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Negative Actions: Events, Absences, and the Metaphysics of Agency
by Jonathan D. PaytonNegative actions, like intentional omissions or refrainments, seem to be genuine actions. The standard metaphysical theories of action are event-based: they treat actions as events of a special kind. However, it seems that many (and perhaps all) negative actions are not events, but absences thereof. This is the first book-length treatment of the problem of negative action. It surveys the recent literature, and shows how the problem is rooted in interconnected issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and the philosophy of language. In particular, it connects competing views of the ontology of negative actions to competing views of the semantics of 'negative action sentences', and develops unique ontological and semantic theories to solve the problem. It provides a comprehensive picture of the nature of negative actions, our thought and talk about them, and their place in a theory of action.
Negative Certainties (Religion and Postmodernism)
by Jean-Luc MarionIn Negative Certainties, renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Marion challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions we have developed about knowledge: that it is categorical, predicative, and positive. Following Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, he looks toward our finitude and the limits of our reason. He asks an astonishingly simple—but profoundly provocative—question in order to open up an entirely new way of thinking about knowledge: Isn’t our uncertainty, our finitude and rational limitations, one of the few things we can be certain about? Marion shows how the assumption of knowledge as positive demands a reductive epistemology that disregards immeasurable or disorderly phenomena. He shows that we have experiences every day that have no identifiable causes or predictable reasons, and that these constitute a very real knowledge—a knowledge of the limits of what can be known. Establishing this “negative certainty,” Marion applies it to four aporias, or issues of certain uncertainty: the definition of man; the nature of God; the unconditionality of the gift; and the unpredictability of events. Translated for the first time into English, Negative Certainties is an invigorating work of epistemological inquiry that will take a central place in Marion’s oeuvre.
Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by Jeremy Biles and Kent L. BrintnallDespite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.
Negative Emotions and Transitional Justice
by Mihaela MihaiVehement resentment and indignation are pervasive in societies emerging from dictatorship or civil conflict. How can institutions channel these emotions without undermining the prospects for democracy? Emphasizing the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically and practically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a culture that is hospitable to democracy.
Negative Ethnicity: From Bias to Genocide
by Koigi Wa Wamwere"Negative ethnicity" is Koigi wa Wamwere's name for the deep-seated tensions in Africa that the world has seen flare so terrifyingly. The genocide in Rwanda and "ethnic" killing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and elsewhere stand out as examples. Wa Wamwere argues that these clashes cannot properly be described as ethnically motivated; ethnicity, a positive distinction, has nothing of the hatred here at work. Negative Ethnicity gives a new picture of the force behind untold deaths on the continent, dispelling the myth of an intractable conflict waged along simple, ancient lines.Negative Ethnicity explains the roots, colonial and pre-colonial, of the current "ethnic" tensions. It goes on to describe how, for most Africans, ethnic identity is ambiguous, and analyzes why that fact is obscured. The culprits are many: chronic poverty, a broken education system, preying dictators, corrupt officials, the colonial legacy of hate, the ongoing exploitation of the West.Negative Ethnicity is both a history and a manual for change, intended to introduce Westerners to the crisis and to give Africans a new understanding of it. Perhaps never before has the problem been addressed with such clarity and insight.
Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology
by Cyrus R. K. PatellSince the nineteenth century, ideas centered on the individual, on Emersonian self-reliance, and on the right of the individual to the pursuit of happiness have had a tremendous presence in the United States--and even more so after the Reagan era. But has this presence been for the good of all? In Negative Liberties Cyrus R. K. Patell revises important ideas in the debate about individualism and the political theory of liberalism. He does so by adding two new voices to the current discussion--Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon--to examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narrative generated by U. S. liberal ideology. Pynchon and Morrison reveal the official narrative of individualism as encompassing a complex structure of contradiction held in abeyance. This narrative imagines that the goals of the individual are not at odds with the goals of the family or society and in fact obscures the existence of an unholy truce between individual liberty and forms of oppression. By bringing these two fiction writers into a discourse dominated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, George Kateb, Robert Bellah, and Michael Sandel, Patell unmasks the ways in which contemporary U. S. culture has not fully shed the oppressive patterns of reasoning handed down by the slaveholding culture from which American individualism emerged. With its interdisciplinary approach, Negative Liberties will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, culture, sociology, and politics.
Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive
by Julie ResheThis book offers a radical alternative to the positive orientation of popular psychology. This positive orientation has been criticized numerous times. However, there has yet to be a coherent alternative proposed. We all know today that life hurts and that there is no ultimate remedy to this pain. The positive approach feels to us as dishonest and irrelevant. We require a new, more negative, perspective and practice, one that is honest and does not pretend to offer an escape from the agonies of the world. This book offers in three main chapters a ‘depressive realist’ perspective that explores the structural role of negativity and tragedy in relation to the individual psyche, society, and nature. It explores the possibility of ‘negative psychoanalysis’ which takes into account the tragedy of human existence instead of adopting escapist positions.
Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis: Only the Splendour of Light (Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion)
by Simon HewittThis book is the first treatment at length of negative, or apophatic, theology within the analytic tradition. Apophatic theology holds that there is a significant sense in which we cannot say what God is. Important negative theological elements are present in a host of Christian thinkers, from Gregory of Nyssa to Aquinas, and yet apophaticism is neglected in philosophical theology as practiced within the analytic tradition. By contrast, Hewitt shows how apophatic theology is integral to how Christians have thought about God, and how it can be defended against standard attacks in the philosophical literature. Hewitt diagnoses the unease with apophaticism amongst contempory philosophical theologicans as rooted in a certain picture of how language functions, here called referentialism. Arguing that this picture is not compulsory, an account of language which sits more comfortably with negative theology (originating from work of later Wittgenstein) is invoked, and applied to key themes in philosophical theology including divine personhood, the Trinity, the Incarnation and the afterlife.
Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity
by Michael FagenblatNegative theology is the attempt to describe God by speaking in terms of what God is not. Historical affinities between Jewish modernity and negative theology indicate new directions for thematizing the modern Jewish experience. Questions such as, What are the limits of Jewish modernity in terms of negativity? Has this creative tradition exhausted itself? and How might Jewish thought go forward? anchor these original essays. Taken together they explore the roots and legacies of negative theology in Jewish thought, examine the viability and limits of theorizing the modern Jewish experience as negative theology, and offer a fresh perspective from which to approach Jewish intellectual history.
The Negative Turn in Comparative Law
by Pierre LegrandThis book’s essays aim subversively and resolutely to replace the hegemonic discursive frame governing comparative law. Beyond harnessing negative critique to resist the orthodoxy’s self-assured cognitive assumptions, at once unexamined and indefensible, the argument mobilizes negativity as an empowering idea, a resource towards the displacement of the brand of comparative law that has been fostering a closing of the comparing mind. To answer the demands of the moment and herald foreign law research as a creditable intellectual development, one requires to engage in a culturalist theorization and practice of comparative law at radical variance from the prevailing positivist model. The negative turn, then, is a call to comparative action – a comparactive motion – in support of the robustly indisciplined thinking that must thoroughly inform research into foreign law. In photography, the negative has been employed productively to generate a positive print. In comparative law, negation wants to affirm edifying epistemic yields.This book will benefit all law teachers and postgraduate law students interested in the workings of law on the international scene, whether specialists in comparative law, public international law, private international law, transnational law, or foreign relations law – in particular, individuals bringing to bear a critical inclination to their subject-matter.
Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition (Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory)
by Vasilis GrolliosThe current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture—that is, the logic of the capitalist system—is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism
by Diana CooleFirst published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Neglected Perspectives on Science and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Relations
by Wayne Viney William Douglas WoodyNeglected Perspectives on Science and Religion explores historical and contemporary relations between science and religion, providing new perspectives on familiar topics such as evolution and the Galileo affair. The book also explores common differences in science and religion with respect to their various treatments of doubt, curiosity, and the methods by which truth claims are assessed. The book includes discussions of religious and scientific treatments of the origins of males and females, evolving views of sex and gender, and contemporary tensions about topics such as same-sex marriage. Viney and Woody also include a chapter exploring the effects of social science research on religious topics such as prayer, prejudice, and violence. The rise of social sciences such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology has resulted in discoveries that contribute to new ways of thinking about the relations of science and religion. This book is ideal for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students, as well as anyone interested in science and religion.
Neglected Virtues (Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory)
by Christine Swanton Glen PettigroveMuch of the work that has been done on virtue has been devoted to getting virtue ethics a seat at the theoretical table. It has been concerned with showing that virtue ethics can provide a satisfactory account of right action to rival accounts offered by consequentialism and deontology. This volume of essays explores the nitty-gritty details of particular virtues. It includes original contributions from a number of leading scholars in virtue ethics. Most of the virtues discussed – such as ambition, cheerfulness, creativity, magnificence, pride, wit, and wonder – have been almost wholly neglected by contemporary ethicists. The volume also includes coverage of other virtues that have received a fair amount of attention in recent years, such as charity, hope, justice, practical wisdom, and temperance. Here the essays address largely ignored dimensions of these virtues and show how these discussions can enrich our understanding of neglected virtues. Neglected Virtues is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on virtue ethics. Its focus on individual virtues, while not meant to be exhaustive, will open new avenues for future research in this rapidly growing area of ethics and moral philosophy.
