- Table View
- List View
Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds: Vulnerability and Care of the Earth
by Didier ZúñigaIn Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds, Didier Zúñiga examines the possibility for dialogue and mutual understanding in human and more-than-human worlds. The book responds to the need to find more democratic ways of listening to, giving voice to, and caring for the variety of beings that inhabit the earth. Drawing on ecology and sustainability in democratic theory, Zúñiga demonstrates the transformative potential of a relational ethics that is not only concerned with human animals, but also with the multiplicity of beings on earth, and the relationships in which they are enmeshed. The book offers ways of cultivating and fostering the kinds of relations that are needed to maintain human and more-than-human diversity in order for life to persist. It also calls attention to the quality of the relationships that are needed for life to flourish, advancing our understanding of the diversity of pluralism. Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds ultimately presses us to question our own condition of human animality so that we may reconsider the relations we entertain with one another and with more-than-human forms of life on earth.
The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
by Olivier ZunzA definitive biography of the French aristocrat who became one of democracy’s greatest championsIn 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville expert Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas.Placing Tocqueville’s dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his life and work, Zunz traces Tocqueville’s evolution into a passionate student and practitioner of liberal politics across a trove of correspondence with intellectuals, politicians, constituents, family members, and friends. While taking seriously Tocqueville’s attempts to apply the lessons of Democracy in America to French politics, Zunz shows that the United States, and not only France, remained central to Tocqueville’s thought and actions throughout his life. In his final years, with France gripped by an authoritarian regime and America divided by slavery, Tocqueville feared that the democratic experiment might be failing. Yet his passion for democracy never weakened.Giving equal attention to the French and American sources of Tocqueville’s unique blend of political philosophy and political action, The Man Who Understood Democracy offers the richest, most nuanced portrait yet of a man who, born between the worlds of aristocracy and democracy, fought tirelessly for the only system that he believed could provide both liberty and equality.
Animals, Political Liberalism and Public Reason
by Federico ZuoloThis book explores the problem of disagreement concerning the treatment of animals in a liberal society. Current laws include an unprecedented concern for animal welfare, yet disagreement remains pervasive. This issue has so far been neglected both in political philosophy and animal ethics. Although starting from disagreement has been the hallmark of many politically liberal theories, none have been devoted to the treatment of animals, and conversely, most theories in animal ethics do not take the disagreement on this issue seriously. Bridging this divide with a change of perspective, Zuolo argues that we should begin from the disagreement on the moral status of animals and the treatment we owe them. Reconstructing the epistemic nature of disagreement about animals, Zuolo proposes a novel form of public justification to find principles acceptable to all. By setting out a unified framework which honours the liberal principles of respect for diversity, a robust liberal political theory capable of dealing with diverse forms of disagreement, and even some forms of radical dissent, is achieved.
War, Morality, and Autonomy: An Investigation in Just War Theory
by Daniel S. ZupanJust War Theory is the governing moral doctrine for all of the major democratic militaries and indeed beyond. This book is a close study of a critical component of Just War theory, the moral status of noncombatants. In this post September 11th, 2001 time of cascading unconventional or 'dirty' wars, issues of treatment of noncombatants - whether as incidental casualties during grey area operations or as prisoners swept up by preventative security measures - have resonance across national lines. Whether or not the democracies and other states pursue their national security interests within the limits of Just War reasoning and laws, or break out of these limits in prosecuting war and security measures against terrorist organizations, is one of the top security issues of the day. Zupan examines the flaws that this complex body of moral reasoning often exhibits, arguing that many of the shortcomings of Just War theory can be resolved using Kantian methodology and the theory of autonomy. According to this conception, human beings have unconditional worth which imposes moral constraints upon the actions of other human beings. From this understanding Zupan generates principles that serve as moral guidelines for the use of force which establish a presumption against harming any human being and greatly restrict the conditions under which we may justify any unintended, collateral harm that may affect those who do not intend our harm. Considering the work of moral theorists such as Onora O'Neill, T. M. Scanlon, Michael Walzer, Paul Christopher and G. E. M. Anscombe and such issues as the Doctrine of Double Effect, autonomy and supreme emergency, Zupan concludes that if we ever are justified in targeting the innocent, it will only be under very rare conditions where the innocent themselves should accept the principle that permitted their being killed.
What IS Sex? (Short Circuits)
by Alenka ZupancicWhy sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology.Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, “What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan “orthopedists of the unconscious.” Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.
Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)
by Alenka ZupančičA provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles’ Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular “obsessions” have driven the author’s thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of “graphic” as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and “second death.” The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, tally with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family’s misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: “What is incest?”Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič’s absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles’ Antigone illuminates the classical text’s ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.
Critical Vices: The Myths of Postmodern Theory (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)
by Nicholas Zurbrugg Warren BurtFirst published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States
by Christopher F. ZurnSplitsville USA argues that it’s time for us to break up to save representative democracy, proposing a mutually negotiated, peaceful dissolution of the current United States of America into several new nations. Zurn begins by examining the United States’ democratic predicament, a road most likely headed for electoral authoritarianism, with distinct possibilities of ungovernability and violent civil strife. Unlike others who share this diagnosis, Zurn presents a realistic picture of how we can get to reform and what it would involve. It is argued that "Splitsville" represents the most plausible way for American citizens to continue living under a republican form of government. Despite recent talk of secession and civil war, this book offers the most extensive treatment yet of the issues we need to think through to enable a peacefully negotiated political divorce. Splitsville USA is a provocative conversation opener about the problems that have gotten us into our current political pickle and how to get out of it by seizing the reins of our own constitutional destiny. The book will appeal to readers of political science, American politics, history, political philosophy, and law, along with all general readers interested in the future of democracy in the United States.
Curious Minds: The Power of Connection
by Perry Zurn Dani S. BassettAn exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity&’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people.Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what&’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book &“represents the thought of one mind and two bodies&”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone&’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it.
Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge
by Perry Zurn Arjun ShankarThe first English-language collection to establish curiosity studies as a unique field From science and technology to business and education, curiosity is often taken for granted as an unquestioned good. And yet, few people can define curiosity. Curiosity Studies marshals scholars from more than a dozen fields not only to define curiosity but also to grapple with its ethics as well as its role in technological advancement and global citizenship. While intriguing research on curiosity has occurred in numerous disciplines for decades, no rigorously cross-disciplinary study has existed—until now. Curiosity Studies stages an interdisciplinary conversation about what curiosity is and what resources it holds for human and ecological flourishing. These engaging essays are integrated into four clusters: scientific inquiry, educational practice, social relations, and transformative power. By exploring curiosity through the practice of scientific inquiry, the contours of human learning, the stakes of social difference, and the potential of radical imagination, these clusters focus and reinvigorate the study of this universal but slippery phenomenon: the desire to know. Against the assumption that curiosity is neutral, this volume insists that curiosity has a history and a political import and requires precision to define and operationalize. As various fields deepen its analysis, a new ecosystem for knowledge production can flourish, driven by real-world problems and a commitment to solve them in collaboration. By paying particular attention to pedagogy throughout, Curiosity Studies equips us to live critically and creatively in what might be called our new Age of Curiosity.Contributors: Danielle S. Bassett, U of Pennsylvania; Barbara M. Benedict, Trinity College; Susan Engel, Williams College; Ellen K. Feder, American U; Kristina T. Johnson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Narendra Keval; Christina León, Princeton U; Tyson Lewis, U of North Texas; Amy Marvin, U of Oregon; Hilary M. Schor, U of Southern California; Seeta Sistla, Hampshire College; Heather Anne Swanson, Aarhus U.
The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity
by Mark ZussThe desire for knowledge is an abiding facet of human experience and cultural development. This work documents curiosity as a sociohistorical force initiating research across the disciplines. Projects generated by theoretical curiosity are presented as historical and material practices emerging as expressions of embodied knowledge and experience. The shifting cultural, philosophical and practical relations between theory and curiosity are situated within classical, medieval, early modern and contemporary communities of practice. The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity advocates for a critical, aesthetic engagement in everyday life. Its purpose is to examine the pedagogical grounds and questions that motivate research programs in the sciences, education, technoculture and post-war social movements. Theoretical curiosity continually resists disciplinary limits. It is a core, embodied process uniting human pursuits of knowledge and power. This inquiry into inquiry itself offers an appreciation of the vital continuity between the senses, perception, and affect and concept development. It is informed by a critical reading of phenomenology as the embodied practice of researchers. This study sponsors a deepening of theory in practice and the practice of theoretical exploration. As a contribution to pedagogical practice, it offers a historical critique of the usually unquestioned philosophical, political and ethical grounds for educational, scientific and social research. The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity profiles significant alliances and persona as agents for the pursuit of novel and often controversial research, adventures and discovery. It claims that the place of technology and the technical is the primary channel for contemporary inquiry. The technosciences of genomics, artificial life and astrobiology are considered as contemporary extensions of a perennial desire to pursue and resist the limits of existing knowledge and representation.
