Inauthentic culture and its philosophical critics
By: Jay Newman.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Montreal; London; Buffalo
Language: eng
Number of pages: 218
Subjects: Culture -- Philosophy.; Culture -- History.; Civilization, Western -- Philosophy.
Description: Despite the pervasive feeling that much of the culture of Western democracies has increasingly become inauthentic or phoney, contemporary cultural critics and observers have paid little attention to the traditional philosophical criticism of inauthentic culture that began with Socrates. Aristophanes, and Plato and was applied, reworked, and extended by such philosophical cultural critics as St Augustine, Erasmus, Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Thorstein Veblen.

This new study in the philosophy of culture and the history of ideas illuminates the problem of inauthentic culture and draws on the insights of major figures from the Western intellectual tradition to show that our contemporary problem is actually an old and enduring one. Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics will be of great interest to all those concerned with philosophy, cultural theory, and the enduring problem of cultural decline.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-209) and index.
Table of contents: title: Inauthentic culture as a social and philosophical problem; title: Some aspects of culture relevant to the problem of inauthenticity; title: The revelance to inauthenticity of what is relative and what is not; title: Plato and the classical analysis of inauthenic culture; title: The classical analysis reworked : four studies in the tradition; title: The classical analysis reworked : two recent studies and an overview; title: Contemporary applications.