Negotiating Change: Overcoming Entrenched Harmful Behaviours and Beliefs
by Mike LotzofBehaviour change programs fail more often than they succeed. Failure is avoidable, but not if we keep attempting change the same way. Negotiating Change is the culmination of decades of work with global corporations in ethics, communications, behaviour change and regulatory and social compliance. The book provides a text for corporate leaders, their advisors and academics and students from several disciplines to explain why the current approach to behaviour change and compliance fails, and documents why the author’s approach has been successful in more than 60 countries. The book synthesises research insights from evolutionary psychology, behavioural sciences, neuroscience and neurochemistry into a practical guide. It explains why systems for behavioural guidance and control based on beliefs, religions, ethics, cultures and the law are ineffective in our globalised, hyper-connected, multi-cultural world. The author proposes that harm, first introduced by Hippocrates to guide the practice of medicine, provides a more useful linguistic model to engage. Harm and the Harm Principles provide an objective, independent and universal measure for assessing behaviour, applying equally regardless of race, religion, gender, age or status. Harm is culturally neutral and operates independently of laws, philosophies or codes of conduct. Harm transcends geography and time. Corporations are particularly vulnerable as they operate not just across jurisdictions and cultures, but their behaviour is influenced by the very nature of incorporation, corporate structure and stock-market pressure. Negotiating Change contains tools for boards and senior executives who want to build a more trustworthy organisation. It will not stop bad people doing bad things, but at least the self-righteous mask of legality will be removed.
Negotiating Childhoods: Applying A Moral Filter To Children S Everyday Lives (Studies In Childhood And Youth Series)
by Sam FrankelThis book investigates how constructed representations of the child have and continue to restrict children's opportunities to engage in moral discourses, and the implications this has on children's everyday experiences. By considering a moral dimension to both structure and agency, the author focuses on the nature of the images that are used to represent the child and how these sit in contrast to the active and meaning-driven way in which children negotiate their everyday lives. The book therefore argues that 'morality' provides a filter to understand the backdrop for interaction, as well as offering a focus for engaging with the individual as a social agent, acting and reacting in the world around them. Negotiating Childhoods will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, childhood studies, criminology, social work, culture and media studies and philosophy.
Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877–1902 (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context)
by Mariano Artigas Thomas F. Glick Rafael A MartinezThis “well-researched and insightful study” reveals the secret deliberations that decided the Vatican’s stance on evolution (Catholic Historical Review).Drawing on primary sources made available to scholars only after the archives of the Holy Office were unsealed in 1998, Negotiating Darwin chronicles how the Vatican reacted when six Catholics—five clerics and one layman—tried to integrate evolution and Christianity in the decades following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.As Mariano Artigas, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martínez reconstruct these cases, we see who acted and why, how the events unfolded, and how decisions were put into practice. With the long shadow of Galileo’s condemnation hanging over the Church as the Scientific Revolution ushered in new paradigms, the Church found it prudent to avoid publicly and directly condemning Darwinism and thus treated these cases carefully. The authors reveal the ideological and operational stance of the Vatican, providing insight into current debates on evolution and religious belief.
Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Arab-Canadian Students: Double Consciousness, Belonging, and Radicalization (Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures)
by Wisam Kh. Abdul-JabbarThis book, framed through the notion of double consciousness, brings postcolonial constructs to sociopolitical and pedagogical studies of youth that have yet to find serious traction in education. Significantly, this book contributes to a growing interest among educational and curriculum scholars in engaging the pedagogical role of literature in the theorization of an inclusive curriculum. Therefore, this study not only recognizes the potential of immigrant literature in provoking critical conversation on changes young people undergo in diaspora, but also explores how the curriculum is informed by the diasporic condition itself as demonstrated by this negotiation of foreignness between the student and selected texts.
Negotiating Ethical Challenges in Youth Research (Critical Youth Studies)
by Rachel Brooks Kitty Te RieleNegotiating Ethical Challenges in Youth Research brings together contributors from across the world to explore real-life ethical dilemmas faced by researchers working with young people in a range of social science disciplines. Unlike literature that tends to discuss youth research at an abstracted and exalted level, this volume aims to make the basic principles and guidelines of youth research more ‘real.’ By openly discussing actual challenges that researchers have experienced in the course of conducting their fieldwork or interpreting their findings, this collection provides the most authentic overview of the ethics of youth research available. A careful selection of chapters addresses a range of ethical challenges particularly relevant to contemporary youth researchers. Each chapter identifies an ethical issue that the author has personally experienced in his or her youth research, explains why this was a challenge or dilemma, outlines how the researcher responded to the challenge, and provides advice and draws out broader implications for youth researchers. The chapters are organized around three themes that capture core ethical challenges: power and agency, protection and harm prevention, and trust and respect. The result is a collection that is a rigorous and valuable resource to those embarking on research with young people for the first time as well as supporting the resolution of ethical challenges by more experienced researchers.
