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A Critical Examination of STEM: Issues and Challenges (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education)
by Chet BowersThis critical examination of STEM discourses highlights the imperative to think about educational reforms within the diverse cultural contexts of ongoing environmental and technologically driven changes. Chet Bowers illuminates how the dominant myths of Western science promote false promises of what science can achieve. Examples demonstrate how the various science disciplines and their shared ideology largely fail to address the ways metaphorically layered language influences taken-for-granted patterns of thinking and the role this plays in colonizing other cultures, thus maintaining the myth that scientific inquiry is objective and free of cultural influences. Guidelines and questions are included to engage STEM students in becoming explicitly aware of these issues and the challenges they pose.
A Critical History of Modern Aesthetics (Routledge Library Editions: Aesthetics #3)
by Earl of ListowelFirst published in 1933. The purpose of this work was to bridge a gap in English philosophical literature by completing the elaborate history of Bosanquet and to stimulate and enrich the whole study of aesthetics by means of his personal destructive and constructive criticism. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy.
A Critical History of Psychology: From Antiquity to Modernity
by Thomas Hardy LeaheyThis fully updated and refreshed 9th edition places social, economic and political forces of change alongside psychology’s internal theoretical and empirical arguments. It utilizes a critical lens to illuminate the way in which the external world has shaped the development of psychology and, in turn, how psychology from antiquity to modernity has shaped society.The text approaches the material from an integrative, rather than wholly linear, perspective, carefully examining how issues in psychology reflect and affect concepts that lie outside the field of psychology’s technical concerns as a science and profession.Key features of this edition include: A newly reconsidered structure, including five additional interludes exploring historical background narratives and the rise of modernity, to allow for flexible and adaptable textbook use. Expanded exploration of the two psychologies: the Way of Ideas, driven by epistemology and unique to Europe, and The Way of Human Nature, a universal concern to find a science of human behavior and its management. Including scientific, applied, and professional psychology, as well as coverage of the social sciences and social policy implications, this book is appropriate for high-level undergraduate and graduate students.
A Critical History of the Economy: On the birth of the national and international economies (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy)
by Ryan WalterDrawing on recent debates in critical International Political Economy, this book mobilizes the idea that the economy does not exist separately from society and politics to develop a detailed intellectual history of how the economy came to be seen as an independent domain. In contrast to typical approaches to writing the history of economic thought, which assume the reality of the economy, the author describes the forms of intellectual argument that made it possible to conceive of the national and international economies as objects of intellectual inquiry. At the centre of this process was the analytical separation of power and wealth. Walter thus offers a broad historical perspective on the emergence of current IPE theory, while linking the field with contextualist intellectual history. This important and innovative volume will be of strong interest to students and scholars of International Political Economy, International Relations, Economics, History and Political Theory.
A Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Gottlob Frege
by Guillermo E. HaddockGottlob Frege is one of the greatest logicians ever and also a philosopher of great significance. In this book Rosado Haddock offers a critical presentation of the main topics of Frege's philosophy, including, among others, his philosophy of arithmetic, his sense-referent distinction, his distinction between function and object, and his criticisms of formalism and psychologism. More than just an introduction to Frege's philosophy this book is also a highly critical and mature assessment of it as a whole in which the limitations, confusions and other weaknesses of Frege's thought are closely examined. The author is also a Husserlian scholar and this book contains valuable discussions of Husserl's neglected views and comparisons between the two great philosophers.
A Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Language: Central Themes from Locke to Wittgenstein
by John FennellA Critical Introduction to Philosophy of Language is a historically oriented introduction to the central themes in philosophy of language. Its narrative arc covers Locke’s ‘idea’ theory, Mill’s empiricist account of math and logic, Frege and Russell’s development of modern logic and its subsequent deployment in their pioneering program of ‘logical analysis’, Ayer and Carnap’s logical positivism, Quine’s critique of logical positivism and elaboration of a naturalist-behaviorist approach to meaning, and later-Wittgenstein’s ‘ordinary language philosophy’-inspired rejection of the project of logical analysis. Thus, it historically situates the two central programs in early twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy -- logical analysis and logical positivism -- and discusses the central critiques they face later in the century in the works of Quine and the later-Wittgenstein. Unlike other secondary studies in philosophy of language, A Critical Introduction to Philosophy of Language is not just a ‘greatest hits album’, i.e., a discontinuous compilation in which classics in the field are presented together with their standard criticisms one after the other. Instead, Fennell develops a particular, historical-thematic narrative in which the figures and ideas he treats are introduced in highly intentional ways. And by cross-referencing them throughout his discussions, he highlights the contributions they make to the narrative they comprise.
