Sharon M. Meagher

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics: • Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities • Modern and Contemporary Philosophical Theories of the City • Urban Aesthetics • Urban Politics • Citizenship • Urban Environments and the Creation/Destruction of Place. The concluding section, Urban Engagements, contains interviews with philosophers discussing their engagement with students and the wider public on issues and initiatives including experiential learning, civic and community engagement, disability rights and access, environmental degradation, professional diversity, social justice, and globalization. Essential reading for students and researchers in environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and political philosophy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is also a useful resource for those in related fields, such as geography, urban studies, sociology, and political science.

A Dialogue between American pragmatists in the Deweyan tradition and Saskia Sassen is profitable in at least two ways. First, Sassen’s call for “analytic tactics” might be understood in terms of Dewey’s understanding of “soft method.” Second, Sassen is a model of the publicly engaged scholar, not only because she lives the work but also because she connects theory and empirical research in ways that are necessary if we are to follow the Deweyan call to philosophers to address social problems rather than problems internal to philosophy. In her Coss Dialogue Lecture, Saskia Sassen argues for “analytic tactics,” tactics that work while we temporarily suspend method so that we might destabilize stable meanings. We ..

This dissertation is a comparative, systematic and critical analysis of the projects of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jurgen Habermas, both of which involve the formulation and justification of ethics in light of post-Enlightenment challenges to the feasibility of such. Chapters on Nietzsche, Weber, and Gadamer serve to highlight critical similarities and differences between the theories of MacIntyre and Habermas, and make it possible to evaluate their work both in respect to one another and the post-Enlightenment theory and practice that is their concern. At the center of the study lie two issues: the relationship between justice and the good life, and the critique of formal procedural approaches to ethics. ;I argue that MacIntyre's narrative approach to ethics more adequately responds to both of these issues. However, there are dangers in that approach as well. By way of a comparative conversation with Habermas I show that MacIntyre implicitly invokes a distinction made by Habermas, that between communicative and strategic action. It is important that this distinction, developed in Habermas's analysis of dialogue and discourse, is thematized in MacIntyre's narrative approach in order to criticize the ways in which narratives can be abused and used only for strategic means. ;A critical synthesis of the moral theories of MacIntyre and Habermas is therefore both desirable and necessary. This approach draws upon MacIntyre's insights on the way in which practical rationality is embedded in narratives of traditions, practices and personal stories, and thematizes the Habermasian concept of communicative rationality implicit in MacIntyre's moral theory. ;In an appendix to the dissertation, I address concrete examples from history and from literature in order to demonstrate more clearly the need for a dialogic narrative model of ethics, and to show more specifically what such a model would look like