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Academic Skepticism in Hume and Kant: A Ciceronian Critique of Metaphysics (Synthese Library #449)
by Catalina González QuinteroThis book offers an unprecedented study of the influence of the skepticism of the New Platonic Academy on David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s critiques of metaphysics. By demonstrating how the skeptical teachings of the Academy affected these authors’ Enlightened attacks on traditional metaphysics, this book deepens and broadens the burgeoning scholarship on the role that the Ancients schools of skepticism played in the configuration of Modern skeptical outlooks. It bolsters the newfound recognition that we must reconsider the conventional view that the revival of Pyrrhonism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave birth to Modern skepticism by incorporating the influence of Academic skepticism in the analysis.Giving a new impetus to this line of research, the author argues that Academic ideas and methods informed Hume’s and Kant’s critique of metaphysics in substantial and thus far unacknowledged ways. Specifically, she demonstrates the centrality of Academic skepticism to Hume’s epistemology and critique of religion through a detailed analysis of his theory of belief in the Treatise and the first Enquiry as well as of its application in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Likewise, her analysis reveals how Kant’s anti-metaphysical stance, developed in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, contains many skeptical insights of Academic inspiration, bequeathed to him by Hume.
Academic Skepticism in Seventeenth-Century French Philosophy: The Charronian Legacy 1601-1662 (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées #215)
by José R. Maia NetoThis book is the first systematic account of Pierre Charron's influence among the major French philosophers in the period (1601-1662). It shows that Charron's Wisdom was one of the main sources of inspiration of Pierre Gassendi's first published book, the Exercitationes adversus aristoteleos. It sheds new light on La Mothe Le Vayer, who is usually viewed as a major free thinker. By showing that he was a follower of Charron, La Mothe emerges neither as a skeptical apologist nor as a disguised libertine, as combatting superstition but not as irreligious. The book shows the close presence of Charron in the preambles of Descartes' philosophy and that the cogito is mainly based on the moral Academic self-assurance of Charron's wise man. This interpretation reverses the standard view of Descartes' relation to skepticism. Once this skepticism is recognized to be Charron's Academic one, it is seen not as the target but as the source of the cogito. Pascal is the last major philosopher for whom Charron's wisdom is crucially relevant. Montaigne and Descartes influenced, respectively, Pascal's view of the Pyrrhonian skeptic and of the skeptical main arguments. The book shows that Charron's Academic skeptical wise man is one of the main targets of his projected apology for Christianity, since he considered him as a threat and counter-example of the kind of Christian view of human beings he believed. By restoring the historical philosophical relevance of Charron in early modern philosophy and arguing for the relevance of Academic skepticism in the period, this book opens a new research program to early modern scholars and will be valuable for those interested in the history of philosophy, French literature and religion.
Academic Women in Neoliberal Times (Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education)
by Briony LiptonThis book investigates the gendered dimensions of academic life in the contemporary Australian university. It examines key discourses – most notably academic performativity and identity – through a feminist lens, and scrutinises how discourses of neoliberalism and feminism are entangled in the structure, systems, operations and cultures of the university. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with academic women in Australia, the author uses a mix of experimental methods to emphasise the performative and discursive decisions women make with regard to their academic careers. In doing so, this book reveals how women themselves generate neoliberal and feminist shifts, how they manage the contradictions they produce, and how they carve spaces of influence and authority. Moving towards a re-evaluation of existing discourses, this book offers new insights into gender inequality in the Australian university in neoliberal times.
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard Arum Josipa RoksaIn spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor's degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they're born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills--including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing--during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise--instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents--all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa's report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.
Academics in a Century of Displacement: The Global History and Politics of Protecting Endangered Scholars (Migrationsgesellschaften)
by Leyla Dakhli Pascale Laborier Frank Wolff‘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.
Academics in Action!: A Model for Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Service
by Sandra L. Barnes Nina C. Martin Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein Bernadette Doykos 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.
#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader
by Robin Mackay Armen AvanessianAn apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy.Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own “Prometheanism,” and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of “reasonable” contemporary political alternatives.
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.
