Product Description: Taking a historical approach, this book examines the conditions under which scientists compromised the ideals of science, and offers some ways in which the expectations of the scientific enterprise can be transformed. Are these ideals too removed from the realities of democratic capitalism? Were they ever attained? Only against some idealized vision of science can we critically assess how well or poorly the scientific community has performed in the past three centuries...read more

Product Description: Who are our public intellectuals? Are they needed in a democracy? Should the state underwrite their activities even if they end up, like Socrates, being gadflies? Shouldn't they refrain from public debates so as to retain their critical vantage point? These and other questions are answered in this historically-informed survey of the role of public intellectuals in western democracies...read more

Religion and Sports in American Culture explores the relationship between religion and modern sports in America. Whether found in the religious purpose of ancient Olympic Games, in curses believed to plague the Chicago Cubs, or in the figure of Tim Tebow, religion and sports have been and are still tightly intertwined. While there is widespread suspicion that sports are slowly encroaching on the territory historically occupied by religion, Scholes and Sassower assert that sports are not replacing religion and that neither is sports a religion. Instead, the authors look at the relationship between sports and religion in America from a post-secular perspective that looks at both discourses as a part of the same cultural web. In this way each institution is able to maintain its own integrity, legitimacy, and unique expression of cultural values as they relate to each other. Utilizing important themes that intersect both religion and sports, Scholes and Sassower illuminate the complex and often publicly contentious relationship between the two. Appropriate for both classroom use and for the interested non-specialist, Religion and Sports in American Culture brings pilgrimage, sacrifice, relics, and redemption together in an unexpected cultural continuity.

Product Description: This book adopts an explicitly postmodernist perspective of the digital revolution. While exploring issues relating to the re-creation of social life in the digital world, its main focus is on the political economy and in particular the extent to which the paradigms of capitalism and socialism can be mapped as postcapitalism onto this new world...read more

Product Description: Solo: Postmodern Explorations provides a postmodern approach to technoscience and economics. Sassower pulls together postmodern motifs and attitudes with his own experience to provide a unique perspective on political history and economics...read more

Product Description: Debates over the role of government have intensified in the wake of America's deepest financial crisis since the Depression. This book suggests new ways of moving forward based on the policies and principles that have worked in the past...read more

Product Description: Karl Popper has had an extraordinary influence on scientific and social thought. Widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century, he was also a highly influential social and political philosopher, a proponent and defender of the open society...read more

In order to better understand the conditions of the twenty-first century Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello revisit the twentieth century in Political Blind Spots: Reading the Ideology of Images. Sassower and Cicotello revisit some of the most significant periods in art and politics in the twentieth century paying close attention to the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Product Description: Contemporary society is rife with instability. Human's active and invasive invesitgation of genetics has raised and given life to the one-time science fiction specter, the clone. The scarcity of natural energy sources had led to greater manipulation of atomic or nuclear energy and as a result greater danger...read more

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work. (view table of contents)

Product Description: What is at stake in compromising the Enlightenment ideals of a liberal education with new educational policies engendered by a neo-liberalized, global marketplace? Richly grounding his arguments in the social philosophy of European and American intellectuals, Raphael Sassower explores Western culture's long-standing ambivalence toward 'the life of the mind...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: What responsibility do the Manhattan Project scientists have for the atomic devastation of Hiroshima? The Krupps scientists for the crematoriums at Auschwitz? Disturbing questions like these are at the heart of this book, a sobering exploration of scientific and intellectual responsibility...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Cultural Collisions Raphael Sassower brings postmodernism face to face with technoscience and considers the viability of public works, such as the Superconducting Supercollider, in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodern technoscience vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th century science...read more

Product Description: This book critically examines the reliance of society on experts, specifically attacking the notion of the privilege of scientific expertise and defining the politics of this intellectual discourse. The extensive case material illustrates the consequences of claims of expert knowledge...read more

Product Description: The essays brought together in this volume are the product of a University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Colloquium on Science, Technology, and Society devoted to foundations of health care practices. Prescriptions contributes to the philosophy of medicine by redefining, redrawing, and resetting the respective domains of philosophy, medicine, and healthcare...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Narrative Experiments was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions...read more

Product Description: Utilizing the history of economic theory, this text provides a critical and philosophical survey of the traditional criteria of demarcating science from non-science as it applies to the field of political economy/economics. Also focuses on methods of qualification, model construction, predictive power of theories, graphical representation of theories, and the allegedly scientific psychological laws and principles which economic theory uses as assumptions...read more