A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights (Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism)
by Matthew McManusThis book has two aims. First, to provide a critical legal examination of the liberal state and liberal rights in the law, and secondly, to present a systematic alternative to liberal approaches to both the law and rights, grounded in a left wing conception of human dignity. At the opening of the 21st century a remarkable thing happened. Liberalism, once considered the only doctrine left standing at the end of history, began to face renewed competition from both the political left and the post-modern conservative right. This book argues that the way forward is not to abandon, but to radicalize, the potential of the liberal project. Analysing major theoretical positions in order to build a critical genealogy of liberal rights, McManus lucidly develops a left wing alternative to the classic liberal approach to rights drawing on the traditions of liberal egalitarians and deliberative democracy theory. Societies, he argues, should be committed to advancing the human dignity of all through the enshrinement of certain rights into positive state law, the expansion of democracy and a resolute commitment to economic equality.
A Critical Legal Study of the Ideology Behind Solvency II (Economic and Financial Law & Policy – Shifting Insights & Values #4)
by Kristina LoguinovaThis book analyzes the impact of Solvency II. In recent years, EU legislators have sought to introduce fundamental reforms. Whether these reforms were indeed fundamental is critically investigated with regard to a post-crisis piece of financial legislation affecting the EU’s largest institutional investors: Solvency II. Namely, the last financial and economic crisis, the worst financial catastrophe of the last decade, revealed that financial law in particular was not sufficiently mature to maintain the existence of a robust and trust-worthy financial system that could protect society from economic decline. The work also makes concrete recommendations on achieving a more sustainable future. As such, it offers a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in the financial system, the EU political economy, insurance, sustainability, and Critical Legal Studies.
A Critical Overview of Biological Functions (SpringerBriefs in Philosophy)
by Justin GarsonThis book is a critical survey of and guidebook to the literature on biological functions. It ties in with current debates and developments, and at the same time, it looks back on the state of discourse in naturalized teleology prior to the 1970s. It also presents three significant new proposals. First, it describes the generalized selected effects theory, which is one version of the selected effects theory, maintaining that the function of a trait consists in the activity that led to its differential persistence or reproduction in a population, and not merely its differential reproduction. Secondly, it advances "within-discipline pluralism" (as opposed to between-discipline pluralism) a new form of function pluralism, which emphasizes the coexistence of function concepts within diverse biological sub-disciplines. Lastly, it provides a critical assessment of recent alternatives to the selected effects theory of function, namely, the weak etiological theory and the systems-theoretic theory. The book argues that, to the extent that functions purport to offer causal explanations for the existence of a trait, there are no viable alternatives to the selected effects view. The debate about biological functions is still as relevant and important to biology and philosophy as it ever was. Recent controversies surrounding the ENCODE Project Consortium in genetics, the nature of psychiatric classification, and the value of ecological restoration, all point to the continuing relevance to biology of philosophical discussion about the nature of functions. In philosophy, ongoing debates about the nature of biological information, intentionality, health and disease, mechanism, and even biological trait classification, are closely related to debates about biological functions.
A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education
by Tracey OllisExplores the differences and similarities between two groups: lifelong activists who have been engaged in campaigns and socials movements over many years and circumstantial activists, those protestors who come to activism due to a series of life circumstances. Outlines the pedagogy of activism and the process of learning to become an activist.
