- Table View
- List View
The K-3 Guide to Academic Conversations: Practices, Scaffolds, and Activities
by Jeff Zwiers Sara R. Hamerla“For thousands of years people have been using the skills we describe in this book to engage in conversations with others. What isn’t as prevalent, however, is instruction--especially in primary grades—in which we engage students in productive conversations about academic ideas. This book fills that very big need.” --Jeff Zwiers & Sara Hamerla Talk about content mastery . . . Primary teachers, you won’t want to miss this: if you’re looking for a single resource to foster purposeful content discussions and high-quality interpersonal engagement, then put Jeff Zwiers and Sara Hamerla’s K-3 Guide to Academic Conversations at the top of your reading list. Whether your students love to talk or not, all must be equipped with key conversation skills such as active listening, taking turns, posing, clarifying, supporting with examples, and arguing ideas. This ready resource comes packed with every imaginable tool you could need to make academic conversations part of your everyday teaching: Sample lesson plans and anchor charts Guidelines for creating effective prompts Applications across content areas, with corresponding assessments Rubrics and protocols for listening to student speech Transcripts of conversations and questions for reflection Companion website with video and downloadable resources Tens of thousands of students in the upper grades have reaped the benefits of academic conversations: high-quality face-to-face interactions, increased motivation, stronger collaborative argumentation skills, and better understanding and retention of content. The K-3 Guide to Academic Conversations is that resource for providing your primary students with the same powerful learning opportunities.
Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings
by Jeff Zwiers Marie CrawfordConversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.
Building Academic Language: Meeting Common Core Standards Across Disciplines, Grades 5-12
by Jeff Zwiers“Of the over one hundred new publications on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), this one truly stands out! In the second edition of Building Academic Language, Jeff Zwiers presents a much-needed, comprehensive roadmap to cultivating academic language development across all disciplines, this time placing the rigor and challenges of the CCSS front and center. A must-have resource!” —Andrea Honigsfeld, EdD, Molloy College “Language is critical to the development of content learning as students delve more deeply into specific disciplines. When students possess strong academic language, they are better able to critically analyze and synthesize complex ideas and abstract concepts. In this second edition of Building Academic Language, Jeff Zwiers successfully builds the connections between the Common Core State Standards and academic language. This is the ‘go to’ resource for content teachers as they transition to the expectations for college and career readiness.” —Katherine S. McKnight, PhD, National Louis University With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by most of the United States, students need help developing their understanding and use of language within the academic context. This is crucially important throughout middle school and high school, as the subjects discussed and concepts taught require a firm grasp of language in order to understand the greater complexity of the subject matter. Building Academic Language shows teachers what they can do to help their students grasp language principles and develop the language skills they’ll need to reach their highest levels of academic achievement. The Second Edition of Building Academic Language includes new strategies for addressing specific Common Core standards and also provides answers to the most important questions across various content areas, including: What is academic language and how does it differ by content area? How can language-building activities support content understanding for students? How can teachers assist students in using language more effectively, especially in the academic context? How can academic language usage be modeled routinely in the classroom? How can lesson planning and assessment support academic language development? An essential resource for teaching all students, this book explains what every teacher needs to know about language for supporting reading, writing, and academic learning.
The Communication Effect: How to Enhance Learning by Building Ideas and Bridging Information Gaps
by Jeff ZwiersThe &“communication effect&” is what happens when we saturate our classrooms with authentic communication, which occurs when students use language to build up ideas and do meaningful things. For starters, authentic communication deepens and increases language development, learning of content concepts and skills, rigor and engagement, empathy and understanding of others&’ perspectives, agency and ownership of core ideas across disciplines, and social and emotional skills for building strong relationships. And these are just the starters. With The Communication Effect, Dr. Jeff Zwiers challenges teachers in Grades 3 and up to focus less on breadth and more on depth by grounding instruction and assessment in authentic (rather than pseudo-) communication. This book provides: Ideas for cultivating classroom cultures in which authentic communication thrives Clear descriptions and examples of the three features of authentic communication: 1. building up key ideas (claims and concepts); 2. clarifying terms and supporting ideas; and 3. creating and filling information gaps Over 175 suggestions for using the three features of authentic communication to enhance twenty commonly used instructional activities across disciplines Additional examples of not-so-commonly-used activities that embody the three features Suggestions for improving four different types of teacher creativity needed to design effective lessons, activities, and assessments that maximize authentic communication Our students deserve to get the most out of each minute of each lesson. Authentic communication can help. As you read The Communication Effect and apply its ideas, you will see how much better equipped and inspired your students are to grow into the amazing and gifted people that they were meant to become.
