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Foundations of Natural Morality
Foundations of Natural Morality
Seagrave, S. Adam
¥288.41
Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in the relationship between natural law and natural rights. During this time, the concept of natural rights has served as a conceptual lightning rod, either strengthening or severing the bond between traditional natural law and contemporary human rights. Does the concept of natural rights have the natural law as its foundation or are the two ideas, as Leo Strauss argued, profoundly incompatible?With The Foundations of Natural Morality, S. Adam Seagrave addresses this controversy, offering an entirely new account of natural morality that compellingly unites the concepts of natural law and natural rights. Seagrave agrees with Strauss that the idea of natural rights is distinctly modern and does not derive from traditional natural law. Despite their historical distinctness, however, he argues that the two ideas are profoundly compatible and that the thought of John Locke and Thomas Aquinas provides the key to reconciling the two sides of this long-standing debate. In doing so, he lays out a coherent concept of natural morality that brings together thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke, revealing the insights contained within these disparate accounts as well as their incompleteness when considered in isolation. Finally, he turns to an examination of contemporary issues, including health care, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty, showing how this new account of morality can open up a more fruitful debate.
Tunguska, or the End of Nature
Tunguska, or the End of Nature
Hampe, Michael
¥288.41
On June 30, 1908, a mysterious explosion erupted in the skies over a vast woodland area of Siberia. Known as the Tunguska Event, it has been a source of wild conjecture over the past century, attributed to causes ranging from meteors to a small black hole to antimatter. In this imaginative book, Michael Hampe sets four fictional men based on real-life scholars-a physicist (Gunter Hasinger and Steven Weinberg), a philosopher (Paul Feyerabend), a biologist (Adolf Portmann), and a mathematician (Alfred North Whitehead)-adrift on the open ocean, in a dense fog, to discuss what they think happened. The result is a playful and highly illuminating exploration of the definition of nature, mankind's role within it, and what its end might be.?Tunguska, Or the End of Nature uses its four-man setup to tackle some of today's burning issues-such as climate change, environmental destruction, and resource management-from a diverse range of perspectives. With a kind of foreboding, it asks what the world was like, and will be like, without us, whether we are negligible and the universe random, whether nature can truly be explained, whether it is good or evil, or whether nature is simply a thought we think. This is a profoundly unique work, a thrillingly interdisciplinary piece of scholarly literature that probes the mysteries of nature and humans alike.?
Autonomy After Auschwitz
Autonomy After Auschwitz
Shuster, Martin
¥370.82
Ever since Kant and Hegel, the notion of autonomy-the idea that we are beholden to no law except one we impose upon ourselves-has been considered the truest philosophical expression of human freedom. But could our commitment to autonomy, as Theodor Adorno asked, be related to the extreme evils that we have witnessed in modernityIn Autonomy after Auschwitz, Martin Shuster explores this difficult question with astonishing theoretical acumen, examining the precise ways autonomy can lead us down a path of evil and how it might be prevented from doing so.Shuster uncovers dangers in the notion of autonomy as it was originally conceived by Kant. Putting Adorno into dialogue with a range of European philosophers, notably Kant, Hegel, Horkheimer, and Habermas-as well as with a variety of contemporary Anglo-American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, and Robert Pippin-he illuminates Adorno's important revisions to this fraught concept and how his different understanding of autonomous agency, fully articulated, might open up new and positive social and political possibilities. Altogether, Autonomy after Auschwitz is a meditation on modern evil and human agency, one that demonstrates the tremendous ethical stakes at the heart of philosophy.?
To Flourish or Destruct
To Flourish or Destruct
Smith, Christian
¥370.82
In his 2010 book What Is a Person?, Christian Smith argued that sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question. Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately "e;capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our 'souls' or 'hearts.'"e; Building on Smith's previous work, To Flourish or Destruct examines the motivations intrinsic to this subjective experience: Why do people do what they doHow can we explain the activity that gives rise to all human social life and social structuresSmith argues that our actions stem from a motivation to realize what he calls natural human goods: ends that are, by nature, constitutionally good for all human beings. He goes on to explore the ways we can and do fail to realize these ends-a failure that can result in varying gradations of evil. Rooted in critical realism and informed by work in philosophy, psychology, and other fields, Smith's ambitious book situates the idea of personhood at the center of our attempts to understand how we might shape good human lives and societies.
