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Academics in Action!: A Model for Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Service
by Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein Bernadette Doykos Nina C. Martin Allison McGuireThe academy is often described as an ivory tower, isolated from the community surrounding it. Presenting the theory, vision, and implementation of a socially engaged program for the Department of Human and Organizational Development (HOD) in Peabody’s College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, Academics in Action! describes a more integrated model wherein students and faculty work with communities, learn from them, and bring to bear findings from theory and research to generate solutions to community problems.Offering examples of community-engaged theory, scholarship, teaching, and action, Academics in Action! describes the nuanced structures that foster and support their development within a research university. Theory and action span multiple ecological levels from individuals and small groups to organizations and social structures. The communities of engagement range from local neighborhoods and schools to arenas of national policy and international development.Reflecting the unique perspectives of research faculty, practitioners, and graduate students, Academics in Action! documents a specific philosophy of education that fosters and supports engagement; the potentially transformative nature of academic work for students, faculty, and the broader society; and some of the implications and challenges of action-oriented efforts in light of dynamics such as income inequality, racism, and global capitalism. This edited volume chronicles teaching, research, and community action that influences both inside and outside the classroom as well as presents dimensions of a participatory model that set such efforts into action.
Academics in a Century of Displacement: The Global History and Politics of Protecting Endangered Scholars (Migrationsgesellschaften)
by Frank Wolff Leyla Dakhli Pascale Laborier‘Endangered scholars’ is a recently highly relevant, yet historical notion. Embedded in the greater history of the 20th and 21st centuries, it captures the phenomenon of scholars who, after years of intellectual work and integration in their societies of origin, are forced to seek rescue in foreign host societies. The pressing urgency of the topic thus has an important historical background. From escaping Russian intellectuals after 1917 to the protection of Jewish refugees during World War II, Algerian intellectuals in contemporary history, or persecuted academics from Turkey today: Over the course of about a century, categories of inclusion, transnational relations, and forms of agency of scholars at risk remained surprisingly stable (and hence diachronously and synchronously comparable) while they also adjusted flexibly to contemporary conditions. This collective volume carves out this historical development and its recent expressions. It brings together researchers in a vivid yet largely unconnected field of migration and refugee studies. By developing a complex image of the origin of the global history and politics of protecting endangered scholars from the early 20th century until today, the book contributes to research on academics in exile as a part of refugee research, migration studies, the history of higher education, and the contemporary history of societies. The interdisciplinary volume explores the phenomenon as a historical, political and legal subject, brings together scholars of forced migration and intellectual studies, and includes currently affected scholars into those reflections.
Acceptance and Resistance of Innovative Technologies: Investigating the Acceptance and Resistance of Innovative Technologies with a Focus on Ethics and Sustainability (Handel und Internationales Marketing Retailing and International Marketing)
by Jan-Lukas SelterThe book examines the adoption of different innovative technologies and explores the behavioral intention of both consumers and companies of using these technologies. Both determinants of acceptance and resistance of technology are considered by referring to the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and the Innovation Resistance Theory. The six essays in this publication relate to six innovative technologies and approaches. This entails an examination of technologies that either involve ethical challenges or are designed with the objective of achieving (ecological) sustainability.
Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History
by Ross HamiltonFrom ancient philosophy to Tristram Shandy and Buster Keaton movies, this book tells the engaging history of accident as an idea. An accidental glance at a newspaper notice causes Rousseau to collapse under the force of a vision. A car accidentally hits Giacometti, and he experiences an epiphany. Darwin introduces accident to the basic process of life, and Freud looks to accident as the expression of unconscious desire. Accident, Ross Hamilton claims, is the force that makes us modern. Tracing the story of accident from Aristotle to Buster Keaton and beyond, Hamilton’s daring book revives the tradition of the grand history of ideas. Accident tells an original history of Western thought from the perspective of Aristotle’s remarkably durable categories of accident and substance. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s distinction underwrote an insistence on order and subordination of the inessential. In a groundbreaking innovation, Hamilton argues that after the Reformation, the concept of accident began to change places with that of substance: accident became a life-transforming event and effectively a person’s essence. For moderns, it is the accidental, seemingly trivial moments of consciousness that, like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” create constellations of meaning in our lives. Touching on a broad array of images and texts—Augustine, Dante, the frescoes of Raphael, Descartes, Jane Austen, the work of the surrealists, and twentieth-century cinema—Hamilton provides a new way to map the mutations of personal identity and subjectivity.
Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History
by Ross HamiltonFrom ancient philosophy to Tristram Shandy and Buster Keaton movies, this book tells the engaging history of accident as an idea. An accidental glance at a newspaper notice causes Rousseau to collapse under the force of a vision. A car accidentally hits Giacometti, and he experiences an epiphany. Darwin introduces accident to the basic process of life, and Freud looks to accident as the expression of unconscious desire. Accident, Ross Hamilton claims, is the force that makes us modern. Tracing the story of accident from Aristotle to Buster Keaton and beyond, Hamilton’s daring book revives the tradition of the grand history of ideas. Accident tells an original history of Western thought from the perspective of Aristotle’s remarkably durable categories of accident and substance. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s distinction underwrote an insistence on order and subordination of the inessential. In a groundbreaking innovation, Hamilton argues that after the Reformation, the concept of accident began to change places with that of substance: accident became a life-transforming event and effectively a person’s essence. For moderns, it is the accidental, seemingly trivial moments of consciousness that, like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” create constellations of meaning in our lives. Touching on a broad array of images and texts—Augustine, Dante, the frescoes of Raphael, Descartes, Jane Austen, the work of the surrealists, and twentieth-century cinema—Hamilton provides a new way to map the mutations of personal identity and subjectivity.
Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History
by Ross HamiltonFrom ancient philosophy to Tristram Shandy and Buster Keaton movies, this book tells the engaging history of accident as an idea. An accidental glance at a newspaper notice causes Rousseau to collapse under the force of a vision. A car accidentally hits Giacometti, and he experiences an epiphany. Darwin introduces accident to the basic process of life, and Freud looks to accident as the expression of unconscious desire. Accident, Ross Hamilton claims, is the force that makes us modern. Tracing the story of accident from Aristotle to Buster Keaton and beyond, Hamilton’s daring book revives the tradition of the grand history of ideas. Accident tells an original history of Western thought from the perspective of Aristotle’s remarkably durable categories of accident and substance. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s distinction underwrote an insistence on order and subordination of the inessential. In a groundbreaking innovation, Hamilton argues that after the Reformation, the concept of accident began to change places with that of substance: accident became a life-transforming event and effectively a person’s essence. For moderns, it is the accidental, seemingly trivial moments of consciousness that, like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” create constellations of meaning in our lives. Touching on a broad array of images and texts—Augustine, Dante, the frescoes of Raphael, Descartes, Jane Austen, the work of the surrealists, and twentieth-century cinema—Hamilton provides a new way to map the mutations of personal identity and subjectivity.
Accidental Agents: Ecological Politics Beyond the Human (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)
by Martin CrowleyIn the Anthropocene, the fact that human activity is enmeshed with the existence and actions of every kind of other being is inescapable. As a result, the planetary ecological crisis has brought forth an urgent need to rethink understandings of human action. One response holds that the transformations necessary to tackle today’s crises will emerge from the distinctive capacity of human beings to transcend their environment. Another school of thought calls for seeing action as composite, produced by distributed networks of human and nonhuman agents. Yet the first of these is open to charges of human exceptionalism, while the second, according to its critics, lacks effective political traction.Martin Crowley argues that a new conception of political agency is necessary to break this impasse. Engaging with thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and Catherine Malabou, Crowley proposes an original account of agency as both distributed and decisive. Challenging the prevailing view of agency as exclusively human, he explores how a politics that incorporates nonhuman agency can intervene in the real world, examining timely issues such as climate-related migration and digital-algorithmic politics. A major intervention into ongoing debates in posthumanism, political ecology, and political theory, Accidental Agents reshapes our understanding of political agency in and for a more-than-human world.