The Communication Effect: How to Enhance Learning by Building Ideas and Bridging Information Gaps
by Jeff ZwiersThe &“communication effect&” is what happens when we saturate our classrooms with authentic communication, which occurs when students use language to build up ideas and do meaningful things. For starters, authentic communication deepens and increases language development, learning of content concepts and skills, rigor and engagement, empathy and understanding of others&’ perspectives, agency and ownership of core ideas across disciplines, and social and emotional skills for building strong relationships. And these are just the starters. With The Communication Effect, Dr. Jeff Zwiers challenges teachers in Grades 3 and up to focus less on breadth and more on depth by grounding instruction and assessment in authentic (rather than pseudo-) communication. This book provides: Ideas for cultivating classroom cultures in which authentic communication thrives Clear descriptions and examples of the three features of authentic communication: 1. building up key ideas (claims and concepts); 2. clarifying terms and supporting ideas; and 3. creating and filling information gaps Over 175 suggestions for using the three features of authentic communication to enhance twenty commonly used instructional activities across disciplines Additional examples of not-so-commonly-used activities that embody the three features Suggestions for improving four different types of teacher creativity needed to design effective lessons, activities, and assessments that maximize authentic communication Our students deserve to get the most out of each minute of each lesson. Authentic communication can help. As you read The Communication Effect and apply its ideas, you will see how much better equipped and inspired your students are to grow into the amazing and gifted people that they were meant to become.
Next Steps with Academic Conversations: New Ideas for Improving Learning Through Classroom Talk
by Jeff ZwiersDr. Jeff Zwiers, an educational researcher at Stanford University, has spent the last 15 years analyzing classroom conversations to see how they can be better used and improved in classroom settings. Teachers who have worked with him report significant growth in students&’ engagement, content learning, language, creativity, and sense of agency. Zweirs introduced his initial vision for classroom conversations Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understanding. His follow-up book, Next Steps with Academic Conversations: New Ideas for Improving Learning Through Classroom Talk , expands the first book with updated classroom strategies and practices. In this new version, teachers will discover: How to introduce buildable ideas and teach students how to develop and support them Equitable classroom discussions and how diverse backgrounds conversing can benefit social skills and emotional intelligence Highlights of new research-based theories on classroom conversation Ways to develop students' confidence in conversation and how classroom skills can apply to real world interactions This resource is the product of his extensive research, co-teaching, and collaborating with a wide range of educators. It was written for busy teachers who want a practical guide for strengthening the quality and quantity of productive conversations in their lessons.
Overhauling Learning for Multilingual Students: An Approach for Achieving Pedagogical Justice
by Jeff ZwiersAdopt a strengths-based, justice-centered approach to teaching multilinguals Offering educators a path to pedagogical justice for multilingual learners, Overhauling Learning for Multilingual Students outlines a comprehensive alternative model for instruction and assessment. With an emphasis on engaging multilingual learners in authentic communication and promoting student agency and creativity, this book is an urgent call-to-action for educators at all levels to value and leverage the many assets that multilingual students bring to every classroom. The book outlines six dimensions of pedagogical justice and offers practical strategies to implement a learner-centered approach that will help all students thrive. Additional features include: An assets-based framework designed to help multilingual learners learn and grow Guidance for shifting instructional strategies away from remediation and test preparation toward an engaging, justice-centered approach Activities to to help students collaboratively build up unique and important ideas (claims and concepts) across disciplines Written by scholar, practitioner, and best-selling author, Jeff Zwiers, Overhauling Learning for Multilingual Students supports educators to de-think and rethink traditional one-size-fits-all approaches to teaching and assessing multilingual learners.
Overhauling Learning for Multilingual Students: An Approach for Achieving Pedagogical Justice
by Jeff ZwiersAdopt a strengths-based, justice-centered approach to teaching multilinguals Offering educators a path to pedagogical justice for multilingual learners, Overhauling Learning for Multilingual Students outlines a comprehensive alternative model for instruction and assessment. With an emphasis on engaging multilingual learners in authentic communication and promoting student agency and creativity, this book is an urgent call-to-action for educators at all levels to value and leverage the many assets that multilingual students bring to every classroom. The book outlines six dimensions of pedagogical justice and offers practical strategies to implement a learner-centered approach that will help all students thrive. Additional features include: An assets-based framework designed to help multilingual learners learn and grow Guidance for shifting instructional strategies away from remediation and test preparation toward an engaging, justice-centered approach Activities to to help students collaboratively build up unique and important ideas (claims and concepts) across disciplines Written by scholar, practitioner, and best-selling author, Jeff Zwiers, Overhauling Learning for Multilingual Students supports educators to de-think and rethink traditional one-size-fits-all approaches to teaching and assessing multilingual learners.
