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Books > Humanities
We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our
possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political,
religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and
reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are
forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are
reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the
conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by
reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of
Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the
nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why
they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most
reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical,
context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the
recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome
consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that
enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to
live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both
the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for
resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that
reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is
ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.
This is a compelling and revealing look at the history of the
U.S.-Mexico border as a place, a symbol of cross-cultural melding,
and a source of growing anxiety over immigration and national
security. The U.S.-Mexico border is far more than a line that
separates two countries. A winding path of nearly 2,000 miles from
the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, it is history, commerce,
and culture. In recent years, however, attitudes about border
crossings and border issues have hardened as has immigration
policy. A source of growing anxiety over illegal immigration,
national security, and safety, the border has become a symbol of
political cataclysm over immigration law and enforcement, the
future of DACA, the increasingly harsh treatment of refugees and
others who attempt to cross without authorization, and the future
of U.S. policy. This book traces the history of the border and its
people, from the creation of the border line to explosive issues
surrounding immigration and the future of the United States as a
nation of diverse cultures and races. Explores the creation and
development of the border in the late 19th century and the growing
industrialization of the region in the early 20th century Examines
the cross-border violence during the US Civil War and the Mexican
Revolution, the increasing racial hostility and deportation
policies in the 1930s and 1950s, and cartel violence Provides an
unbiased assessment of the advent of the Chicano movement and
politics on the border, NAFTA and border economics, and the
increasingly hostile political debate over immigration and demands
for a wall Provides critical background and contextual information
to the events that have led to a turning point in America: How do
we as a nation treat those seeking a new life at the border? Shows
how the border has brought out feelings of community and acceptance
along the border and at the same time birthed nativist and racial
stereotypes Supplements political material with relatable
information about the lives of cross-border workers and the
blending of cultures along the border as they include food,
language, and art
Through its extensive use of primary source materials and
invaluable contextual notes, this book offers a documented history
of one of the most famous adventures in early American history: the
Lewis and Clark expedition. This book is the first to situate the
Lewis and Clark expedition within the political and scientific
ambitions of Thomas Jefferson. It spans a forty-year period in
American history, from 1783–1832, covering Jefferson's early
interest in trying to organize an expedition to explore the
American West through the difficult negotiations of the Louisiana
Purchase, the formation of the "Corps of Discovery," the
expedition's incredible journey into the unknown, and its
aftermath. The story of the expedition is told not just through the
journals and letters of Lewis and Clark, but also through the
firsthand accounts of the expedition's other members, which
included Sacagawea, a Native American woman, and York, an African
American slave. The book features more than 100 primary source
documents, including letters to and from Jefferson, Benjamin Rush,
and others as the expedition was being organized; diary excerpts
during the expedition; and, uniquely, letters documenting the lives
of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and York after the expedition.
Why should inquiry be possible, only if some knowledge is required
to guide it, as conventionally understood? Contrary to the
conventional wisdom held by many thinkers in all human history
hitherto existing, there are some fundamental dialectic principles
hidden behind any categories of understanding in knowing. And these
principles impose some constraints, at both methodological and
ontological levels, together with other levels in culture, society,
nature, and the mind - on how reality is to be understood.
Furthermore, the specific categories of understanding (as
conventionally understood), even if valid at all (which are often
not the case), are often not that important, when compared with
these more fundamental dialectic principles hidden behind them. The
focus on understanding the nature of knowledge has been much
misplaced, in this sense, in the intellectual history hitherto
existing, and much time and talent have been wasted for something
less important. If true, this thesis will alter the way of how
knowledge is to be understood across the board.
Is written by a highly knowledgeable and well-respected scholarA
new theory called The Holistic Theory of KnowledgeA comprehensive
analysis of knowledge in relation to methodology and ontology, from
the perspectives of nature, the mind, society, and culture
Explore the haunted history of the RMS "Queen Mary."
Explore the haunted history of Helena, Montana.
Modernism has long been understood as a radical repudiation of the
past. Reading against the narrative of modernism-as-break,
Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernist
thought that grows out of pragmatist philosophy and is
characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and
recontextualization. It rediscovers a distinctive response to the
social, intellectual, and artistic transformations of modernity in
the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James. These thinkers share
an institutionally-grounded approach to change which emphasizes
habits, continuities, and daily life over spectacular events,
heroic opposition, and radical rupture. Pragmatic modernists
developed an active, dialectical approach to habit, maintaining a
critical stance toward mindless repetitions while refusing to
romanticize moments of shock or conflict. Through its analysis of
pragmatist keywords, including "habit," "institution,"
"prediction," and "bigness," Pragmatic Modernism offers new
readings of works by James, Proust, Stein, and Andre Breton, among
others. It shows, for instance, how Stein's characteristic literary
innovation-her repetitions-aesthetically materialize the problem of
habit; and how institutions-businesses, museums, newspapers, the
law, and even the state itself-help to construct the subtlest of
personal observations and private gestures in James's novels. This
study reconstructs an overlooked strain of modernism. In so doing,
it helps us to reimagine the stark choice between political
quietism and total revolution that has been handed down to us as
modernism's legacy.