A Critical Reflection on Automated Science: Will Science Remain Human? (Human Perspectives in Health Sciences and Technology #1)
by Marta Bertolaso Fabio SterpettiThis book provides a critical reflection on automated science and addresses the question whether the computational tools we developed in last decades are changing the way we humans do science. More concretely: Can machines replace scientists in crucial aspects of scientific practice? The contributors to this book re-think and refine some of the main concepts by which science is understood, drawing a fascinating picture of the developments we expect over the next decades of human-machine co-evolution. The volume covers examples from various fields and areas, such as molecular biology, climate modeling, clinical medicine, and artificial intelligence. The explosion of technological tools and drivers for scientific research calls for a renewed understanding of the human character of science. This book aims precisely to contribute to such a renewed understanding of science.
A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals
by Peter OsborneA Critical Sense brings together in a single volume the leading figures of contemporary radical theory. Moving freely between philosophy, politics and cultural studies, it offers a fascinating overview of the lines of thought of today's intellectual left.Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, literary studies, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonial and queer theory are discussed in a series of interviews from the journal Radical Philosophy. Those interviewed are:Judith ButlerCornelius CastoriadisDrucilla CornellAxel HonnethIstvan MeszarosEdward SaidRenata SaleclGayatri Chakravorty SpivakCornel WestSlavoj ZizekFor those unfamiliar with the often daunting work of some of today's most important thinkers, ACritical Sense will offer an ideal introduction; for those already acquainted with the writings of the theorists interviewed here, the collection will throw new - and often surprising - light on familiar ground.
A Critical Theory for the Anthropocene (Anthropocene – Humanities and Social Sciences)
by Nathanaël WallenhorstThis volume, which is rooted in biogeophysical studies, addresses conceptions of political action in the Anthropocene and the tension between a desire to accomplish the Promethean project of modernity and a post-Promethean approach. This work explores the idea of an anthropological mutation of political consolidation from a “post-Promethean togetherness”, to creating the capacity to act together. The political thinking of the human condition developed by Hannah Arendt is important here as a resource for thinking about humanity in terms of human adventure. This has three dimensions: hubris, the world and coexistence referring respectively to the logic of profit of the homo oeconomicus, the logic of responsibility of the homo collectivus and the logic of the hospitality of the homo religatus. The intellectual and political attitude outlined in this book is an extension of critical theory: the work also puts forward a critique of what poses a problem in our relationship to the world and suggests how to overcome it, the ultimate goal being social transformation. The author propose an uprising and an anthropological consolidation of politics based on the revitalization that is brought about by the sharing of a conviviality both between humans and with what is non-human. The identification of conviviality as an educational paradigm to survive the Anthropocene gives us the much needed reason for hope despite this heritage of the Anthropocene. In addition to Arendtian thinking, this critical theory for the Anthropocene draws on the political thinking of several contemporary authors including Maurice Bellet, Hartmut Rosa, Andreas Weber, Dominique Bourg, and Christian Arnsperger. This volume is of interest to researchers in the Anthropocene.
A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation (Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism)
by Werner BonefeldThis book explores a variety of interconnected themes central to contemporary Marxist theory and its further development as a critical social theory. Championing the critique of political economy as a critical theory of society and rejecting Marxian economics as a contradiction in terms, it argues instead that economic categories are perverted social categories, before identifying the sheer unrest of life - the struggle to make ends meet - as the negative content of the reified system of economic objectivity. With class struggle recognised as the negative category of the cold society of capitalist wealth, which sees in humanity a living resource for economic progress, the author contends that the critique of class society finds its rational solution in the society of human purposes, that is, the classless society of communist individuals. A theoretically sophisticated engagement with Marxist thought, A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in critical theory and post-capitalist imaginaries.
A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of the Social Order
by Mark NeocleousPutting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalismThe ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.
A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television
by Silke Panse Dennis RothermelA Critique of Judgment in Film and Television is a response to a significant increase of judgment and judgmentalism in contemporary television, film, and social media by investigating the changing relations between the aesthetics and ethics of judgment.
