Boaventura de Sousa Santos (ed.): Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (2007)

9 May 2014, dusan

“The main argument of this book is that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. Probably more than ever, global capitalism appears as a civilizational paradigm encompassing all domains of social life. The exclusion, oppression, and discrimination it produces have not only economic, social, and political dimensions but also cultural and epistemological ones. Accordingly, to confront this paradigm in all its dimensions is the challenge facing a new critical theory and new emancipatory practices. Contrary to their predecessors, this theory and these practices must start from the premise that the epistemological diversity of the world is immense, as immense as its cultural diversity and that the recognition of such diversity must be at the core of the global resistance against capitalism and of the formulation of alternative forms of sociability.” (from the Introduction)

Another Knowledge Is Possible explores the struggles against moral and cultural imperialism and neoliberal globalization that have taken place over the past few decades, and the alternatives that have emerged in countries throughout the developing world from Brazil and Colombia, to India, South Africa and Mozambique. In particular it looks at the issue of biodiversity, the confrontation between scientific and non-scientific knowledges, and the increasing difficulty experienced by great numbers of people in accessing information and scientific-technological knowledge.

With contributions by Margarita Flórez Alonso, Luis Carlos Arenas, João Paulo Borges Coelho, Arturo Escobar, Yash Ghai, Maria Paula Meneses, João Arriscado Nunes, Lino João de Oliveira Neves, Mauricio Pardo, Shalini Randeria, Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Vandana Shiva, Carlos Frederico Marés de Souza Filho, Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, Shiv Visvanathan, and Thokozani Xaba.

Publisher Verso, London, 2007
ISBN 9781844672561
447 pages
via the editor, HT kris

Publisher

PDF (single PDF, updated to an OCR’d version on 2014-5-9 via esco_bar)
PDF (PDF chapters)

Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space (1957–) [FR, DE, EN, ES, IT, PT-BR, RO, RU]

8 May 2014, dusan

Since its first publication in 1957, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space remains one of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home. Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams.

Publisher Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1957
Third edition, 1961
214 pages

English edition
Translated by Maria Jolas
Publisher The Orion Press, 1964
New edition, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994
With a new Foreword by John R. Stilgoe
ISBN 0807064734
241 pages
via esco_bar

Review: Joan Ockman (Harvard Design Magazine, 1998).

Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

La poétique de l’espace (French, 3rd ed., 1957/1961, no OCR)
Poetik des Raumes (German, trans. Kurt Leonhard, 1960)
The Poetics of Space (English, trans. Maria Jolas, 1964/1994)
La poética del espacio (Spanish, trans. Ernestina de Champourcin, 1965/2000)
La poetica dello spazio (Italian, trans. Ettore Catalano, 1975/2006, updated on 2014-11-18)
[A filosofia do não. O novo espírito científico.] A poética do espaço (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. [Joaquim José Moura Ramos, Remberto Francisco Kuhnen], Antônio da Costa Leal and Lídia do Valle Santos Leal, 1978)
Poetica spaţiului (Romanian, trans. Irina Bădescu, 2003)
Poetika prostranstva (Russian, trans. N.V. Kislova, G.V. Volkova and M.Yu. Mikheev, PDF’d HTML, 2004)

Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (1970–) [DE, EN, ES, PT]

3 May 2014, dusan

In this book, the economist and philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel attempts to “establish the relationship between the capitalist commodity form and the origin of the distinction between manual and intellectual labor. His theory of knowledge is constructed after an elaborate consideration and criticism of two schools of thought. On the one hand, he criticizes the effort of bourgeois science to assert the independent nature of science and to formulate ahistorical laws of the development of knowledge in terms of non-empirical, metaphysical characteristics of Reason. On the other hand, he also challenges orthodox Marxist theories of ideology in which knowledge is viewed as mechanistically derived from activity in the economic base.” (from a review by Gilda Zwerman, Theory and Society, 1982)

German edition
First published by Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1970
Revised and expanded edition published by VCH, Weinheim, 1989
ISBN 352717690X
226 pages
via discofiasko

English edition
Publisher Macmillan, 1978
ISBN 0333230450
216 pages
via jlw

Commentary: Alberto Toscano (2005), N Pepperell (2007), David Black (2009), David Black (2013), Joseph Belbruno (2012), Ross Wolfe (2014).

New English edition in preparation

Geistige und körperliche Arbeit (German, revised ed., 1970/1989)
Intellectual and Manual Labour (English, 1978, 7 MB, OCR’d version added on 2014-5-4 via Marcell Mars)
Trabajo intelectual y trabajo manual (Spanish, 1979)
Trabalho espiritual e corporal (Portuguese, trans. Cesare Giuseppe Galvan, HTML, undated, unpaginated)