Negotiating in Civil Conflict: Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in Iraq
by Haider Ala HamoudiIn 2005, Iraq drafted its first constitution and held the country’s first democratic election in more than fifty years. Even under ideal conditions, drafting a constitution can be a prolonged process marked by contentious debate, and conditions in Iraq are far from ideal: Iraq has long been racked by ethnic and sectarian conflict, which intensified following the American invasion and continues today. This severe division, which often erupted into violence, would not seem to bode well for the fate of democracy. So how is it that Iraq was able to surmount its sectarianism to draft a constitution that speaks to the conflicting and largely incompatible ideological view of the Sunnis, Shi’ah, and Kurds? Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues here that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main sects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.
Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts (Routledge Research in Education)
by Adam Howard Brianne Wheeler Aimee PolimenoRecent efforts emphasize the roles that privilege and elite education play in shaping affluent youths’ identities. Despite various backgrounds, the common qualities shared among the eight adolescents showcased in this book lead them to form particular understandings of self, others, and the world around them that serve as means for them to negotiate their privilege. These self-understandings are crucial for them to feel more at ease with being privileged, foster a positive sense of self, and reduce the negative feelings associated with their advantages – thus managing expectations for future success. Offering an intimate and comprehensive view of affluent adolescents’ inner lives and understandings, Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts explores these qualities and provides an important alternative perspective on privilege and how privilege works. The case studies in this volume explore different settings and lived experiences of eight privileged adolescents who, influenced by various sources, actively construct and cultivate their own privilege. Their stories address a wide range of issues relevant to the study of adolescence and the various social class factors that mediate adolescents’ educational experiences and identities.
Negotiating the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1959-1964: Conferences, Commissions and Decolonisation (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies)
by Peter DockingThis book examines conferences and commissions held for British colonial territories in East and Central Africa in the early 1960s. Until 1960, the British and colonial governments regularly employed hard methods of colonial management in East and Central Africa, such as instituting states of emergency and imprisoning political leaders. A series of events at the end of the 1950s made hard measures no longer feasible, including criticism from the United Nations. As a result, softer measures became more prevalent, and the use of constitutional conferences and commissions became an increasingly important tool for the British government in seeking to manage colonial affairs.During the period 1960-64, a staggering sixteen conferences and ten constitutional commissions were held for British colonies in East and Central Africa. This book is the first of its kind to provide a detailed overview of how the British sought to make use of these events to control and manage the pace of change. The author also demonstrates how commissions and conferences helped shape politics and African popular opinion in the early 1960s. Whilst giving the British government temporary respite, conferences and commissions ultimately accelerated the decolonisation process by transferring more power to African political parties and engendering softer perceptions on both sides. Presenting both British and African perspectives, this book offers an innovative exploration into the way that these episodes played an important part in the decolonisation of Africa. It shows that far from being dry and technical events, conferences and commissions were occasions of drama that tell us much about how the British government and those in Africa engaged with the last days of empire.
Negotiating the Good Life: Aristotle and the Civil Society (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)
by Mark A. YoungFor centuries philosophers have wrestled with the dichotomy between individual freedom on the one hand and collective solidarity on the other. Yet today there is a growing realization that this template is fundamentally flawed. In this book, Mark Young embraces and advocates a more holistic concept of freedom; one which is not merely defined negatively but which positively provides the preconditions for individuals to actively exercise their autonomy and to flourish as human beings in the process. Young posits the idea of 'freedom in community' and traces its origin back to Aristotle. Taking as his premise that humans are deeply social beings who live their lives intricately interwoven with each other, he examines what type of political community is relevant for us in this post-Classical, post-Enlightenment and, indeed, post-Existential world. Identifying the failure of traditional 'statist' models of politics, Young instead argues for a civil society: a globally interlinked and free set of liberal communities as the best context for nourishing human flourishing. In this way we can achieve a proper setting for Eudaimonia in a modern sense.
Negri on Negri: in conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle
by Antonio NegriFirst published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths
by Taylor C. ShermanAn iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in IndiaNehru’s India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in shaping the nation. She argues that the notion of Nehru as the architect of independent India, as well as the ideas, policies, and institutions most strongly associated with his premiership—nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, the strong state, and high modernism—have lost their explanatory power. They have become myths.Sherman examines seminal projects from the time and also introduces readers to little-known personalities and fresh case studies, including India’s continued engagement with overseas Indians, the importance of Buddhism in secular India, the transformations in industry and social life brought about by bicycles, a riotous and ultimately doomed attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol in Bombay, the early history of election campaign finance, and the first state-sponsored art exhibitions. The author also shines a light on underappreciated individuals, such as Apa Pant, the charismatic diplomat who influenced foreign policy from Kenya to Tibet, and Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, the rebellious architect who helped oversee the building of Chandigarh.Tracing and critiquing developments in this formative period in Indian history, Nehru’s India offers a fresh and definitive exploration of the nation’s early postcolonial era.