Wasting a Crisis
Wasting a Crisis
Mahoney, Paul G.
¥370.82
The recent financial crisis led to sweeping reforms that inspired countless references to the financial reforms of the New Deal. Comparable to the reforms of the New Deal in both scope and scale, the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank Act of 2010-the main regulatory reform package introduced in the United States-also shared with New Deal reforms the assumption that the underlying cause of the crisis was misbehavior by securities market participants, exacerbated by lax regulatory oversight.With Wasting a Crisis, Paul G. Mahoney offers persuasive research to show that this now almost universally accepted narrative of market failure-broadly similar across financial crises-is formulated by political actors hoping to deflect blame from prior policy errors. Drawing on a cache of data, from congressional investigations, litigation, regulatory reports, and filings to stock quotes from the 1920s and '30s, Mahoney moves beyond the received wisdom about the financial reforms of the New Deal, showing that lax regulation was not a substantial cause of the financial problems of the Great Depression. As new regulations were formed around this narrative of market failure, not only were the majority largely ineffective, they were also often counterproductive, consolidating market share in the hands of leading financial firms. An overview of twenty-first-century securities reforms from the same analytic perspective, including Dodd-Frank and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, shows a similar pattern and suggests that they too may offer little benefit to investors and some measurable harm.
Rhetoric of Pregnancy
Rhetoric of Pregnancy
Seigel, Marika
¥288.41
It is a truth widely acknowledged that if you're pregnant and can afford one, you're going to pick up a pregnancy manual. From What to Expect When You're Expecting to Pregnancy for Dummies, these guides act as portable mentors for women who want advice on how to navigate each stage of pregnancy. Yet few women consider the effect of these manuals-how they propel their readers into a particular system of care or whether the manual they choose reflects or contradicts current medical thinking.Using a sophisticated rhetorical analysis, Marika Seigel works to deconstruct pregnancy manuals while also identifying ways to improve communication about pregnancy and healthcare. She traces the manuals' evolution from early twentieth-century tomes that instructed readers to unquestioningly turn their pregnancy management over to doctors, to those of the women's health movement that encouraged readers to engage more critically with their care, to modern online sources that sometimes serve commercial interests as much as the mother's.The first book-length study of its kind, The Rhetoric of Pregnancy is a must-read for both users and designers of our prenatal systems-doctors and doulas, scholars and activists, and anyone interested in encouraging active, effective engagement.
Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence
Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence
Tarde, Gabriel
¥282.53
Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde's most important work and demonstrates his continuing relevance to a new generation of students and thinkers.Tarde's landmark research and empirical analysis drew upon collective behavior, mass communications, and civic opinion as elements to be explained within the context of broader social patterns. Unlike the mass society theorists that followed in his wake, Tarde integrated his discussions of societal change at the macrosocietal and individual levels, anticipating later twentieth-century thinkers who fused the studies of mass communications and public opinion research.Terry N. Clark's introduction, considered the premier guide to Tarde's opus, accompanies this important work, reprinted here for the first time in forty years.
Digging for History at Old Washington
Digging for History at Old Washington
Mary L. Kwas
¥261.73
Positioned along the legendary Southwest Trail, the town of Washington in Hempstead County in southwest Arkansas was a thriving center of commerce, business, and county government in the nineteenth century. Historical figures such as Davy Crockett and Sam Houston passed through, and during the Civil War, when the Federal troops occupied Little Rock, the Hempstead County Courthouse in Washington served as the seat of state government. A prosperous town fully involved in the events and society of the territorial, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, Washington became in a way frozen in time by a series of events including two fires, a tornado, and being bypassed by the railroad in 1874. Now an Arkansas State Park and National Historic Landmark, Washington has been studied by the Arkansas Archeological Survey over the past twenty-five years. Digging for History at Old Washington joins the historical record with archaeological findings such as uncovered construction details, evidence of lost buildings, and remnants of everyday objects. Of particular interest are the homes of Abraham Block, a Jewish merchant originally from New Orleans, and Simon Sanders from North Carolina, who became the town's county clerk. The public and private lives of the Block and Sanders families provide a fascinating look at an antebellum town at the height of its prosperity.