Semialgebraic Statistics and Latent Tree Models
by Piotr ZwiernikThe first part of the book gives a general introduction to key concepts in algebraic statistics, focusing on methods that are helpful in the study of models with hidden variables. The author uses tensor geometry as a natural language to deal with multivariate probability distributions, develops new combinatorial tools to study models with hidden data, and describes the semialgebraic structure of statistical models.The second part illustrates important examples of tree models with hidden variables. The book discusses the underlying models and related combinatorial concepts of phylogenetic trees as well as the local and global geometry of latent tree models. It also extends previous results to Gaussian latent tree models.This book shows you how both combinatorics and algebraic geometry enable a better understanding of latent tree models. It contains many results on the geometry of the models, including a detailed analysis of identifiability and the defining polynomial constraints
Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870–1910: The First Speech (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by null Anne-Julia ZwierleinThis book examines the emergence of women as audiences and speakers on the British metropolitan lecture circuit and in mass print representations from 1870 to 1910. Bringing together research on Victorian lecturing, periodicals, voice studies and the cultural history of feminism, it sheds new light on the interdependence of orality and print and the rise of the British women’s movement.Sifting through the archives of lecture institutions (the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, the London Institution and the Royal Institution), penny fiction weeklies and feminist weeklies, New Woman and suffrage novels, autobiographical writings and rhetorical manuals, this book reconstructs the changing mediascape of late Victorian London and treats speech events, in print and on site, as catalysts for democratic participation. Undertaking an archaeology of women’s presence in the lecture hall, it explores conservative fantasies in fiction of the female speaking automaton alongside new writings that transformed women orators from objects of sensation into public agents. By analysing women’s collective self-education in rhetoric and elocution, this book traces the emergence in political fictions of key narrative tropes of oral performance: the surprise encounter in the lecture hall, the moment of conversion during a lecture and the symbolic ‘first speech’ of new suffrage recruits.Drawing on new and extensive primary research, this book intervenes in several flourishing fields of inquiry: literary studies, oral culture studies, sound and voice studies, performance studies, periodical studies and Victorian and Edwardian cultural history.
Imperial Unknowns
by Cornel ZwierleinIn this major new study, the history of the French and British trading empires in the early modern Mediterranean is used as a setting to test a new approach to the history of ignorance: how can we understand the very act of ignoring - in political, economic, religious, cultural and scientific communication - as a fundamental trigger that sets knowledge in motion? Zwierlein explores whether the Scientific Revolution between 1650 and 1750 can be understood as just one of what were in fact many simultaneous epistemic movements and considers the role of the European empires in this phenomenon. Deconstructing central categories like the mercantilist 'national', the exchange of 'confessions' between Western and Eastern Christians and the bridging of cultural gaps between European and Ottoman subjects, Zwierlein argues that understanding what was not known by historical agents can be just as important as the history of knowledge itself.
Peacemaking, Religious Belief and the Rule of Law: The Struggle between Dictatorship and Democracy in Syria and Beyond (Routledge Research in International Law)
by Paul J. ZwierThis book offers a new way of understanding the role of the mediator in teaching parties the interrelationship between sustainable peace, forgiveness, and international justice. It argues that the arrival of social media presents new opportunities for reaching sustainable peace agreements, through their use in gathering the detailed information that can match victims and perpetrators of past atrocities. The author aims to advance a more expansive understanding of the subjects and limitations of making peace in the shadow of international law by examining the concepts of mediation and forgiveness that exist alongside law. To that end, the book offers an account of the role of the mediator that emerges from the interplay between Ricouerian imagination and forgiveness and predicts ever-greater opportunities for making peace and protecting human rights that can be facilitated by a harnessing of social media as a tool for making peace with justice. The author also aims to examine how strategies for sustaining the peace must combat the inevitable frustrations with democracy that can lead to a slide into dictatorship. Assad, Obama, and the UN leadership and their decisions concerning making and maintaining peace in Syria are used as case studies to examine the interplay between a leaders’ religious beliefs, faith in democracy and rule of law, and impulses towards totalitarianism.