Discover the remarkable history of Dupont Circle in Washington,
D.C.
Discover the stories behind Vermont's most haunted inns, hotels,
and B&Bs.
This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of
all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed
attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship.
The book opens with an exploration of the theological and cultural
difficulties of defining beauty. It traces the church's historical
ambivalence about beauty and art and describes how, in our own day,
the concept of beauty has been commercialized and degraded. Troeger
develops a theologically informed aesthetic that provides a
counter-cultural vision of beauty flowing from the love of God.
The book demonstrates how preachers can reclaim the place of beauty
in preaching and worship. Chapter two employs the concept of
midrash to mine the history of congregational song as a resource
for sermons. Chapter three introduces methods from musicology for
creating sermons on instrumental and choral works and for
integrating word and music more effectively. Chapter four explores
how the close relationship between poetry and prayer can stir the
homiletical imagination. Each of these chapters includes a
selection of the author's sermons illustrating how preachers can
use these varied art forms to open a congregation to the beauty of
God.
A final chapter recounts the responses of congregation members to
whom the sermons were delivered. It uses the insights gained from
those experiences to affirm how the human heart hungers for a
vision of wonder and beauty that empowers people to live more
faithfully in the world.
Tantric traditions in both Buddhism and Hinduism are thriving
throughout Asia and in Asian diasporic communities around the
world, yet they have been largely ignored by Western scholars until
now. This collection of original essays fills this gap by examining
the ways in which Tantric Buddhist traditions have changed over
time and distance as they have spread across cultural boundaries in
Asia. The book is divided into three sections dedicated to South
Asia, Central Asia, and East and Southeast Asia. The essays cover
such topics as the changing ideal of masculinity in Buddhist
literature, the controversy triggered by the transmission of the
Indian Buddhist deity Heruka to Tibet in the 10th century, and the
evolution of a Chinese Buddhist Tantric tradition in the form of
the True Buddha School. The book as a whole addresses complex and
contested categories in the field of religious studies, including
the concept of syncretism and the various ways that the change and
transformation of religious traditions can be described and
articulated. The authors, leading scholars in Tantric studies, draw
on a wide array of methodologies from the fields of history,
anthropology, art history, and sociology. Tantric Traditions in
Transmission and Translation is groundbreaking in its attempt to
look past religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
The idea of the pre-existence of the soul has been extremely
important, widespread, and persistent throughout Western
history--from even before the philosophy of Plato to the poetry of
Robert Frost. When Souls Had Wings offers the first systematic
history of this little explored feature of Western culture.
Terryl Givens describes the tradition of pre-existence as
"pre-heaven"--the place where unborn souls wait until they descend
to earth to be born. And typically it is seen as a descent--a
falling away from a happier and untroubled state into the turbulent
and sinful world we know. The title of the book refers to the idea
put forward in antiquity that our souls begin with wings, and that
only after shedding those wings do we fall to earth. The book not
only traces the history of the idea of pre-existence, but also
captures its meaning for those who have embraced it. Givens
describes how pre-existence has been invoked to explain "the better
angels of our nature," including the human yearning for
transcendence and the sublime. Pre-existence has been said to
account for why we know what we should not know, whether in the
form of a Greek slave's grasp of mathematics, the moral sense
common to humanity, or the human ability to recognize universals.
The belief has explained human bonds that seem to have their own
mysterious prehistory, salved the wounded sensibility of a host of
thinkers who could not otherwise account for the unevenly
distributed pain and suffering that are humanity's common lot, and
has been posited by philosophers and theologians alike to salvage
the principle of human freedom and accountability.
When Souls had Wings underscores how durable (and controversial)
this idea has been throughout the history of Western thought, the
theological dangers it has represented, and how prominently it has
featured in poetry, literature, and art.
Hindu Christian Faqir compares two colonial Indian saints from
Punjab, the neo-Vedantin Hindu Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and the
Christian convert Sundar Singh (1889-1929). Timothy S. Dobe shows
that varied asceticisms, personal exemplary models, and material
religion exuded their ambivalent and powerful public presence in
Protestant metropolitan centers as much as in colonial peripheries.
Challenging ideas of the invention of modern Hinduism, the
transparent translation of Christianity, and the construction of
saints by devotees, this book focuses on the long-standing, shared
religious idioms on which these two men creatively drew to appeal
to transnational audiences and to pursue religious perfection.
Following both men's usage of Urdu, the book adopts the word
"faqir" to examine the vernacular and performative dimensions of
Indian holy man traditions, thereby calling special attention to
missionary and Orientalist anti-ascetic accounts of the "fukeer"
indigenous Islamic traditions and this-worldly religion. Exploring
Rama Tirtha and Sundar Singh's global tours in Europe and America,
self-conscious sartorial styles, and intimate autobiographical
writings, Dobe demonstrates that the vernacular holy man traditions
of Punjab provided resources that both men drew on to construct
their forms of modern monkhood. The rise of heroic, anti-colonial
sannyasis or sadhus of modern Hinduism like Swami Vivekananda is
thus repositioned in relation to global Christianity, Sufi, bhakti,
and Sikh regional practices, religious boundary-crossing,
contestation and conversion. A comparative and contextualized story
of two Punjabi holy men's particular performance of sainthood,
Hindu Christian Faqir reveals much about the broad, interactional
history of religious modernities.