Accidental Revolution: The Story of Grunge
by Kyle AndersonAn in-depth history of grunge and the bands behind the pop culture music phenomenon including Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains.Grunge, a style of music that wed classic rock riffs with punk ethos, was the musical movement that defined the 90s and left an indelible mark on the music scene at large. But how did this musical phenomenon emerge from the Seattle underground to become a universal beacon of despair for millions of restless kids around the globe, and why did it resonate with so many disenchanted outsiders?Kyle Anderson answers these questions and more, examining the connection between grunge and punk, how Kurt Cobain's disdain for Axl Rose propelled Nirvana to instant success, the singer who officially killed off grunge with his trite lyrics and pseudo-grunge attitude, and the band that ripped off Pearl Jam, made millions of dollars by selling out to the media, and went on to become the most hated band ever.Accidental Revolution is an essential guide to the triumphs and defeats of a musical revolution and its unforgettable icons.“The way Kyle Anderson writes about grunge mirrors how the music sounded in 1993: Humor within seriousness, heaviness within distortion, enthusiasm within detachment. This book will make you get on the snake.” —New York Times–bestselling author Chuck Klosterman“Kyle Anderson details the roots, the rise, the demise, and the legacy rock and roll's last big thin. Anderson's witty, clear-eyed insights cut through the flannel haze to capture rock's last movement for what it truly was—and what it wasn't.” —New York Times–bestselling author Anthony Bozza
Accountability and Transparency in the Modern Anthropocene
by Glen LehmanThe book is about accountability processes and how they contribute solutions to our current environmental and global political problems. This book is different to other literature in this field. This is so because the dominant accountability discourse is shaped by what is defined as a neoliberal business case for social and environmental reform. This book assumes a nirvana stance within globalisation where all citizens operate within the parameters of the free market and will recover from adverse economic and political damage. Further this book uses neoliberalism and free-market reforms aims as examples to implement efficient management technologies and create more competitive pressures. Central to the argument of the book are perspectives on authenticity, expressivism and interpretivism which are found to provide a radical reworking of our understanding of being in the world. These frameworks offer a starting point for rethinking the way individuals, businesses and communities ought to be dealing politically with accountability and ecological crises. The argument builds to an accountability perspective that utilises work from expressivism, interpretivism, classical liberalism and postmodern theory. The theoretical quest undertaken in this book is to develop connections between accountability, democratic, ethical and ecological perspectives.
Accountability, Philosophy and the Natural Environment (Routledge Research in Sustainability and Business)
by Glen LehmanUsing a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach, this book looks at how accountability can provide solutions to our current environmental and global political problems. When a social system has external elements imposed upon it, or presented to it, political problems are likely to emerge. This book demonstrates that what is needed are connecting social elements with a natural affinity to bring people together despite their differences. This book is different from others in the field. It provides new insights by critiquing the extant understandings of accountability and expands the possibilities by building on Charles Taylor’s philosophies. Central to the argument of the book are perspectives on authenticity and expressivism which are found to provide a radical reworking of our understanding of being in the world, and a starting point for rethinking the way individuals and communities ought to be dealing politically with accountability and ecological crises. The argument builds to an accountability perspective that utilises work from interpretivism, liberalism, and postmodern theory. The book will be of interest to researchers in environmental philosophy, critical perspectives on accounting, corporate governance, corporate social reporting, and environmental accounting.
Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire
by R. J. SnellWhile the term acedia may be unfamiliar, the vice, usually translated as sloth, is all too common. Sloth is not mere laziness, however, but a disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself. As described by Josef Pieper, the slothful person does not "want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is." Sloth is a hellish despair. Our own culture is deeply infected, choosing a destructive freedom rather than the good work for which God created us. Acedia and Its Discontents resists despair, calling us to reconfigure our imaginations and practices in deep love of the life and work given by God. By feasting, keeping sabbath, and working well, we learn to see the world as enchanting, beautiful, and good--just as God sees it. "In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell's book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty 'vacations' that are but interruptions in work. Like his great predecessors Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Max Picard, Romano Guardini, and Pope John Paul II, he diagnoses the besetting disease of our time--spiritual torpor--and prescribes as a remedy the joyful celebration of the Sabbath. A stupendous book, filled with the happiness of wonder."--ANTHONY ESOLEN, "A whole book about just one vice, 'sloth'? Ah, but this book is different. It exposes a deeply hidden and deeply destructive fundamental attitude that pervades our culture, an attitude that comes not just from the flesh (laziness) or from the world (world-weariness, cynicism), but from the Devil: disgust and rebellion toward Being itself, natural as well as supernatural. This is the 'noonday devil' that great saints have labelled 'sloth.' Know your enemy. Read this book!"--PETER KREEFT
Achievement Addiction (Re: CONSIDERING)
by Justine TohRe:CONSIDERING invites you to look at what’s familiar from an unfamiliar angle. To consider how we consider things – and how to do it better.Are you an achievement addict? It’s hard not to be one given our collective obsession with success.Students fear that the ATAR will sum up not just their schooling career, but also their individual worth. Australians aren’t just mad for sporting victory – skyrocketing house prices show we’re equally hooked on owning property. Then there are the furious work habits of Silicon Valley CEOs, violin prodigies, and tiger mums.Why do we constantly strive for our significance – and could you quit the habit if you tried?
