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Letters From Quebec: Background |
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Letters from Quebec
Howard Richards
The first eleven letters
This edition comprises the first eleven of twenty five letters in Volume One of Letters from Quebec by Howard Richards. Volume One of the Letters, which is subtitled "Philosophy for Builders of Peace and Justice", is used as a text in an introductory philosophy course at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, USA. The course is cross-listed as Peace and Global Studies IV, being the fourth course in the college's peace and justice program.
The first three are courses in anthropology, ("Culture and Conflict"); political science, ("Politics of Global Problems"); and economice, ("The Global Economy"). Peace and Global Studies N is called "Food Ethics." The texts studied include, in addition to Volume One of Letters from Quebec, a UNESCO selection from Gandhi's writings; Martín Luther King, Jr.'s Strength to Love; Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins' Food First; Immanuel Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; and Hannah Arendt's On Violente.
Volume Two of Letters from Quebec, which is subtitled "Methods for Transforming the Structures of the Modern World," contains twenty-five more letters and is used in an upper-level course in Philosophy of Social Science, which is aleo part of the Peace Studies program of the college, along with Nancy Hartsock's Money, Sex and Power: toward a specifically feminist historical materialism and several books on the methodology of research in the social sciences.
Volume Three, which is unfinished, is addressed to a more academic audience. So far, it contains letters on Richard Rorty, Willard van Orman Quine, Plato, Aristotle and the Social Sciences, The Man Without Qualities, "Economics and AntiEconomics," the Gospel of John, St. Augustine, and Fredric Jameson. Howard Richards' other works include The Evaluation of CulturalAction. (London: Macmillan, 1985); Etica y Economía (Costa Rica: Instituto Tecnologico, 1987); and La Ciencia Social al Servicio de la Esperanza (Santiago de Chile: CIDE, 1988).
Howard is married to Caroline Richards, with whom he shares an academic appointment at Earlham. Her writings include Sweet Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), a novel about the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile. Caroline and Howard have two daughters, Shelley Demaris, a civil servant with the Social Security Administration; and Laura, a student at Santa Barbara (California) High School. Although the Richards lived in Quebec when the letters in this first volume were first composed, they now divide their time between Indiana and Santa Barbara, where Howard practices law and both he and Caroline continue to write.
Elliott Chapin, publisher.
24 Monteith Street, Toronto Canada. M4Y 1K7
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ISBN # 0 - 920759 - 14 - 9 Printed on Recycled Paper <>
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