A Critique of Pure Education: Radically Rethinking the Education Archipelago (Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education)
by Nick PeimThis book analyses educational theory in order to offer an alternative view of the history of education in modernity. It provides a new understanding of education as a phenomenon that draws on powerful lines of thinking, but also makes a significant departure from the conventional wisdom of both education policy and education studies. These perspectives offer an original and challenging account of what education is and of what politics has become, providing resources to rethink education as a fundamental dimension of the unprecedented political order of our time. It does this through a focus on what it takes to be the key, complex and expanding political apparatus of education. Taking the school to be the paradigm institution of modernity and beyond, the book proposes that we see the school as central to contemporary political ontology.
A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Revisions: Vol 7)
by Russell HittingerIn this book, Hittinger seeks to provide a critique of the "new natural law theory" developed over the past two decades by Germain G. Grisez and, to a lesser degree, by John M. Finnis. Grisez's articulation of the position began in the early 1960s with the publication of his Contraception and the Natural Law, continued with the publication of major articles and massive books concerned with abortion, euthanasia and other issues, and , while still developing today, culminated in the 1983 publication of his Christian Moral PrinCiples. the first of a projected four-volume work in moral theology. In Christian Moral Principles.
A Croce Reader: Aesthetics, Philosophy, History, and Literary Criticism
by Massimo VerdicchioBenedetto Croce was a historian, humanist, political figure, and the foremost Italian philosopher of the early twentieth-century. A Croce Reader brings together the author’s most important works across the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, history, literary criticism, and the Baroque and presents the “other” Croce that has been erased by scholarly tradition, including by Croce himself. Massimo Verdicchio traces the progress of Croce as a thinker, focusing on his philosophy of absolute historicism and its aesthetic implications. Unlike other anthologies, A Croce Reader includes essays from the Aesthetics of 1902 and key studies on Vico, Hegel, and Pirandello. Verdicchio’s masterful translation of the source material welcomes specialists and non-specialists alike to discover the “other” Croce for themselves.
A Cross-linguistic Approach to the Syntax of Subjunctive Mood (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory #101)
by Lena Baunaz Genoveva PuskásThis monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian, among others. Starting from a close scrutiny of the environments in which subjunctive mood occurs and of its semantic contribution, we present a feature-based approach which reveals the common properties of the class of verbs which embed subjunctive, and which takes into account the variation in subjunctive-related complementizers. Two main proposals can be highlighted: (i) the lexical semantics of the main clause predicate plays a crucial role in mood selection. More specifically subjunctive mood is regulated by a specific property of the main predicate, the emotive property, which is associated with the external argument of the embedding verb (usually the Subject). The book proposes a nanosyntactic analysis of the internal structure of embedding verbs. (ii) Cross- and intra-linguistic variations are dealt with according to different patterns of lexicalization, i.e., variations depend on what portions of the verb’s and complementizer’s functional sequence is lexicalized and on how it is packaged by languages. In doing so, this approach provides a uniform account of the phenomenon of embedded subjunctives. The monograph takes a novel, feature-based approach to the question of subjunctive licensing, providing a detailed analysis of the features of the matrix verb, of the complementizer and of the embedded subjunctive clause. It is also based on a wide empirical coverage, ranging from the relatively well-studied groups of Romance and Balkan languages to less explored languages from non-Indo-European families (Hungarian).
A Cultivated Reason: An Essay on Hume and Humeanism (G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects)
by Christopher WilliamsAs Plato’s tripartite division of the soul, Descartes’s criterion of clear and distinct ideas, and Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative attest, philosophy has traditionally been wedded to rationalism and its “intellectualist” view of persons. In this book Christopher Williams seeks to wean his fellow philosophers away from an overly rationalistic self-understanding by using resources that are available within the philosophical tradition itself, including some that anticipate strands of Nietzsche’s thought.The book begins by developing Hume’s critique of rationalism, with reference especially to the section of the Treatise that deals with the continuing existence of bodies (an argument that subverts intellectualist criteria by attempting to satisfy them) and to his neglected essay “The Sceptic” where Hume reveals the importance of our embodiment through a comic portrayal of philosophers’ efforts to “correct our sentiments.” Then it moves on to ward off charges of irrationalism by showing that, although our powers of self-correction are more limited than the rationalist thinks they are, a Humean position is able both to sustain a commitment to reflection and to sensitize us to a version of irrationalism, manifest in monotheistic theologies, that is otherwise difficult to detect. The book concludes, more speculatively, with a comparison of persons to artworks in order to show how our aesthetic dimension is the source of some of the normative work previously assigned to rationalist reason.Ranging as it does across subfields from epistemology and history of philosophy to ethics and aesthetics, A Cultivated Reason should appeal to a wide audience of philosophers and to scholars in other fields as well.