The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still
by Dinty W. MooreA journey through the diverse landscape of American Buddhism, written with “a blessedly down-to-earth sense of humor” (Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus). In an era when many of us yearn for an escape from a culture of noise and narcissism, this book takes us into the physical and spiritual geography of Buddhism, American-style: from a weekend at a mountain retreat for corporate executives learning effective ways to cope with stress, to a visit with a Zen teacher holding classes in an old Quaker farmhouse, to a meeting with a Catholic priest who’s also a Zen master. Both a lively introduction to this Eastern spiritual tradition and a colorful portrait of American society, The Accidental Buddhist “makes the oftentimes impenetrable concepts of Buddhism accessible to the reader and contains striking, and important, parallels and contrasts between [the author’s] own Catholic upbringing and ancient Buddhist traditions” (Library Journal). “A travelogue detailing the tremendous diversity within American Buddhism. His anecdotes make it clear that the umbrella term ‘Buddhist’ encompasses strict Zen monks, laid-back Tibetan politicos, and beatnik holdover Allen Ginsberg. In his travels, Moore attends weekend retreats, chronicles the Dalai Lama’s 1996 visit to Indiana, and grooves to Change Your Mind Day, a meditative Buddha-fest in New York City’s Central Park. . . . He finds that his family is his sangha (monastery), and while he still feels he is ‘probably a fairly lousy Buddhist,’ he will eclectically combine his various forms of new knowledge to find a path that makes sense to him. Now that may be an authentic American Buddhism.” —Kirkus Reviews
The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa
by Michael KimmelmanA New York Times bestseller—a dazzling and inspirational survey of how art can be found and appreciated in everyday lifeMichael Kimmelman, the prominent New York Times writer and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, is known as a deep and graceful writer across the disciplines of art and music and also as a pianist who understands something about the artist's sensibility from the inside. Readers have come to expect him not only to fill in their knowledge about art but also to inspire them to think about connections between art and the larger world - which is to say, to think more like an artist. Kimmelman's many years of contemplating and writing about art have brought him to this wise, wide-ranging, and long-awaited book.It explores art as life's great passion, revealing what we can learn of life through pictures and sculptures and the people who make them. It assures us that art - points of contact with the exceptional that are linked straight to the heart - can be found almost anywhere and everywhere if only our eyes are opened enough to recognize it. Kimmelman regards art, like all serious human endeavors, as a passage through which a larger view of life may come more clearly into focus. His book is a kind of adventure or journey.It carries the message that many of us may not yet have learned how to recognize the art in our own lives. To do so is something of an art itself. A few of the characters Kimmelman describes, like Bonnard and Chardin, are great artists. But others are explorers and obscure obsessives, paint-by-numbers enthusiasts, amateur shutterbugs, and collectors of strange odds and ends. Yet others, like Charlotte Solomon, a girl whom no one considered much of an artist but who secretly created a masterpiece about the world before her death in Auschwitz, have reserved spots for themselves in history, or not, with a single work that encapsulates a whole life.Kimmelman reminds us of the Wunderkammer, the cabinet of wonders - the rage in seventeenth-century Europe and a metaphor for the art of life. Each drawer of the cabinet promises something curious and exotic, instructive and beautiful, the cabinet being a kind of ideal, self-contained universe that makes order out of the chaos of the world. The Accidental Masterpiece is a kind of literary Wunderkammer, filled with lively surprises and philosophical musings. It will inspire readers to imagine their own personal cabinet of wonders.
The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution
by Henry GeeThe idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being “animal” and started being “human. ” In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world—they are not, indeed, unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gee’s firsthand experience on the editorial side of many incredible paleontological findings with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution—the key is not what’s missing, but how we’re linked.
