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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism presents a
revaluation of the major narratives in the history of terrorism,
exploring the emergence and the use of terrorism in world history
from antiquity up to the twenty-first century. The essays collected
in this handbook constitute the first systematic analysis of the
relationship between terrorism and modernity on a global scale from
the French Revolution to the present. Historians and political
theorists have long asserted such a link, but this causal
connection has rarely been rigorously investigated, and the failure
to examine such a crucial aspect of terrorism has contributed to
the spread of unsubstantiated claims about its nature and origins.
Terrorism is often presented as a perennial barbarism forever
lurking outside of civilization when, in fact, it is a historically
specific form of political violence generated by modern Western
culture that was then transported around the globe, where it was
transformed in accordance with local conditions. This handbook
offers cogent arguments and well-documented case studies that
support a reading of terrorism as an explicitly modern phenomenon.
It also provides sustained analyses of the challenges involved in
the application of the theories and practices of modernity and
terrorism to non-Western parts of the world. The volume presents an
overview of terrorism's antecedents in the pre-modern world,
analyzes the emergence of terrorism in the West, and presents a
series of case studies from non-Western parts of the world that
together constitute terrorism's global reception history. Essays
cover a broad range of topics from tyrannicide in ancient Greek
political culture, the radical resistance movement against Roman
rule in Judea, the invention of terrorism in Europe, Russia, and
the United States, anarchist networks in France, Argentina, and
China, imperial terror in Colonial Kenya, anti-colonial violence in
India, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and the German Autumn, to
right-wing, eco-and religious terrorism, as well as terrorism's
entanglements with science, technology, media, literature and art.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism ultimately provides
an account of the global history of terrorism and coverage of the
most important cases from this history, always presented with an
eye towards their entanglement with the forces and technologies of
modernity.
This book looks into different forms of social exclusion in
different societies or contexts. It is important to note that in
some cases, social exclusion is fueled by the deprivation of
economic resources, political and social rights. In contrast,
social constructs or cultural norms constitute significant factors
in other cases. At the subject (macro) level, this book opens up an
avenue where researchers from different subjects can look into how
central issues of their subject can be understood through the
lenses of social exclusion. For example, historical perspectives of
social exclusion, sociological perspectives of social exclusion,
religiosity and social exclusion, gender perspectives of social
exclusion, educational perspectives of social exclusion, etc. At
the thematic (micro) level, this book looks into how specific
themes like racism, the corona virus pandemic, albinism, media,
sexuality and gender intersect with social exclusion. In doing all
these, the book also provides a much-needed multidisciplinary and
methodological understanding of issues of social exclusion.
Marx's early work is well known and widely available, but it
usually interpreted as at best a kind of stepping-stone to the Marx
of Capital. This book offers something completely different; it
reconstructs, from his first writings spanning from 1835 to 1846, a
coherent and well-rounded political philosophy. The influence of
Engels upon the development of that philosophy is discussed. This,
it is argued, was a philosophy that Marx could have presented had
he put the ideas together, as he hinted was his eventual intention.
Had he done so, this first Marx would have made an even greater
contribution to social and political philosophy than is generally
acknowledged today. Arguments regarding revolutionary change,
contradiction and other topics such as production, alienation and
emancipation contribute to a powerful analysis in the early works
of Marx, one which is worthy of discussion on its own merits. This
analysis is distributed among a range of books, papers, letters and
other writings, and is gathered here for the first time. Marx's
work of the period was driven by his commitment to emancipation.
Moreover, as is discussed in the conclusion to this book, his
emancipatory philosophy continues to have resonance today. This new
book presents Marx in a unique, new light and will be indispensable
reading for all studying and following his work.
The doctrine of the atonement is the distinctive doctrine of
Christianity. Over the course of many centuries of reflection,
highly diverse interpretations of the doctrine have been proposed.