A Cultural History of Heredity
by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger Staffan Müller-Wille&“Thought-provoking…any scientist interested in genetics will find this an enlightening look at the history of this field.&”—Quarterly Review of Biology It was only around 1800 that heredity began to enter debates among physicians, breeders, and naturalists. Soon thereafter, it evolved into one of the most fundamental concepts of biology. Here, Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger offer a succinct cultural history of the scientific concept of heredity. They outline the dramatic changes the idea has undergone since the early modern period and describe the political and technological developments that brought about these changes. They begin with an account of premodern theories of generation, showing that these were concerned with the procreation of individuals rather than with hereditary transmission, and reveal that when hereditarian thinking first emerged, it did so in a variety of cultural domains, such as politics and law, medicine, natural history, breeding, and anthropology. The authors then track theories of heredity from the late nineteenth century—when leading biologists considered it in light of growing societal concerns with race and eugenics—through the rise of classical and molecular genetics in the twentieth century, to today, as researchers apply sophisticated information technologies to understand heredity. What we come to see from this exquisite history is why it took such a long time for heredity to become a prominent concept in the life sciences, and why it gained such overwhelming importance in those sciences and the broader culture over the last two centuries.
A Cultural History of Reforming Math for All: The Paradox of Making In/equality (Routledge Cultural Studies in Knowledge, Curriculum, and Education)
by Jennifer D. DiazWhile many accept that math is a universal, culturally indifferent subject in school, this book demonstrates that this is anything but true. Building off of a historically conscious understanding of school reform, Diaz makes the case that the language of mathematics, and the symbols through which it is communicated, is not merely about the alleged cultural indifference of mathematical thinking; rather, mathematical teaching relates to historical, cultural, political, and social understandings of equality that order who the child is and should be. Focusing on elementary math for all education reforms in America since the mid-twentieth century, Diaz offers an alternative way of thinking about the subject that recognizes the historical making of contemporary notions of inequality and difference.
A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present
by Kocku von StuckradThe soul, which dominated many intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture—from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements.This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and North America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines a fascination spanning philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the study of religion, as well as occultism and spiritualism, against the backdrop of the emergence of experimental psychology. He then explores how and why the United States witnessed a flowering of ideas about the soul in popular culture and spirituality in the latter half of the century.Von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements—ranging from Ernest Renan, Martin Buber, and Carl Gustav Jung to the Esalen Institute, deep ecology, and revivals of shamanism, animism, and paganism to Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Harry Potter franchise. Revealing how the soul remains central to a culture that is only seemingly secular, this book casts new light on the place of spirituality, religion, and metaphysics in Europe and North America today.
A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously
by Mark FalcoffA Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously presents Mark Falcoff's essays on the region. Many of them are contentious; none of them are dull. He ranges from bilingualism to the cult of Garcia Lorca, from U.S.-Cuban relations to Chile's curious love affair with Germany. On more than one occasion, Falcoff takes aim at American journalism and scholarship, both of which, he argues, have all too often produced a fantasy version of Latin America which reflects our own national narcissism rather than genuine curiosity about the other. Latin America, Falcoff argues, is not merely a geographical extension of the United States, or a kind of downmarket version of the American Southwest. It is a culture all its own, with its own historical memory, sensibility, and worldview. Its achievements -and its miseries-are also its own, not the end-product of policies made by the Pentagon, Wall Street, or the CIA.Falcoff writes about the region with originality, iconoclastic wit, and distinctive literary flair. His volume will interest Latin American specialists, diplomats, and journalists as well as those general readers who think they are not interested in Latin America-or who only suspect they might be, but don't know quite where to start.