Books by "David A. Rickert"
3 books found
Maturity and Modernity is the first book to analyze Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault as a tradition of theorising and to chart the development of genealogy as a mode of critique. It provides clear accounts of the main ideas of Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault (as well as a useful Glossary) and illustrates the relations between these thinkers at methodological, substantive and politcal levels.
Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book’s focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas’s racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science.
European intellectual history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries presents a picture of extraordinary creative richness. Many historians have looked at this period as one of a "revolt against positivism in the attempts of thinkers such as Freud, Weber, Dilthey, and Durkheim to encompass and submit to strict investigation the irrational aspects of human behavior. At the same time, however, other thinkers such as Russell, Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Meinong were seeking to revise and expand the notion of reason itself through investigation of language and its relation to logic and psychology; this trend might be seen as a "revolt within positivism." David Lindenfeld shows that these two trends were integrally related in the thought of the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, and that he was representative of the major trends of the age. Meinong played a role in several intellectual movements which are now thought of as distinct. He, like Husserl, studied under the philosopher Fraz Brentano, whose ideas inspired the phenomenological movement. In addition, however, Meinong exerted a decisive influence on Bertrand Russell in the early 1900's and thus also figures prominently in the history of British analytical philosophy. Furthermore, he developed a theory of values and their meaning which dealt with many of the issues raised by German social philosophers such as Weber and Dilthey. Finally, Meinong has an acknowledged place in the history of psychology, where he is cited as a precursor of the Gestalt psychology of Wertheimer, Kohler and Koffka. The first part of The Transformation of Positivism locates the background of Meinong's thought in the long-run traditions of British empiricism as well as in the political and social conditions of Austria in the late 19th century. The second part traces Meinong's intellectual development as he participated in the movement away from "psychologism"--the tendency to reduce all philosophical and social questions to psychological ones. After 1900, Meinong moved to a new concern with language and semantics, culminating in his "theory of objects." The third part shows how positivism, experimental psychology, and phenomenology developed away from Meinong's concepts to emerge as distinct, even opposed, by the 1920's. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.