Egocracy
Egocracy
Arribas,Sonia
¥288.41
Sonia Arribas would like to thank her colleagues from the CSIC and UPF seminars ?Mínima Políticaand ?Movimientos Sociales?, especially Paco Fernández Buey, Antonio Gimeno and José Antonio Zamora; and also, for the invaluable support that they have provided at the CSIC, José María González, Reyes Mate and Concha Roldán.
Lost Classroom, Lost Community
Lost Classroom, Lost Community
Brinig, Margaret F.
¥370.82
In the past two decades in the United States, more than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools have closed, and more than 4,500 charter schools-public schools that are often privately operated and freed from certain regulations-have opened, many in urban areas. With a particular emphasis on Catholic school closures, Lost Classroom, Lost Community examines the implications of these dramatic shifts in the urban educational landscape.?More than just educational institutions, Catholic schools promote the development of social capital-the social networks and mutual trust that form the foundation of safe and cohesive communities. Drawing on data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and crime reports collected at the police beat or census tract level in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett demonstrate that the loss of Catholic schools triggers disorder, crime, and an overall decline in community cohesiveness, and suggest that new charter schools fail to fill the gaps left behind.This book shows that the closing of Catholic schools harms the very communities they were created to bring together and serve, and it will have vital implications for both education and policing policy debates.
Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy
Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy
Zuckert, Michael P.
¥370.82
Leo Strauss and his alleged political influence regarding the Iraq War have in recent years been the subject of significant media attention, including stories in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.Time magazine even called him "e;one of the most influential men in American politics."e; With The Truth about Leo Strauss, Michael and Catherine Zuckert challenged the many claims and speculations about this notoriously complex thinker. Now, with Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy, they turn their attention to a searching and more comprehensive interpretation of Strauss's thought as a whole, using the many manifestations of the "e;problem of political philosophy"e; as their touchstone.?For Strauss, political philosophy presented a "e;problem"e; to which there have been a variety of solutions proposed over the course of Western history. Strauss's work, they show, revolved around recovering-and restoring-political philosophy to its original Socratic form. Since positivism and historicism represented two intellectual currents that undermined the possibility of a Socratic political philosophy, the first part of the book is devoted to Strauss's critique of these two positions. Then, the authors explore Strauss's interpretation of the history of philosophy and both ancient and modern canonical political philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Locke. Strauss's often-unconventional readings of these philosophers, they argue, pointed to solutions to the problem of political philosophy. Finally, the authors examine Strauss's thought in the context of the twentieth century, when his chief interlocutors were Schmitt, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche.?The most penetrating and capacious treatment of the political philosophy of this complex and often misunderstood thinker, from his early years to his last works, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy reveals Strauss's writings as an attempt to show that the distinctive characteristics of ancient and modern thought derive from different modes of solving the problem of political philosophy and reveal why he considered the ancient solution both philosophically and politically superior.
Global Pigeon
Global Pigeon
Jerolmack, Colin
¥247.21
The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance-if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the "e;pigeon wars"e; waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in South Africa.Drawing on more than three years of fieldwork across three continents, Colin Jerolmack traces our complex and often contradictory relationship with these versatile animals in public spaces such as Venice's Piazza San Marco and London's Trafalgar Square and in working-class and immigrant communities of pigeon breeders in New York and Berlin. By exploring what he calls "e;the social experience of animals,"e; Jerolmack shows how our interactions with pigeons offer surprising insights into city life, community, culture, and politics. Theoretically understated and accessible to interested readers of all stripes, The Global Pigeon is one of the best and most original ethnographies to be published in decades.
