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(0)Anthony Appiah
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Description
Idealization is a central feature of human thought. We build ideal models in the sciences, our politics is guided by pictures of impossible utopias, and our thinking about the arts and moral life is guided by images of how things might have been. In all these cases we sometimes proceed with a representation of the world that we know is not true or aim at a world we accept we cannot realize. This is the world of the "as if," which the philosopher Hans...
Author
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Intertwining philosophy and historical narrative, Appiah has created a remarkably dramatic work, which demonstrates that honor is the driving force in the struggle against man's inhumanity to man--and the foundation of democratic movements such as the emancipation of women, slaves, and the oppressed.
Author
Description
Draws on a wide range of disciplines, including history, literature, and philosophy, to examine the imaginary boundaries people have drawn around themselves and other cultures and to challenge people to redraw those boundaries and appreciate the connections between people of different cultures, religions, and nations.
"In an age of Al Qaeda--of terror and insurgent fundamentalists--we have grown accustomed to thinking of the world as divided among...
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Here is a thorough, vividly written introduction to contemporary philosophy and some of the most crucial questions of human existence: the nature of mind and knowledge, the status of moral claims, the existence of God, the role of science, and the mysteries of language, among them. In Thinking It Through, esteemed philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah shows us what it means to "do" philosophy in our time and why it should matter to anyone who wishes to...
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Alice Walker has been honored with most of the major literary awards - including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple - clearly establishing her among the giants of American literature. She has achieved critical and commercial success not only through her five published novels, but for her short stories, poetry, essays, and other writings, and for a top-grossing feature film based on her first best-selling novel. She...
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"Known by many as the "poet laureate of the American Negro" and by others as "Shakespeare in Harlem," Langston Hughes is one of America's most read and quoted poets. In the Preface to this important and unique collection of reviews and essays, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes: "Between 1926, when he published his pioneering The Weary Blues, to 1967, the year of his death, when he published The Panther and the Lash, Hughes would write sixteen...
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Since the 1940s, when Richard Wright published his best-selling Native Son, he has been one of the most widely read writers of his time and after. Many of Wright's stories were accounts of racially motivated violence that shocked the public at the time of publication and forced his readers to be aware of the horrors of racism in America. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah, editors of Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, selected...
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"A major influence on international civil rights, anticolonial, and black consciousness movement, Black Skin, White Masks is an unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important thinkers on revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in human history."--Jacket.
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Toni Morrison has been described by the New York Times as "the closest thing the country has to a national writer." Her third novel, Song of Solomon, earned her the National Book Critics Circle and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awards, and was the first novel written by an African-American writer to be selected for the Book-of-the-Month club since Richard Wright's Native Son. With six published novels, two anthologies, a volume...
Description
Zora Neale Hurston is a literary legend. One of the leading forces of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was also one of the most widely acclaimed Black authors in America from the mid twenties to the mid forties. She faded into obscurity in the subsequent decades, but literary figures and scholars in the 1970s revived her work and introduced a whole generation to her brilliance. Today she is the most widely taught Black woman writer in the canon of...
Description
Gloria Naylor's first published book of fiction won her the American Book Award. The Women of Brewster Place was a dramatic launch for a successful literary career that is still on the ascendant. Like Alice Walker, Naylor has earned a reputation associated with both critical and commercial success; she is respected in academic circles and acknowledged in the world of popular culture. Both have had a best-selling novel translated into successful movies....