In the context of this history of interpretation, Eleonore Stump
considers the doctrine afresh with philosophical care. Whatever
exactly the atonement is, it is supposed to include a solution to
the problems of the human condition, especially its guilt and
shame. Stump canvasses the major interpretations of the doctrine
that attempt to explain this solution and argues that all of them
have serious shortcomings. In their place, she argues for an
interpretation that is both novel and yet traditional and that has
significant advantages over other interpretations, including
Anselms well-known account of the doctrine. In the process, she
also discusses love, union, guilt, shame, forgiveness, retribution,
punishment, shared attention, mind-reading, empathy, and various
other issues in moral psychology and ethics.
Nietzsche's famous attack upon established Christianity and
religion is brought to the reader in this superb hardcover edition
of The Antichrist, introduced and translated by H.L. Mencken. The
incendiary tone throughout The Antichrist separates it from most
other well-regarded philosophical texts; even in comparison to
Nietzsche's earlier works, the tone of indignation and conviction
behind each argument made is evident. There is little lofty
ponderousness; the book presents its arguments and points at a
blistering pace, placing itself among the most accessible and
comprehensive works of philosophy. The Antichrist comprises a total
of sixty-two short chapters, each with distinct philosophical
arguments or angle upon the targets of Christianity, organised
religion, and those who masquerade as faithful but are in actuality
anything but. Pointedly opposed to notions of Christian morality
and virtue, Nietzsche vehemently sets out a case for the faith's
redundancy and lack of necessity in human life.
Where did the idea of sin arise from? In this meticulously argued
book, David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman
texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian
writings, and argues that the fundamental idea of "sin" arose in
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original
meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations.
Through close philological examination of the words for "sin," in
particular the Hebrew hata' and the Greek hamartia, he traces their
uses over the centuries in four chapters, and concludes that the
common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed
has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired
a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
The topic of this book is mental representation, a theoretical
concept that lies at the core of cognitive science. Together with
the idea that thinking is analogous to computational processing,
this concept is responsible for the "cognitive turn" in the
sciences of the mind and brain since the 1950s. Conceiving of
cognitive processes (such as perception, reasoning, and motor
control) as consisting of the manipulation of contentful vehicles
that represent the world has led to tremendous empirical
advancements in our explanations of behaviour. Perhaps the most
famous discovery that explains behavior by appealing to the notion
of mental representations was the discovery of 'place' cells that
underlie spatial navigation and positioning, which earned
researchers John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard I. Moser a
joint Nobel Prize in 2014. And yet, despite the empirical
importance of the concept, there is no agreed definition or
theoretical understanding of mental representation. This book
constitutes a state-of-the-art overview on the topic of mental
representation, assembling some of the leading experts in the field
and allowing them to engage in meaningful exchanges over some of
the most contentious questions. The collection gathers both
proponents and critics of the notion, making room for debates
dealing with the theoretical and ontological status of
representations, the possibility of formulating a general account
of mental representation which would fit our best explanatory
practices, and the possibility of delivering such an account in
fully naturalistic terms. Some contributors explore the relation
between mutually incompatible notions of mental representation,
stemming from the different disciplines composing the cognitive
sciences (such as neuroscience, psychology, and computer science).
Others question the ontological status and explanatory usefulness
of the notion. And finally, some try to sketch a general theory of
mental representations that could face the challenges outlined in
the more critical chapters of the volume.
With an Introduction by Dr Richard Serjeantson, Trinity College,
Cambridge Since its first publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's
Leviathan has been recognised as one of the most compelling, and
most controversial, works of political philosophy written in
English. Forged in the crucible of the civil and religious warfare
of the mid-seventeenth century, it proposes a political theory that
combines an unequivocal commitment to natural human liberty with
the conviction that the sovereign power of government must be
exercised absolutely. Leviathan begins from some shockingly
naturalistic starting-points: an analysis of human nature as being
motivated by vain-glory and pride, and a vision of religion as
simply the fear of invisible powers made up by the mind. Yet from
these deliberately unpromising elements, Hobbes constructs with
unparalleled forcefulness an elaborate, systematic, and
comprehensive account of how political society ought to be:
ordered, law-bound, peaceful. In Leviathan, Hobbes presents us with
a portrait of politics which depicts how a state that is made up of
the unified body of all its citizens will be powerful, fruitful,
protective of each of its members, and - above all - free from
internal violence.
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