An Accidental Statistician
by George E. BoxCelebrating the life of an admired pioneer in statisticsIn this captivating and inspiring memoir, world-renowned statistician George E. P. Box offers a firsthand account of his life and statistical work. Writing in an engaging, charming style, Dr. Box reveals the unlikely events that led him to a career in statistics, beginning with his job as a chemist conducting experiments for the British army during World War II. At this turning point in his life and career, Dr. Box taught himself the statistical methods necessary to analyze his own findings when there were no statisticians available to check his work.Throughout his autobiography, Dr. Box expertly weaves a personal and professional narrative to illustrate the effects his work had on his life and vice-versa. Interwoven between his research with time series analysis, experimental design, and the quality movement, Dr. Box recounts coming to the United States, his family life, and stories of the people who mean the most to him.This fascinating account balances the influence of both personal and professional relationships to demonstrate the extraordinary life of one of the greatest and most influential statisticians of our time. An Accidental Statistician also features:* Two forewords written by Dr. Box's former colleagues and closest confidants* Personal insights from more than a dozen statisticians on how Dr. Box has influenced and continues to touch their careers and lives* Numerous, previously unpublished photos from the author's personal collectionAn Accidental Statistician is a compelling read for statisticians in education or industry, mathematicians, engineers, and anyone interested in the life story of an influential intellectual who altered the world of modern statistics.
The Accommodation of Regional and Ethno-cultural Diversity in Ukraine (Federalism and Internal Conflicts)
by Aadne Aasland Sabine KroppThe book offers new insights into how ethnicity, language and regional-local identity interact within the context of Ukrainian political reform, and indicates how these reforms affect social cohesion among ethno-cultural groups. While the individual chapters each focus on one or a few facets of the overall research question, together they draw a nuanced picture of the multifaceted challenges to creating and consolidating social cohesion in a nationalizing state. The concept integrates various disciplines, including political science, international relations, law, and sociology. Correspondingly, the contributions are based on various methodological approaches, ranging from legal analysis over media discourse analysis, individual and focus group interviews to analysis of data from a representative population survey. The findings of the in-depth study are discussed within the broader context of comparative research on diversity management and social cohesion in fragmented societies.
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.
The Accursed Share, Volume I
by Georges BatailleFrom the acclaimed French philosopher, intellectual, and novelist, a brilliant account of the social and economic costs of civilizationIn this important work, Georges Bataille uses his novel economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. He introduces here his concept of the accursed share, the surplus energy that any system, natural or cultural, must expend; it is this expenditure, according to Bataille, that most clearly defines a society. His examples include sacrifice among the Aztecs, potlatch among the Northwest Coast Indians, military conquest in Islam, and Buddhist monasticism in Tibet.In this way, Bataille proposes a theory of a &“general economy&” based on excess and exuberance that radically revises conventional economic models of scarcity and utility. A brilliant blend of economics and aesthetics, ethics and anthropology, The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille&’s philosophic work. It will be of particular interest not only to readers of his fiction and essays but also to cultural theorists, anthropologists, and economists of all schools.
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
The Achaean Federation in Ancient Greece: History, Political and Economic Organisation, Warfare and Strategy (Frontiers in Economic History)
by Emmanouil M. EconomouThis book analyses ancient Greek federalism by focusing on one of the most organised and advanced Greek federal states, the Achaean Federation Sympoliteia. Unlike earlier studies that mainly focused on its political history, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach, analysing aspects of the economic organization and institutions, and the political economy of the Achaean Federation, and combining these findings with political history. It also discusses the strategic choices made by significant historical figures such as generals Aratos and Philopoemen. The analysis of the Achaean Federation verifies the intertemporal federal axiom, which states that the success and viability of federal experiment is achieved when the benefits of participation for the member-states exceed the costs of conferring national sovereignty on supranational federal authorities.The book further argues that the Achaeans developed a system of sophisticated direct democratic procedures in decision-making on federal matters, as well as significant and highly sophisticated (for the era) economic institutions and federal practices, in order to achieve bonds of trust and legitimacy regarding their innovative federal structure. These practices included, among others, the creation of free market type economic institutions, a monetary union, federal budget, provision of public goods and a common defense and security policy for all the Achaean city-state members. Lastly, the book relates these findings to ideas on how the Achaean Federation would have dealt with a series of current global issues, such as European Union integration and problems such as Euroscepticism, Brexit and immigration.
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 Stacey N. Blackman Dennis A. Conrad Launcelot I. BrownThis 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.