Early Antiquity
Early Antiquity
I. M. Diakonoff, Alexander Kirjanov
¥759.29
The internationally renowned Assyriologist and linguist I.M. Diakonoff has gathered the work of Soviet historians inthis survey of the earliest history of the ancient Near East,Central Asia, India, and China. Diakonoff and hiscolleagues, nearly all working within the general Marxisthistoriographic tradition, offer a comprehensive, accessiblesynthesis of historical knowledge from the beginnings ofagriculture through the advent of the Iron Age and the Greekcolonization in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea areas.Besides discussing features of Soviet historicalscholarship of the ancient world, the essays treat thehistory of early Mesopotamia and the course of PharaonicEgyptian civilization and developments in ancient India andChina from the Bronze Age into the first millennium B.C.Additional chapters are concerned with the early history ofSyria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, the Hittite civilization,the Creto-Mycenaean world, Homeric Greece, and the Phoenicianand Greek colonization.This volume offers a unified perspective on earlyantiquity, focusing on the economic and social relations ofproduction. Of immense value to specialists, the book willalso appeal to general readers.I. M. Diakonoff is a senior research scholar of ancienthistory at the Institute of Oriental Studies, LeningradAcademy of Sciences. Philip L. Kohl is professor ofanthropology at Wellesley College.
Animal Personalities
Animal Personalities
Claudio Carere and Dario Maestripieri
¥394.36
Ask anyone who has owned a pet and they'll assure you that, yes, animals have personalities. And science is beginning to agree. Researchers have demonstrated that both domesticated and nondomesticated animals-from invertebrates to monkeys and apes-behave in consistently different ways, meeting the criteria for what many define as personality. But why the differences, and how are personalities shaped by genes and environmentHow did they evolveThe essays in Animal Personalities reveal that there is much to learn from our furred and feathered friends.?The study of animal personality is one of the fastest-growing areas of research in behavioral and evolutionary biology. Here Claudio Carere and Dario Maestripieri, along with a host of scholars from fields as diverse as ecology, genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, and psychology, provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on animal personality. Grouped into thematic sections, chapters approach the topic with empirical and theoretical material and show that to fully understand why personality exists, we must consider the evolutionary processes that give rise to personality, the ecological correlates of personality differences, and the physiological mechanisms underlying personality variation.
Contesting Nietzsche
Contesting Nietzsche
Acampora, Christa Davis
¥311.96
In this groundbreaking work, Christa Davis Acampora offers a profound rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche's crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, she shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche's philosophy, providing a new appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, she offers an exciting, original vantage from which to view this iconic thinker: Contesting Nietzsche.?Though existence-viewed through the lens of Nietzsche's agon-is fraught with struggle, Acampora illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon's generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche's elaborations of agonism-his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate-she demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led him from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, Contesting Nietzsche sheds fundamentally new light on some of this philosopher's most difficult and paradoxical ideas.
Maimonides and Spinoza
Maimonides and Spinoza
Parens, Joshua
¥353.16
Until the last century, it was generally agreed that Maimonides was a great defender of Judaism, and Spinoza-as an Enlightenment advocate for secularization-among its key opponents. However, a new scholarly consensus has recently emerged that the teachings of the two philosophers were in fact much closer than was previously thought. In his perceptive new book, Parens sets out to challenge the now predominant view of Maimonides as a protomodern forerunner to Spinoza-and to show that a chief reason to read Maimonides is in fact to gain distance from our progressively secularized worldview.Turning the focus from Spinoza's oft-analyzed Theologico-Political Treatise, this book has at its heart a nuanced analysis of his theory of human nature in the Ethics. Viewing this work in contrast to Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, it makes clear that Spinoza can no longer be thought of as the founder of modern Jewish identity, nor should Maimonides be thought of as having paved the way for a modern secular worldview. Maimonides and Spinoza dramatically revises our understanding of both philosophers.
Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
Gross, Neil
¥158.92
On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as "e;one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers."e; Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil Gross explores the path of Rorty's thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that prominence.The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son "e;wasn't rebellious enough,"e; Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty's own thought. Doctoral work at Yale led to Rorty's landing a job at Princeton, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, Rorty quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition-but by the late 1970s Rorty had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a "e;relaxed attitude"e; toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, he argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge-an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time.In clear and compelling fashion, Gross sets that surprising shift in Rorty's thought in the context of his life and social experiences, revealing the many disparate influences that contribute to the making of knowledge. As much a book about the growth of ideas as it is a biography of a philosopher, Richard Rorty will provide readers with a fresh understanding of both the man and the course of twentieth-century thought.
The Theory of Ecology
The Theory of Ecology
Samuel M.Scheiner,Michael R.Willig
¥394.36
Despite claims to the contrary, the science of ecology has a long history of building theories. Many ecological theories are mathematical, computational, or statistical, though, and rarely have attempts been made to organize or extrapolate these models into broader theories. The Theory of Ecology brings together some of the most respected and creative theoretical ecologists of this era to advance a comprehensive, conceptual articulation of ecological theories. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, from ecological niche theory to population dynamic theory to island biogeography theory. Collectively, the chapters ably demonstrate how theory in ecology accounts for observations about the natural world and how models provide predictive understandings. It organizes these models into constitutive domains that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of ecological understanding. This book is a milestone in ecological theory and is certain to motivate future empirical and theoretical work in one of the most exciting and active domains of the life sciences.
THE Affect Effect
THE Affect Effect
George E. Marcus,W. Russell Neuman
¥265.87
two sections branch out to explore how politics work at the societal level and suggest the next steps in modeling, research, and political activity itself. Opening up new paths of inquiry in an exciting new field, this volume will appeal not only to scholars of American politics and political behavior, but also to anyone interested in political psychology and sociology.
Personal Knowledge
Personal Knowledge
Polanyi, Michael
¥206.01
The publication of Personal Knowledge in 1958 shook the science world, as Michael Polanyi took aim at the long-standing ideals of rigid empiricism and rule-bound logic. Today, Personal Knowledge remains one of the most significant philosophy of science books of the twentieth century, bringing the crucial concepts of "e;tacit knowledge"e; and "e;personal knowledge"e; to the forefront of inquiry.In this remarkable treatise, Polanyi attests that our personal experiences and ways of sharing knowledge have a profound effect on scientific discovery. He argues against the idea of the wholly dispassionate researcher, pointing out that even in the strictest of sciences, knowing is still an art, and that personal commitment and passion are logically necessary parts of research. In our technological age where fact is split from value and science from humanity, Polanyi's work continues to advocate for the innate curiosity and scientific leaps of faith that drive our most dazzling ingenuity.For this expanded edition, Polyani scholar Mary Jo Nye set the philosopher-scientist's work into contemporary context, offering fresh insights and providing a helpful guide to critical terms in the work. Used in fields as diverse as religious studies, chemistry, economics, and anthropology, Polanyi's view of knowledge creation is just as relevant to intellectual endeavors today as when it first made waves more than fifty years ago.
Science in the Age of Sensibility
Science in the Age of Sensibility
Riskin, Jessica
¥282.53
Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility. In what she calls a "sentimental empiricism," natural knowledge was taken to rest on a blend of experience and emotion.Riskin argues that sentimental empiricism brought together ideas and institutions, practices and politics. She shows, for instance, how the study of blindness, led by ideas about the mental and moral role of vision and by cataract surgeries, shaped the first school for the blind; how Benjamin Franklin's electrical physics, ascribing desires to nature, engaged French economic reformers; and how the question of the role of language in science and social life linked disputes over Antoine Lavoisier's new chemical names to the founding of France's modern system of civic education.Recasting the Age of Reason by stressing its conjunction with the Age of Sensibility, Riskin offers an entirely new perspective on the development of modern science and the history of the Enlightenment.