An Analytical Philosophy of Religion (Routledge Library Editions: Philosophy of Religion)
by Willem Frederik ZuurdeegThis original study, published initially in 1959, introduces students of philosophy and of theology to a treatment of religion based upon the methods of modern philosophy – particularly logical empiricism and existentialism. Above and beyond the importance of its point of view, this book is distinguished by its clarity and by its objective and understanding presentation of diverse points of view.
The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History)
by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite Stefanos Geroulanos Nicole JerrWhat is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings. Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches, periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests.The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin’s corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of “the people” in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book’s contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.
Continental Philosophy of Technoscience (Philosophy of Engineering and Technology #38)
by Hub ZwartThe key objective of this volume is to allow philosophy students and early-stage researchers to become practicing philosophers in technoscientific settings. Zwart focuses on the methodological issue of how to practice continental philosophy of technoscience today. This text draws upon continental authors such as Hegel, Engels, Heidegger, Bachelard and Lacan (and their fields of dialectics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis) in developing a coherent message around the technicity of science or rather, “technoscience”. Within technoscience, the focus will be on recent developments in life sciences research, such as genomics, post-genomics, synthetic biology and global ecology. This book uniquely presents continental perspectives that tend to be underrepresented in mainstream philosophy of science, yet entail crucial insights for coming to terms with technoscience as it is evolving on a global scale today.This is an open access book.
Origins of the Welfare State V8
by F. ZweigFirst published in 2004. Consisting of both shorter pieces and reprints of entire books, this set restores to circulation a number of key texts from the debate about the future of welfare that took place in Britain following the depression. The collection covers the following areas: The period during which the country felt the full impact of the world depression. A number of solutions were put forward during this time to address the arising issues - in particular the consequences of mass unemployment. The approaches ranged from orthodox Marxism to modified conservatism and "middle opinion" A key feature of the debate was the concept of planning as a device to enable governments to cope with economic and social problems. * A range of different ideas were widely canvassed during the war years. It was considered that successful conduct of war could then be applied to the problems of peace. This set resurrects certain proposals, influential in the climate of the times, which have subsequently dropped out of circulation Early assessments dealing with the implications of Welfare State legislation are also included. Although the implementation of the welfare programme was in effect a bipartisan process it did not take long for doubts to be expressed - some of which were directed at the principles on which the Welfare State was being constructed. Volume 8 includes Labour, life, and poverty by F. Zweig.
German Reparations and the Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference
by Ronald W. ZweigGerman Reparations and the Jewish World" has become a standard reference work since it was first published. Based extensively on archival sources, the author examines the difficult debate within the Jewish world whether it was possible to reach a material settlement with Germany so soon after Auschwitz. Concentrating on how the money was spent in rebuilding Jewish life, he also analyzes how the reparations payments transformed the relations bteween Israel and the diaspora, and between different Jewish political and ideological groups. This revised and expanded edition includes material on sensitive relief programmes from archives that have only recently been opened to researchers. In a new, extensive introductory essay the author reexamines the reparations, restitution and indemnification processes from the perspective of 50 years later.
Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky: Master Builders of the Spirit
by Stefan ZweigWritten over a period of twenty-five years, this first volume in a trilogy is intended to depict in the life and work of writers of different nationalities--Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky--the world-portraying novelist. Though these essays were composed at fairly long intervals, their essential uniformity has prompted Zweig to bring these three great novelists of the nineteenth century together; to show them as writers who, for the very reason that they contrast with each other, also complete one another in ways which makes them round our concept of the epic portrayers of the world.Zweig considers Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century. He draws between the writer of one outstanding novel, and what he terms a true novelist--an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. The novelist in this higher sense is endowed with encyclopedic genius, is a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravity that are unique to these fi gures.Each of the novelists featured in Zweig's book has created his own sphere: Balzac, the world of society; Dickens, the world of the family; Dostoevsky, the world of the One and of the All. A comparison of these spheres serves to prove their diff erences. Zweig does not put a valuation on the differences, or emphasize the national element in the artist, whether in a spirit of sympathy or antipathy. Every great creator is a unity in himself, with its own boundaries and specifi c gravity. There is only one specifi c gravity possible within a single work, and no absolute criterion in the sales of justice. This is the measure of Zweig, and the message of this book.
Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon
by Stefan ZweigThis is the second volume in a trilogy in which Stefan Zweig builds a composite picture of the European mind through intellectual portraits selected from among its most representative and influential figures. In 'Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche', Zweig concentrates on three giants of German literature to portray the artist and thinker as a figure possessed by a powerful inner vision at odds with the materialism and scientific positivism of his time, in this case, the nineteenth century. Zweig's subjects here are respectively a lyric poet, a dramatist and writer of novellas, and a philosopher. Each led an unstable life ending in madness and/or suicide and not until the twentieth century did each make their full impact. Whereas the nineteenth-century novel is socially capacious in terms of subject and audience, the three figures treated here are prophets or forerunners of modernist ideas of alienation and exile. Hoelderlin and Kleist consciously opposed the worldly harmoniousness of Goethe's classicism in favor of a visionary inwardness and dramatisation of the subjective psyche. Nietzsche set himself as a destroyer and rebuilder of philosophy and critic of the degradation of the German spirit through nationalism and militarism. Zweig's choice of subjects reflects a division in his own soul. The image of Goethe recurs here as the ultimate upholder of Zweig's own ideals: scientist and artist, receptive to world culture, supremely rational and prudent. Yet Zweig was aware that Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche were more daring explorers of the dangerous and destructive aspects of man that needed to be seen and comprehended in the clarifying light of poetry and philosophy.
Nietzsche: The Struggle With The Daemon (Master Builders Of The Spirit Ser.)
by Stefan ZweigA scintillating biographical study of the one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, by one of the bestselling writers of the twentieth.In this vivid biography, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche's habits, passions and obsessions. This work, concentrating on the man rather than the work, on the tragedy of his existence and his apartness from the world in which he moved in enforced isolation, is a tour de force, drawing the reader inexorably into Nietzsche's tragic trajectory.Illustrated with numerous photographs relating to Nietzsche and his European locations, this superb translation by Will Stone is essential reading for anyone interested in Nietzsche, Zweig, first-class biographies and philosophy.
The Struggle with the Daemon
by Stefan Zweig Cedar Paul Eden PaulThe Struggle with the Daemon is a brilliant analysis of the European psyche by the great novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig. Zweig studies three giants of German literature and thought: Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche - powerful minds whose ideas were at odds with the scientific positivism of their age; troubled spirits whose intoxicating passions drove them mad but inspired them to great works. In their struggle with their inner creative force, Zweig reflects the conflict at the heart of the European soul - between science and art, reason and inspiration.Both highly personal and philosophically wide-ranging, this is one of the most fascinating of Zweig's renowned biographical studies.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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.
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.
This Great National Object: Essays in Philosophy
by Jan ZwickyMaking extensive use of the National Archives and the Archives of Ontario, Styran and Taylor unveil previously unpublished information about the construction of the canals, including technical plans and drawings from a wide variety of sources. They illustrate the technical and management intricacies of building a navigational trade and commerce lifeline while also revealing the vivid characters - from businessman William Hamilton Merritt to engineer John Page - who inspired the project and drove it to completion. The history of the Welland Canals is a gripping tale of epic proportions. Given the ongoing importance of the Great Lakes in the North American economy, interest in the St. Lawrence Seaway - of which the Welland is "the Great Swivel Link" - and the relevance of labour history, This Great National Object will be of interest to enthusiasts and historians alike.
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.
The Quantum World
by Hervé Zwirn Bernard D'EspagnatIn this largely nontechnical book, eminent physicists and philosophers address the philosophical impact of recent advances in quantum physics. These are shown to shed new light on profound questions about realism, determinism, causality or locality. The participants contribute in the spirit of an open and honest discussion, reminiscent of the time when science and philosophy were inseparable. After the editors’ introduction, the next chapter reveals the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the subsequent discussions examine our notion of reality. The spotlight is then turned to the topic of decoherence. Bohm’s theory is critically examined in two chapters, and the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics is likewise described and discussed. The penultimate chapter presents a proposal for resolving the measurement problem, and finally the topic of loop quantum gravity is presented by one of its founding fathers, Carlo Rovelli. The original presentations and discussions on which this volume is based took place under the auspices of the French “Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques”. The book will appeal to everybody interested in knowing how our description of the world is impacted by the results of the most powerful and successful theory that physicists have ever built.