Katja Maria Vogt's Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato
explores a Socratic intuition about the difference between belief
and knowledge. Beliefs - doxai - are deficient cognitive attitudes.
In believing something, one accepts some content as true without
knowing that it is true; one holds something to be true that could
turn out to be false. Since our actions reflect what we hold to be
true, holding beliefs is potentially harmful for oneself and
others. Accordingly, beliefs are ethically worrisome and even, in
the words of Plato's Socrates, "shameful." As Vogt argues, this is
a serious philosophical proposal and it speaks to intuitions we are
likely to share. But it involves a notion of belief that is rather
different from contemporary notions. Today, it is a widespread
assumption that true beliefs are better than false beliefs, and
that some true beliefs (perhaps those that come with
justifications) qualify as knowledge. Socratic epistemology offers
a genuinely different picture. In aiming for knowledge, one must
aim to get rid of beliefs. Knowledge does not entail belief -
belief and knowledge differ in such important ways that they cannot
both count as kinds of belief. As long as one does not have
knowledge, one should reserve judgment and investigate by thinking
through possible ways of seeing things. According to Vogt, the
ancient skeptics and Stoics draw many of these ideas from Plato's
dialogues, revising Socratic-Platonic arguments as they see fit.
Belief and Truth retraces their steps through interpretations of
the Apology, Ion, Republic, Theaetetus, and Philebus, reconstructs
Pyrrhonian investigation and thought, and illuminates the
connections between ancient skepticism and relativism, as well as
the Stoic view that beliefs do not even merit the evaluations
"true" and "false."
An exploration of the murder that occurred at Rocky Point Park in
Warwick, Rhode Island in 1893.
A thoughtful and informative look at moonshine whiskey and the
characters who produced it in the Southern Appalachian region.
Walkers, bikers, paddlers and snowshoers can encounter relics of
the past and their incredible tales from Keene to the Seacoast.
"Exploring Southern New Hampshire" takes history off the page, out
of the car and into the welcoming pine-scented woods and pristine
waters of the Granite State. Hike Mount Monadnock, paddle the
Nashua River and retrace Lincoln's footsteps down Exeter's streets.
Experience the legacy of a women's sawmill at Turkey Pond from the
waters that powered it. Visit Cathedral of the Pines, a beautiful
outdoor altar built with stones from historic sites around the
world. Set sail on the Piscataqua River onboard a gundalow and
learn about the region's rich maritime history. Local history
explorer and nature lover Lucie Bryar leads readers through the
Monadnock, Merrimack Valley and Seacoast regions. Granite State
natives and transplants alike will explore trails and waterways to
gain a new appreciation for the history hidden in natural New
Hampshire.
In a long-overlooked diary entry, Franz Kafka admitted to suffering
from ''bouts of clairvoyance.'' These bouts of clairvoyance can be
seen in his writing, in moments when the solid basis of human
cognition totters, the dissolution of matter seems imminent, and
objects are jarringly severed from physical referents. June O.
Leavitt offers a fascinating examination of the mystical in Kafka's
life and writings, showing that Kafka's understanding of the occult
was not only a product of his own clairvoyant experiences but of
the age in which he lived.
Kafka lived during the modern Spiritual Revival, a powerful
movement which resisted materialism, rejected the adulation of
science and Darwin, and idealized clairvoyant modes of
consciousness. Kafka's contemporaries - such theosophical
ideologues as Madame H.P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Dr. Rudolph
Steiner - encouraged the counterculture to seek the true, spiritual
essence of reality by inducing out-of-body experiences and
producing visions of higher disembodied beings through meditative
techniques. Leaders of the Spiritual Revival also called for the
adoption of certain lifestyles, such as vegetarianism, in order to
help transform consciousness and return humanity to its divine
nature.
Interweaving the occult discourse on clairvoyance, the divine
nature of animal life, vegetarianism, the spiritual sources of
dreams, and the eternal nature of the soul with Kafka's
dream-chronicles, animal narratives, diaries, letters, and stories,
Leavitt takes the reader on a journey through the texts of a great
psychic writer and the fascinating epoch of the Spiritual Revival.
New England stagemen followed thousands of bedazzled gold rushers
out west in 1849, carving out the first public overland
transportation routes in California. Daring drivers like Hank Monk
navigated treacherous terrain, while entrepreneurs such as James
Birch, Jared Crandall and Louis McLane founded stagecoach companies
traveling from Stockton to the Oregon border and over the
formidable Sierra Nevada. Stagecoaches hauling gold from isolated
mines to big-city safes were easy targets for highwaymen like Black
Bart. Road accidents could end in disaster--coaches even tumbled
down mountainsides. Journey back with author Cheryl Anne Stapp to
an era before the railroad and automobile arrived and discover the
wild history of stagecoach travel in California.
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