Principled Negotiation and Mediation in the International Arena
by Paul J. ZwierThis book argues that it can be beneficial for the United States to talk with 'evil' – terrorists and other bad actors – if it engages a mediator who shares the United States' principles yet is pragmatic. It shows how the US can make better foreign policy decisions and demonstrate its integrity for promoting democracy and human rights, by employing a mediator who facilitates disputes between international actors by moving them along a continuum of principles, as political parties act for a country's citizens. This is the first book to integrate theories of rule of law development with conflict resolution methods, and it examines ongoing disputes in the Middle East, North Korea, South America and Africa. It draws on the author's experiences with The Carter Center and judicial and legal advocacy training to provide a sophisticated understanding of the current situation in these countries and of how a strategy of principled pragmatism will give better direction to US foreign policy abroad.
English L2 Vocabulary Learning and Teaching: Concepts, Principles, and Pedagogy (ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series)
by Lawrence J. Zwier Frank BoersAccessible to experts and non-experts alike, this text is a comprehensive entry to teaching and learning vocabulary in ESL and EFL contexts. Firmly grounded in research, it presents frameworks and methods for teaching vocabulary to English L2 speakers. Overviewing key topics as well as providing in-depth research analyses and critiques, Zwier and Boers address all major areas of vocabulary pedagogy and instruction. Organized in four parts, chapters cover the nature of vocabulary and strands of vocabulary research; curricular approaches; and techniques and activities. Readers are introduced to key topics, including teaching multiword expressions, assessment, discourse, and instruction at different levels. Each chapter includes questions, prompts, and activities to foster discussion. A foundational textbook for courses on L2 instruction and teacher-training courses, it is an essential text for students and scholars in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, and provides the pedagogical grounding future English L2 teachers need to effectively teach vocabulary.
Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion (Comparative Philosophy of Religion #3)
by Karen R. Zwier David L. Weddle Timothy D. KnepperThis volume provides a comparative philosophical investigation into a particular concept from a variety of angles—in this case, the concept of “miracle.” The text covers deeply philosophical questions around the miracle, with a multiplicity of answers. Each chapter brings its own focus to this multifaceted effort. The volume rejects the primarily western focus that typically dominates philosophy of religion and is filled with particular examples of miracle narratives, community responses, and polemical scenarios across widely varying religious contexts and historical periods. Some of these examples defy religious categorization, and some papers challenge the applicability of the concept “miracle,” which is of western and monotheistic origin. By examining miracles thru a wide comparative context, this text presents a range of descriptive content and analysis, with attention to the audience, to the subjective experiences being communicated, and to the flavor of the narratives that come to surround miracles. This book appeals to students and researchers working in philosophy of religion and science, as well those in comparative religion. It represents, in written form, some of the perspectives and dialogue achieved in The Comparison Project’s 2017–2019 lecture series on miracles. The Comparison Project is an enterprise in comparing a variety of religious voices, allowing them to stand in dialogue.
Entrepreneurial Wellbeing: Perspectives in SMEs based on Gender and Immigrant Entrepreneurs
by Jeremy Zwiegelaar Beck ShelleyWellbeing is an integral part of living a fulfilled life. It is intimately related to people's capacity to work and maintain positive relationships. Wellbeing plays an important role in scholarly conversations and public policy debates. In this respect, entrepreneurship can be a source of personal fulfillment and satisfaction, which, in turn, can energise entrepreneurs to persist in improbable tasks that can become a force for a positive change in society. For example, new ventures are created by entrepreneurs not only to benefit themselves but to a greater extent to contribute to customers and other multiple key actors in society. Wellbeing is a complex topic that can be taught across a multitude of areas, including psychology, entrepreneurship and health. This book adds to the context of entrepreneurship by highlighting different types of wellbeing. In this book, the focus is placed on SME owners, and wellbeing and various ways of measuring it in different contexts are discussed. The SME owner is a critical stakeholder in economies, and therefore, the highlighted focus is on how they can apply and practically implement strategies linked to wellbeing which is deemed to be essential for business success. Entrepreneurial Wellbeing: Perspectives in SMEs based on Gender and Immigrant Entrepreneurs will provide views on wellbeing for entrepreneurs, students, employees and research audiences and will help them to further understand this multifaceted topic.