Achieving Ethical Competence for Public Service Leadership
by Terry L. Cooper Donald C. MenzelThis book shows students entering the public service as well as professionals in the field how to become ethically competent to provide the leadership needed to advance the public interest. The book doesn't just talk about ethics. The contributors describe how ethical competence should guide organizational conduct. All chapters are original, and written by experts in the PA field for this book.
Achieving Inclusive Education in the Caribbean and Beyond: From Philosophy to Praxis
by Dennis A. Conrad Launcelot I. Brown Stacey N. BlackmanThis book offers an international perspective of philosophical, conceptual and praxis-oriented issues that impinge on achieving education for all students. It sheds light on the historical, systemic, structural, organizational, and attitudinal barriers that continue to be antithetical to the philosophy and practice of inclusive education within the Caribbean. The first section of the book examines how globalized views of inclusion informed by philosophical ideas from the North have influenced and continue to influence the equity in education agenda in the region. The second section considers how exclusion and marginalization still occur across selected Caribbean islands. It provides both quantitative and qualitative data about the nature and experience of exclusion in selected Caribbean islands, the UK and USA. The third section tackles the practical realities of transforming education systems in the Caribbean for inclusion. In particular, it identifies teacher practices as the main site of interrogation that needs to be tackled if inclusion is to be successful. The fourth and final section examines the contribution of principals and exemplars to the development and advocacy for inclusive education. It discusses how educational leadership is understood, as well as the role of school principals in making inclusion a reality in schools, the challenges experienced and the qualities of education leaders.
Achieving Justice in the U.S. Healthcare System: Mercy is Sustainable; the Insatiable Thirst for Profit is Not (Library of Public Policy and Public Administration #13)
by Arthur J. DyckThis book focuses on justice and its demands in the way of providing people with medical care. Building on recent insights on the nature of moral perceptions and motivations from the neurosciences, it makes a case for the traditional medical ethic and examines its financial feasibility. The book starts out by giving an account of the concept of justice and tracing it back to the practices and tenets of Hippocrates and his followers, while taking into account findings from the neurosciences. Next, it considers whether the claim that it is just to limit medical care for everyone to some basic minimum is justifiable. The book then addresses finances and expenditures of the US health care system and shows that the growth of expenditures and the percentage of the gross national product spent on health care make for an unsustainable trajectory. In light of the question what should be changed, the book suggests that overdiagnosis and medicalizing normal behavior lead to harmful, costly and unnecessary interventions and are the result of unethical behavior on the part of the pharmaceutical industry and extensive ethical failures of the FDA. The book ends with suggestions about what can be done to put the U.S. health care system on the path to sustainability, better medical care, and compliance with the demands of justice.
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
by Richard RortyMust the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey. How have national pride and American patriotism come to seem an endorsement of atrocities--from slavery to the slaughter of Native Americans, from the rape of ancient forests to the Vietnam War? Achieving Our Country traces the sources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Left, as well as the harm it does to its proponents and to the country. At the center of this history is the conflict between the Old Left and the New that arose during the Vietnam War era. Richard Rorty describes how the paradoxical victory of the antiwar movement, ushering in the Nixon years, encouraged a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to pursue "High Theory" at the expense of considering the place of ideas in our common life. In this turn to theory, Rorty sees a retreat from the secularism and pragmatism championed by Dewey and Whitman, and he decries the tendency of the heirs of the New Left to theorize about the United States from a distance instead of participating in the civic work of shaping our national future. In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for "achieving our country."
Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future
by Emmanuel C. EzeAchieving Our Humanity explores a postracial future through a philosophical analysis of the social, cultural, economic and political experiences of race in the past and what this might mean for our present and, most importantly, our future.
