Search results for ""Author Donald N. Levine""

Intends to seek answers to the following questions: What is the nature of the traditional culture of the dominant ethnic group, the Amhara, and what are its enduring values? What aspects of modern culture interest this society and by what means has it sought to institutionalize them?

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In "Powers of the Mind", former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine considers the liberal education that our universities purport to offer, finds it lacking, and in response proposes fresh and invigorating ways to think about liberal learning that are more suited to our times. Levine begins by defining basic values of modernity and then considering pertinent curricular principles. The principles he favors are powers of the mind - disciplines understood as fields of study defined less by their subject matter than by the distinct intellectual capacities they embody. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, "Powers of the Mind" constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world.

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The essays turn about a single theme, the loss of the capacity to deal constructively with ambiguity in the modern era. Levine offers a head-on critique of the modern compulsion to flee ambiguity. He centers his analysis on the question of what responses social scientists should adopt in the face of the inexorably ambiguous character of all natural languages. In the course of his argument, Levine presents a fresh reading of works by the classic figures of modern European and American social theory—Durkheim, Freud, Simmel and Weber, and Park, Parsons, and Merton.

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In this work, Don Levine moves from the origins of systematic knowledge in ancient Greece to the present day in order to present an account that is at once a history of the social science enterprise and an introduction to the cornerstone works of Western social thought. "Visions" has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part of the book. In Part 1, Levine presents the ways previous sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a series of narratives - or "life stories" - that build upon each other, generation to generation, a succession of efforts to envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present. In Part 2, the heart of the book, Levine offers his own narrative, reconnecting centuries of voices into a dialogue among the varied strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic, British, French, German, Marxian, Italian and American. Here, he tracks the formation of the sociological imagination through a series of conversations across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism, Aristotle to W.I. Thomas, Levine maps the web of visionary statements - confrontations and oppositions - from which social science has grown. Throughout each stage, Levine demonstrates how social knowledge has grown in response to three recurring questions: How shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge to ethical foundations, and shows how differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern social science - among them, Marshall and Spencer, Comte and Durkheim, Simmel and Weber, Marx and Mosca, Dewey and Park - to proceed in vastly different ways. In Part 3, Levine offers a vision of the contemporary scene, setting the crisis of fragmentation in social sciences against the fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for sociology's intellectual resources: not only as insight about the nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful communication in an increasingly fractious world.

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"Of those who created the intellectual capital used to launch the enterprise of professional sociology, Georg Simmel was perhaps the most original and fecund. In search of a subject matter for sociology that would distinguish it from all other social sciences and humanistic disciplines, he charted a new field for discovery and proceeded to explore a world of novel topics in works that have guided and anticipated the thinking of generations of sociologists. Such distinctive concepts of contemporary sociology as social distance, marginality, urbanism as a way of life, role-playing, social behavior as exchange, conflict as an integrating process, dyadic encounter, circular interaction, reference groups as perspectives, and sociological ambivalence embody ideas which Simmel adumbrated more than six decades ago."—Donald N. Levine Half of the material included in this edition of Simmel's writings represents new translations. This includes Simmel's important, lengthy, and previously untranslated "Group Expansion and Development of Individuality," as well as three selections from his most neglected work, Philosophy of Money; in addition, the introduction to Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, chapter one of the Lebensanschauung, and three essays are translated for the first time.

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Published in 1918, "The View of Life" is Georg Simmel's final work. Famously deemed 'the brightest man in Europe by George Santayana, Simmel addressed a variety of topics across his essayistic writings, which have influenced scholars in aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, a set of core issues emerged over the course of his career, most centrally the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms and the nature and genesis of authentic individuality. Composed in the years before his death, "The View of Life" was, according to Simmel, his 'testament', a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety. Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger's "Being and Time" and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars has been extolled by Jurgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel's last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

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Published in 1918, The View of Life is Georg Simmel's final work. Famously deemed "the brightest man in Europe" by George Santayana, Simmel addressed diverse topics across his essayistic writings, which influenced scholars in aesthetics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, certain core issues emerged over the course of his career - the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms, and the nature and conditions of authentic individuality, including the role of mindfulness regarding mortality. Composed not long before his death, The View of Life was, Simmel wrote, his "testament," a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety. Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger's Being and Time and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars was extolled by Jurgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel's last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

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