James Lawler

Beginning with The Simpsons and ending with The Da Vinci Code, the entertaining sections in this book uncover profound philosophical and religious ideas in pop culture. Each work covered contains a challenge to both standard religious orthodoxy and secular science. In The Simpsons Movie, although Homer must be dragged off his couch to church, he experiences a spiritual epiphany with an Inuit shaman woman. In the film of The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon proposes that ?the human is the divine.” The author makes a striking case here for pop culture as a hotbed of alternative thinking.

This narrative shows how the contours of moral and political philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were shaped by Kant's two distinct philosophical responses to the results of modern science. This history of early modern Western philosophy takes its inspiration from Kant's claim that the battle between the metaphysics of matter and that of spirit is the principal axis around which modern philosophy up to his time, in all its aspects, has revolved. The empiricist-materialist trend that dominates in England is first examined in the progressively unfolding works of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Adam Smith. A contrasting and competing dialectic develops in the rationalist/spiritualist trend in the continental philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Rousseau. Framing this history is the background context of the philosophy and science of Aristotle and the challenges to the traditional paradigm presented by the revolutionary sciences of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. James Lawler is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Aside from Post Modernism, probably the hottest topic today among socialist scholars world-wide is Market Socialism. In this book, four leading socialist scholars present both sides of the debate--two for, and two against--highlighting the different perspectives from which Market Socialism has been viewed. Arguing in favor of Market Socialism are the philosophers David Schweickart and James Lawler. While opposing them and Market Socialism are the political economist Hillel Ticktin and the political theorist Bertell Ollman. The evidence and arguments found in this book will prove invaluable to readers interested in the future of socialism.