Achilles in the Quantum Universe: The Definitive History of Infinity
by Richard MorrisCenturies ago, when the ancient philosopher Zeno proposedhis famous paradox involving Achilles and the Tortoise, he struck at the heart of one of science's most enduring and intractable problems: How do we define the infinite? From then on, our greatest natural philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, and scientists, from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking, have been stymied-and driven-by infinity.Acclaimed Science writer Richard Morris guides us on a fascinating, literate and entertaining tour of the efforts made throughout history to make sense of the mind-bending concept of the infinite. In tracing this quest, Morris shows us how each new encounter with infinity drove the advancement of physics and mathematics. Along the way, we encounter such luminaries as Galileo and Newton, Tycho Brahe and Giordano Bruno, and the giants of modern physics: Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann, Hawking, and numerous others.Beginning with simple logical puzzles and progressing to the latest cosmological theories, Morris shows how these same infinity problems helped spawn such groundbreaking scientific developments as relativity and quantum mechanics. Though in many ways, the infinite is just as baffling today as it was in antiquity, contemporary scientists are probing ever deeper into the nature of our universe and catching fleeting glimpses of the infinite in ways the ancients could never have imagined.Ultimately, we see that hidden within the theoretical possibility of an infinite number of universes may lie the answers to some of humankind's most fundamental questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we here?
Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music
by Joe MolloyAcid Detroit tells the story of Motor City through its revolutionary music past and present, in order to find the seeds of radical transformation among its ruins.Acid Detroit is an exhilarating, technicolour view of Detroit&’s musical and social history from the 1960s to the present day. Redefining the counterculture as a time of Acid Communism, Acid Detroit diverges from most books on the Sixties, which centre on California, to show that Detroit was an unequalled hotbed of radical activism, urban unrest and sonic innovation. Considering Detroit's unique mix of people and cultures and enduring sonic legacies, it covers everything from incendiary garage rock, to European-influenced techno and experimental hip-hop crews, intertwining the artist&’s lives and works with the city&’s rise and decline, from its establishment as an industrial powerhouse to the high point of Motor City, into its decline and tentative rebirth. A mind-expanding tour through time and space that explores the lost possibilities, histories and hidden potentials of the city, Acid Detroit reveals a history of resilience and transformation hidden in the shadows of the abandoned factories and warehouses of the Motor City.
Acorn
by Yoko Ono"It's nearly 50 years ago that my book of conceptual instructions Grapefruit was first published. In these pages I'm picking up where I left off. After each day of sharing the instructions you should feel free to question, discuss, and/or report what your mind tells you. I'm just planting the seeds. Have fun." - Yoko OnoLegendary avant-garde icon Yoko Ono has inspired generations of artists and performers. In Acorn, she offers enchanting and thought-provoking exercises that open our eyes-and all of our senses - to more creative and mindful ways of relating to ourselves, each other, and the planet we cohabit. Throughout this beautifully designed book are 100 black-and-white line drawings by Yoko. Like this legendary woman herself, the book is wildly original, stimulating, and hard to label: call it purposeful play, call it brain poetry, call it guided motivation, call it Zen-like incantations, call it whatever you want. But read it. Acorn may change the way you experience the world.
Across the Great Divide: Between Analytic and Continental Political Theory
by Jeremy ArnoldThe division between analytic and continental political theory remains as sharp as it is wide, rendering basic problems seemingly intractable. Across the Great Divide offers an accessible and compelling account of how this split has shaped the field of political philosophy and suggests means of addressing it. Rather than advocating a synthesis of these philosophical modes, author Jeremy Arnold argues for aporetic cross-tradition theorizing: bringing together both traditions in order to show how each is at once necessary and limited. Across the Great Divide engages with a range of fundamental political concepts and theorists—from state legitimacy and violence in the work of Stanley Cavell, to personal freedom and its civic institutionalization in Philip Pettit and Hannah Arendt, and justice in John Rawls and Jacques Derrida—not only illustrating the shortcomings of theoretical synthesis but also demonstrating a productive alternative. By outlining the failings of "political realism" as a synthetic cross-tradition approach to political theory and by modeling an aporetic mode of engagement, Arnold shows how we can better understand and address the pressing political issues of civil freedom and state justice today.
