Bøker av Daniel A. Dombrowski

Despite their influence in our culture, sports inspire dramatically less philosophical consideration than such ostensibly weightier topics as religion, politics, or science. Arguing that athletic playfulness coexists with serious underpinnings, and that both demand more substantive attention, Daniel Dombrowski harnesses the insights of ancient Greek thinkers to illuminate contemporary athletics. Dombrowski contends that the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus shed important light on issues--such as the pursuit of excellence, the concept of play, and the power of accepting physical limitations while also improving one's body--that remain just as relevant in our sports-obsessed age as they were in ancient Greece. Bringing these concepts to bear on contemporary concerns, Dombrowski considers such questions as whether athletic competition can be a moral substitute for war, whether it necessarily constitutes war by other means, and whether it encourages fascist tendencies or ethical virtue. The first volume to philosophically explore twenty-first-century sport in the context of its ancient predecessor, Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals reveals that their relationship has great and previously untapped potential to inform our understanding of human nature.

Explores the political philosophy of John Rawls in relation to public policy issues, including war, mental disability, nonhuman animals, legacy, and affirmative action. Pays special attention to the relationship of religion to these issues and to the processual characteristics of Rawls's method.

The idea that it is morally wrong to eat animals held sway for about one thousand years among some of the most prominent ancient Greek philosophers, including Pythagoras, Empedocles, Theophrastus, Plotinus, Plutarch, Porphyry, and, perhaps, Plato. The idea then died out for almost seventeen-hundred years. Since the 1970s, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in vegetarianism, marked by lively debates and the emergence of a substantial literature in the form of scholarly books and articles. Daniel A. Dombrowski uses the tools and insights of these contemporary debates in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of ancient philosophical vegetarianism. He also uses the wisdom of the Greek vegetarians as an Archimedean point from which to critique both the opponents and the defenders of contemporary philosophical vegetarianism. The book includes an annotated bibliography of the current debates in this burgeoning field of scholarship.