Antifragile Systems and Teams
by Dave ZwiebackHow Can DevOps Make You Antifragile?All complex computer systems eventually break, despite all of the heavy-handed, bureaucratic change-management processes we throw at them. But some systems are clearly more fragile than others, depending on how well they cope with stress. In this O’Reilly report, Dave Zwieback explains how the DevOps methodology can help make your system antifragile.Systems are fragile when organizations are unprepared to handle changing conditions. As generalists adept at several roles, DevOps practitioners adjust more easily to the fast pace of change. Rather than attempt to constrain volatility, DevOps embraces disorder, randomness, and impermanence to make systems even better.This concise report covers:Why Etsy, Netflix, and other antifragile companies constantly introduce volatility to test and upgrade their systemsHow DevOps removes the schism between developers and operations, enlisting developers to deploy as well as buildUsing continual experimentation and minor failures to make critical adjustments—and discover breakthroughsHow an overreliance on measurement and automation can make systems fragileWhy sharing increases trust, collaboration, and tribal knowledgeDownload this free report and learn how the DevOps philosophy of Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing makes use of changing conditions and even embarrassing mistakes to help improve your system—and your organization.Dave Zwieback has been managing large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure and teams for 17 years.
Beyond Blame: Learning From Failure and Success
by Dave ZwiebackFailure is inevitable and a postmortem analysis, conducted in an open, blameless way, is the best way for IT techs and managers to learn from outages and near-misses. But when the "root cause" is determined to be "human error" (or worse, particular humans), the real causes and conditions are lost.In this insightful book, IT veteran Dave Zwieback shows you an approach for making postmortems blameless, so you can focus instead on addressing areas of fragility within systems and organizations. If you’re involved with assessing why something goes wrong on a project or at your company—as a system administrator, developer, team manager, or executive—the concrete steps in this guide will help you find a real solution that works.Recognize and mitigate the effects of stress during outagesLearn how to communicate effectively in a charged, high-stakes postmortem conversationCollect the necessary data before the postmortem beginsFocus on determining the actual causes and conditions of an outageLearn techniques for writing up a postmortem for either internal or external use
DevOps Hiring
by Dave ZwiebackIf your organization has embraced DevOps, you need people whose nonlinear career paths and wide-ranging interests will help you remove dysfunctional silos. But your efforts to hire DevOps practitioners aren't working. How do you unearth these DevOps creatures? Think like one. In this Web Ops & Performance report, Dave Zwieback describes a successful model for finding, hiring, and retaining talent based on the DevOps philosophy of Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. This concise report covers: Why the current recruiting model is brokenHow a culture of engagement gives candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers a common goalFinding "dark pools" of candidates via automationWhat attractive metrics to ditch in order to focus on what's business-criticalSharing the rich opportunities of failures as well as successes Download this free report to learn unorthodox but effective ways to find people who fit your company, and discover why prioritizing employee engagement and fulfillment leads to increased productivity, profits, and customer satisfaction.
The Human Side of Postmortems: Managing Stress And Cognitive Bias In Devops
by Dave ZwiebackImagine you had to write a postmortem containing statements like these?"We were unable to resolve the outage as quickly as we would have hoped because our decision making was impacted by extreme stress.""We spent two hours repeatedly applying the fix that worked during the previous outage, only to find out that it made no difference in this one.""We did not communicate openly about an escalating outage that was caused by our botched deployment because we thought we were about to lose our jobs."While the above scenarios are entirely realistic, it's hard to find many postmortem write-ups that even hint at these "human factors." Their absence is, in part, due to the social stigma associated with publicly acknowledging their contribution to outages. And yet, people dealing with outages are clearly subject to physical exhaustion and psychological stress, not to mention impaired reasoning due to a host of cognitive biases.This report focuses on the effects and mitigation of stress and cognitive biases during outages and postmortems. This "human postmortem" is as important as the technical one, as it enables building more resilient systems and teams, and ultimately reduces the duration and severity of outages.
A First Course in String Theory
by Barton ZwiebachAn accessible introduction to string theory, this book provides a detailed and self-contained demonstration of the main concepts involved. The first part deals with basic ideas, reviewing special relativity and electromagnetism while introducing the concept of extra dimensions. D-branes and the classical dynamics of relativistic strings are discussed next, and the quantization of open and closed bosonic strings in the light-cone gauge, along with a brief introduction to superstrings. The second part begins with a detailed study of D-branes followed by string thermodynamics. It discusses possible physical applications, and covers T-duality of open and closed strings, electromagnetic fields on D-branes, Born/Infeld electrodynamics, covariant string quantization and string interactions. Primarily aimed as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses, it will also be ideal for a wide range of scientists and mathematicians who are curious about string theory.