Act and Omission in Criminal Law: Autonomy, Morality and Applications to Euthanasia (Routledge Research in Legal Philosophy)
by Roni RosenbergThis book offers an innovative perspective on the critical distinction between acts and omissions in criminal law, a distinction that runs like a defining thread through all types of criminal offenses.While any act that positively causes a prohibited harm is sufficient for a conviction, an omission that causes the very same harm warrants a conviction only when there is a legal duty to act. This fundamental distinction between acts and omissions is not just relevant to criminal law, but it is also deeply rooted in our moral thinking. Thus, it is commonly argued that the difference between acts and omissions is also applicable to the intuitive moral distinction between active euthanasia, forbidden in most countries, and passive euthanasia, permitted in many countries under certain circumstances. Hence, the significance of this book is threefold: First, it offers a comprehensive, coherent, and systematic discussion of the intersections between the philosophical-moral and the legal-criminal aspects of this fundamental topic. Second, it offers a novel rationale for the distinction between acts and omissions, based on the principle of autonomy. Finally, it demonstrates the influences of the theoretical discussion, on the most significant practical questions.This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of criminal law, moral philosophy, and bioethics.
Acting Out and Sin: Psychoanalytic and Theological Perspectives (SpringerBriefs in Psychology)
by Henry KellermanThis brief treatise explores the common threads to psychoanalytic thought and theological theory. It uses a psychoanalytic lens to examine Judeo/Christian concepts of individual will, consciousness and the unconscious, and the apparent confounding idea of sin. What is new is that the definition of sin is revealed as a psychoanalytic translation of acting-out. Focusing on the behavior of acting-out it illuminates ideas that are part of Western cultural tradition providing insights to those interested in the psychology, and its history and philosophy. As such, it is a highly relevant work for psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, as well as for a comparative study of psychoanalytic and theological intersecting structures.
Acting after Grotowski: Theatre’s Carnal Prayer
by Kris SalataFor whom does the actor perform? To answer this foundational question of the actor’s art, Grotowski scholar Kris Salata explores acting as a self-revelatory action, introduces Grotowski’s concept of "carnal prayer," and develops an interdisciplinary theory of acting and spectating. Acting after Grotowski: Theatre’s Carnal Prayer attempts to overcome the religious/secular binary by treating "prayer" as a pre-religious, originary deed, and ultimately situates theatre along with ritual in their shared territory of play. Grounded in theatre practice, Salata’s narrative moves through postmodern philosophy, critical theory, theatre, performance, ritual, and religious studies, concluding that the fundamental structure of prayer, which underpins the actor’s deed, can be found in any self-revelatory creative act.
Action
by D. G. BrownProfessor Brown in this volume discusses one of the most difficult questions in metaphysics, "what is action?" His analysis proceeds along three main lines of thought: the point of view of the agent, the primacy of inanimate action, and the pervasiveness of explanatory insight in the description of action. In the spirit of recent work on practical reasoning, he takes the central fact about human action to be the existence of the point of view, and considers the agent's relation to his own body, Professor Brown argues that the concept of human action is best understood through that of inanimate action, such as the action of wind on trees or an axe on wood. His analysis takes inanimate action as fundamental, and defends it against the popular theory that it is an anthropomorphic projection. Human action is indeed unique. But it is also Professor Brown's thesis that the classical empiricist search for the brute fact of our own agency yields no more than incidental insights into its nature; introspection does not replace the analysis of human action.The analysis in this essay caters for inanimate action as well as for the uniqueness of human action. The key to an analysis complex enough to cover both is the notion of "attributability," which Professor Brown regards as providing "an Aristotelian extension of a Humean approach to causation." Explanation by reference to the soul exploits the point of view of the rational agent. In this way, both human and inanimate action are exhibited as natural phenomena the descriptions of which are pervaded by explanatory insight.The book as a whole gives an account of action in which the peculiarities of human action find their place in nature. It does not enter on questions of ethics, but remains with concepts common to morality, psychology, and history. There are incidental discussions of deliberation, psychokinesis, casual necessity, the agent's knowledge of his action, and responsibility. Here is a controversial theory of action supported by careful argument. Professor Brown's writing is both ambitious in scope and attentive to conceptual detail, and offers a valuable contribution to one of the liveliest contemporary debates in philosophy.