated by irritation have a tendency to be polemical, and this book is no exception. It is an attack on the tendency to consider practically all phenomena from a perspective of fear. A paradoxical trait of the culture of fear is that it emerges at a time when, by all accounts, we are living more securely than ever before in human history. One of my most important arguments against the culture of fear is that it undermines our freedom. It might seem strange to be writing a book about our living in a culture of fear after having previously written a book about our living in a culture of boredom. The two diagnoses of our present culture as being one of fear and one of boredom respectively would seem on the face of it to be contradictory. If one is consumed by fear, one is not bored. But every life will contain both elements. In the poem ‘Dockery and Son’ (1963), Philip Larkin seems to imply that these two emotions, broadly speaking, sum up human existence: ‘Life is first boredom, then fear.’ Every society – and not least postmodern ones – is characterized by many contrasting movements and phenomena. Two phenomena such as boredom and fear, however, do not simply oppose each other but can also build up under each other. Fear is not simply something we are exposed to against our will; it is often also something we voluntarily expose ourselves to in an attempt to transcend a banal, boring everyday existence. I attempt in this book to unravel what kind of an emotion fear is, what role it plays in present-day culture and, not least, what political use is made of it. The book consists of seven chapters. In chapter One I give a brief account of ‘the culture of fear’, that is, how fear has become a kind of culturally determined magnifying glass through which we consider the world. Chapter Two is an attempt to describe what kind of a phenomenon fear is, and adopts a number of different approaches, ranging from neurobiology to phenomenology. In chapter Three I examine the role of fear in ‘the risk society’ and demonstrate how our attempts to minimize risk contain many irrational aspects. Chapter Four deals with the fact that we often voluntarily seek what is frightening – in extreme sports and entertainment, for example – something that is paradoxical, taking into consideration that we normally try to avoid sources of fear. In chapter Five I take a look at the concept of trust and point out that the culture of fear has an undermining effect on trust – something that in turn increases the scope of fear. When general trust decreases, this has a disintegrating effect on social relations, although fear for its part can also have an integrating effect. This integrating role of fear is central in a number of political philosophies, not least those of Machiavelli and Hobbes, and in chapter Six I look at the role of fear as a basis for political philosophy as well as the political use that has been made of fear in the ‘war against terror’ of recent years. Finally, the concluding chapter asks if there is any way out of fear, if we can break down the climate of fear that surrounds us today. A theme that will only be dealt with to a slight extent is the fear of death in general, as this is such a wide-ranging theme – because it calls for a thorough thematization of our conceptions of death – and must therefore be dealt with elsewhere. Anxiety – or Angst – will also be dealt with just as briefly. An obvious question is: Why write a ‘philosophy of fear’ when it is not so much fear as anxiety that has been traditionally dealt with in philosophy? Since anxiety is in addition ascribed major metaphysical implications, fear would seem to be trivial by comparison. Anxiety is ‘deep’, whereas fear is ‘shallow’. In Roland Barthes’ words we can say that fear would appear to be a ‘mediocre and unworthy emotion’.1 Nevertheless, fear would seem today to have greater cultural and political consequences than anxiety. Furthermore, it is basically rather pleasant to do away with all the ‘metaphysical hand-luggage’ that accompanies the concept of anxiety.

Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as religious thinkers such as Kant, Levinas, and Gershom Scholem, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career. The collection includes two new essays by Derrida that appear here for the first time in any language, as well as a substantial introduction by Gil Anidjar that explores Derrida's return to his own "religious" origins and his attempts to bring to light hidden religious dimensions of the social, cultural, historical, and political.

An A-Z of Modern Europe 1789-1999 is a comprehensive dictionary which defines modern Europe through its important events and people An A-Z of Modern Europe 1789-1999 offers accessible and concise definitions of nearly 1000 separate items. The book is cross-referenced and thus provides associated links and connections while the appendices contain essential extra information. The book contains five helpful maps to guide the reader along.

This revised and considerably expanded 2nd edition brings together a wide range of topics, including modal, tense, conditional, intuitionist, many-valued, paraconsistent, relevant, and fuzzy logics. Part 1, on propositional logic, is the old Introduction, but contains much new material. Part 2 is entirely new, and covers quantification and identity for all the logics in Part 1. The material is unified by the underlying theme of world semantics. All of the topics are explained clearly using devices such as tableau proofs, and their relation to current philosophical issues and debates are discussed. Students with a basic understanding of classical logic will find this book an invaluable introduction to an area that has become of central importance in both logic and philosophy. It will also interest people working in mathematics and computer science who wish to know about the area.

Т. 1 : From anarchy to anarchism (300 CE To 1939). - 2005. - 538 p.

This book aims to define – or to re-define – anarchism in relation to the fundamental ethico-political problem of authority. Authority is defined in terms of the right to exercise social control (as explored in the ‘sociology of power’) and the correlative duty to obey (as explored in the ‘philosophy of practical reason’). Anarchism is distinguished, philosophically, by its scepticism towards such moral relations – by its questioning of the claims made for such normative power – and, practically, by its challenge to those ‘authoritative’ powers which cannot justify their claims and which are therefore deemed illegitimate or without moral foundation.

Contemporary accounts of what’s “natural” for human society still cite the thirteenth-century system of Thomas Aquinas – even on the Supreme Court. But those accounts ignore his biblical commentaries, which reveal something much stranger. Against the reigning impression, the commentaries embed all law, even the law of nature, in a sexually charged story of decline by specific ethnic groups – Jews and Gentiles – gendered in changing ways and redeemed by the reinsemination of divine grace. This book uses accounts of ethnicity and gender, nature and grace in Aquinas’s biblical commentaries to reframe the systematic works (especially his Summa theologiae) still quoted in court. The whole advantage of natural law is supposed to lie in its independence from any particular group, history, or religion. That is why rival views of gender and sexuality both appeal to “nature” and cite Aquinas. But Aquinas’s Summa ties natural law to specific biblical passages, where his commentary describes a nature that differs by ethnicity, varies over time, and changes sexuality by God’s decree. This destabilizes turn-of-the-twenty-first-century uses, liberal or conservative.