Full Description
How do we define culture? To what uses should our concept of culture be put? What costs and benefits do these uses entail?Adam Muller brings together a diverse group of emerging and established scholars to probe the nature of the concept of culture while shedding light on its many different applications and contexts of use. In particular, they examine the assumed unity of culture and with arguments being made for and against over discussions of popular culture, film, globalization, sport, aesthetics, and human values.
This volume brings together a variety of perspectives to add much-needed substance to our understanding of the history and politics of culture. Rigorous and interdisciplinary, Concepts of Culture secures a place for analytic philosophy, humanism, and liberal political theory in the ongoing discussion of exactly what culture is and how culture works.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Unity in Diversity
Adam Muller
Writing for Culture: Why a Successful Concept Should Not Be Discarded
Christoph Brumann
Culture and the Abstract Life
Geoffrey Hartmann
The Tenth Muse
Jacques Barzun
Between Conflict and Consensus: Redux
Mette Hjort
Culture and/in Globalization
Imre Szeman
Art, Culture, and Identity
David Novitz
Aesthetics and Culture
Robert Stecker
Film Culture
Martin Roberts
Sport, Universals, and Multiculturalism
Jim Parry
In Defense of Universal Values
Martha Nussbaum
Incommensurability Pragmatized
Rhonda Martens and Carl Matheson
Bibliography
Index