Mastering Quantum Mechanics: Essentials, Theory, and Applications
by Barton ZwiebachA complete overview of quantum mechanics, covering essential concepts and results, theoretical foundations, and applications.This undergraduate textbook offers a comprehensive overview of quantum mechanics, beginning with essential concepts and results, proceeding through the theoretical foundations that provide the field&’s conceptual framework, and concluding with the tools and applications students will need for advanced studies and for research. Drawn from lectures created for MIT undergraduates and for the popular MITx online course, &“Mastering Quantum Mechanics,&” the text presents the material in a modern and approachable manner while still including the traditional topics necessary for a well-rounded understanding of the subject. As the book progresses, the treatment gradually increases in difficulty, matching students&’ increasingly sophisticated understanding of the material. • Part 1 covers states and probability amplitudes, the Schrödinger equation, energy eigenstates of particles in potentials, the hydrogen atom, and spin one-half particles• Part 2 covers mathematical tools, the pictures of quantum mechanics and the axioms of quantum mechanics, entanglement and tensor products, angular momentum, and identical particles.• Part 3 introduces tools and techniques that help students master the theoretical concepts with a focus on approximation methods.• 236 exercises and 286 end-of-chapter problems• 248 figures
Alkibiades' Love
by Jan ZwickyAlkibiades, a central character in Plato's Symposium, claims that philosophy touches him to the quick. When Socrates speaks, he's often moved to tears and realizes he must change his life. In Alkibiades' Love, Jan Zwicky demonstrates that this image of philosophy is not anachronistic, but remains the living heart of the discipline. Philosophy can indeed matter to our lives, but for it to do so, we must reconceive the methods that, since the Enlightenment, have dominated its self-image in the West. In these meticulously researched essays, Zwicky argues that analytic and poststructuralist philosophy are not simply fashions in academic discourse, but are manifestations of the technocracy which they sustain and promote. The alternative she develops, by showing it in action, is lyric philosophy - an integrated mode of understanding whose foundations lie in the way we comprehend music and metaphor. Written in lucid and powerful prose, Alkibiades' Love will interest a broad readership, from students of ancient Greek philosophy to ecologists seeking a coherent foundation for their work. Zwicky offers deep and original readings of Freud, Plato, and Simone Weil, and resuscitates Max Wertheimer's work, linking it to our comprehension of mathematics, metaphor, and ecological structures. Zwicky has been hailed as one of the most important and original thinkers of our time. Alkibiades' Love illuminates and extends her groundbreaking work while providing an accessible introduction for those coming to her thought for the first time.
The Experience of Meaning
by Jan ZwickyThe aim of this book is a recovery of interest in the experience of meaning. Jan Zwicky defends the claim that we experience meaning in the apprehension of wholes and their internal structural relations, providing examples of such insight in mathematics and physics, literature, music, and Plato's ancient theory of forms. Taken together, these essays constitute a powerful indictment of the aggressive reductionism and the reliance on calculative modes of thought that dominate our present conception of understanding. The Experience of Meaning proposes a more just epistemology, arguing for a new grammar of thought, a new way of understanding the relationship of human intelligence to the world. Engaging with philosophy, psychology, literature, fine arts, music, and environmental studies in a profound way, The Experience of Meaning will interest any reader who ponders the question of meaning and its relation to true human expression.
Once upon a Time in the West: Essays on the Politics of Thought and Imagination
by Jan ZwickyWestern civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky’s trenchant exploration of the root of global cultural and ecological collapse: a way of thinking that is also linked to some of the West’s most noted achievements.The Renaissance merged imperial enterprise with Islamic algebra and recently recovered Greek mathematics to precipitate mechanized industry and resource extraction; these in turn made possible the growth of capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Big Technology. Despite its self-image as objective, Zwicky argues, the West’s style of thought is not politically neutral, but intensely anthropocentric. It has led those who adopt it to regard the more-than-human world as nothing more than timber licences and drilling sites, where value is not recognized unless it is monetized. Oblivious to context and blind to big-picture thinking, it analyzes, mechanizes, digitizes, and systematizes, while rejecting empathy and compassion as distorting influences. Lyric comprehension, in Zwicky’s view, offers an alternative to this way of thinking, and she provides a wide range of examples. Once upon a Time in the West documents how a narrow epistemological style has left Western thought blind to critical features of reality, and how the terrifying consequences of that blinkered vision are now beginning to unfold.