Product Description: This paperback edition contains a new greatly expanded bibliography of Habermas's work.

Product Description: Thomas McCarthy's third book confirms his standing among the finest Irish poets to emerge in recent years. "The Non-Aligned Storyteller" develops both personal and public themes in eloquent, incisive and moving poems. Reviewing his last collection in "PN Review", Ian McMillan wrote, 'Thomas McCarthy is very young and very good...read more

Product Description: `Not many poets have McCarthy's gift of being able to write so tenderly about private affections and so acutely about public figures and events.' Brendan Kennelly's comment on an earlier McCarthy collection is just as true of his new book...read more

Offers a systematic reconstruction of the theoretical foundations and framework of critical social theory.

These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed. McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to McCarthy's earlier study The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Philosophical controversies within contemporary critical theory arise largely from questions about the nature, scope and limits of human reason. As the linguistic turn in 20th-century philosophy has increasingly given way to a socio-critical turn, traditional ideas of "pure" reason have been left further behind...read more

Product Description: `The Gardens of Remembrance' is a moving testimony to the power of memory, childhood, and poetry by one of Ireland's finest living poets. Drawing on the rich landscape of West Waterford, from its Anglo-Irish gardens to the hidden town lands of Fianna Fail activism and de Valera worship, McCarthy brilliantly captures the personal life behind his poems and politics, as well as his experiences teaching at the Iowa Writer's school and at Minnesota's Carleton College...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Thomas McCarthy's new collection powerfully combines the private and the public in poems of memory, love, history and ideas. In the title sequence, written during 1993-4 when the prospect of ultimate peace in Northern Ireland was at its peak, he explores various kinds of betrayal in the light of the Dreyfus affair and its one honourable man, the deputy from the lost province of Alsace...read more

Product Description: Recent discussions of aesthetics, whether in the hermeneutic or the analytic tradition, understand the place of art and aesthetic experience according to a model of "autonomy"--as just one among the many modes of experience that make up the realm of reason, situated beside the other "spheres of value...read more

Product Description: Memory, love, history and ideas: Thomas McCarthy has a uniquely direct and engaged approach both to the private and the public, which are inseparable in his poetry. His special blend of wit and lyricism is shown to the full in this selection which draws on his five previous books and adds a large group of new poems...read more

Offers 249 articles on ancient civilizations, covering such topics as legendary figures and deities, places, philosophy, religion, mythology, and writings, art, education, and technology.