Pascalian meditations / Pierre Bourdieu ; translated by Richard Nice.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- 1. Critique of Scholastic Reason -- 2. The Three Forms of Scholastic Fallacy -- 3. The Historicity of Reason -- 4. Bodily Knowledge -- 5. Symbolic Violence and Political Struggles -- 6. Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence -- Subject Index -- Name Index.

"Synthesizing forty years' work by France's leading sociologist, this book exemplifies Bourdieu's unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. It makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of 'scholasticism', a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers have brought these presuppositions into the order of discourse, more to legitimate than analyze them, and this is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique. Pascalian because he, too, was concerned with symbolic power, he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking, attended to 'ordinary people', and was determined to seek the reason for seemingly illogical behavior rather than simply condemning it. Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy, whose intellectual debt to such other 'heretical' philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence."--Publisher description.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.