Cultural values and structures differ in societies throughout the world. For example, the traditional conformism of Confucian countries is vastly dissimilar from the individualistic values of Western societies. In today's globalized environment, the greatest challenge is the collaboration of diverse cultures. The comprehension of global epistemology and the understanding of diverse cultural perspectives is needed in order to sustain global harmony and intercultural congruence. Cultural Perspectives on Global Research Epistemology: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a pivotal reference source that discusses the effect of globalization on intercultural communication and critical thinking and analyzes Eastern and Western societies from an epistemological standpoint. While highlighting topics including uncertainty avoidance, Confucianism, and cultural heritage, this book is ideally designed for researchers, scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, educators, practitioners, and students seeking current research on epistemic discordance in global research.

Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney examines the overlooked similarities between Genet's literary oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their shared ontology of fragility and incompletion. This book exposes the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that the representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence. According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked. Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as Lacan's psychoanalytic act, Genet's acts of poetry further seek to expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates. Moving away from scholarship that considers Genet's plays, novels, sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span of Genet's work, from his early novels to the posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet, Lacan and our wanting being.

This book proposes a bold idea. Living beings are distinguishing distinctions. Single cells and multicellular organisms maintain themselves distinct by drawing distinctions. This is what organisms are and what they do. From this starting point, key issues examined range across ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, logic, and ethics. Topics discussed include the origin of life, the nature and purpose of biology, the relation between life and logic, the nature and limits of formal logic, the nature of subjects, the subject-object relation, subject-subject relationships and the deep roots of ethics. The book provides a radical new foundation to think about philosophy and biology and appeals to researchers and students in these fields. It powerfully debunks mechanical thinking about living beings and shows the vast reservoir of insights into aliveness available in the arts and humanities.   

Who has the right to decide how nature is used, and in what ways? Recovering an overlooked thread of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century environmental thought, Erin Drew shows that English writers of the period commonly believed that human beings had only the "usufruct" of the earth the "right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another, so far as may be had without causing damage or prejudice." The belief that human beings had only temporary and accountable possession of the world, which Drew labels the ""usufructuary ethos,"" had profound ethical implications for the ways in which the English conceived of the ethics of power and use. Drew's book traces the usufructuary ethos from the religious and legal writings of the seventeenth century through mid-eighteenth-century poems of colonial commerce, attending to the particular political, economic, and environmental pressures that shaped, transformed, and ultimately sidelined it. Although a study of past ideas, The Usufructuary Ethos resonates with contemporary debates about our human responsibilities to the natural world in the face of climate change and mass extinction.

This second of a two-volume work provides a new understanding of Western subjectivity as theorized in the Augustinian Rule. A theopolitical synthesis of Antiquity, the Rule is a humble, yet extremely influential example of subjectivity production. In these volumes, Jodra argues that the Classical and Late-Ancient communitarian practices along the Mediterranean provide historical proof of a worldview in which the self and the other are not disjunctive components, but mutually inclusive forces. The Augustinian Rule is a culmination of this process and also the beginning of something new: the paradigm of the monastic self as protagonist of the new, medieval worldview. In the previous volume, Jodra gave us the Mediterranean backstory to Augustine's Rule. In this volume two, he develops his solution to socialism, through a kind of Augustinian communitarianism for today, in full. These volumes therefore restore the unity of the Hellenistic and Judaic world as found by the first Christians, proving that the self and the other are two essential pieces in the construction of our world.

The "New York Times"-bestselling author of "God's Politics" reinvigorates America's hope for the future, offering a roadmap to rediscover the nation's moral center and providing the inspiration and a concrete plan to change today's politics.

The Futility of Philosophical Ethics puts forward a novel account of the grounds of moral feeling with fundamental implications for philosophical ethics. It examines the grounds of moral feeling by both the phenomenology of that feeling, and the facts of moral feeling in operation - particularly in forms such as moral luck, vicious virtues, and moral disgust - that appear paradoxical from the point of view of systematic ethics. Using an analytic approach, James Kirwan engages in the ongoing debates among contemporary philosophers within metaethics and normative ethics. Instead of trying to erase the variety of moral responses that exist in philosophical analysis under one totalizing system, Kirwan argues that such moral theorizing is futile. His analysis counters currently prevalent arguments that seek to render the origins of moral experience unproblematic by finding substitutes for realism in various forms of noncognitivism. In reasserting the problematic nature of moral experience, and offering a theory of the origins of that experience in unavoidable individual desires, Kirwan accounts for the diverse manifestations of moral feeling and demonstrates why so many arguments in metaethics and normative ethics are necessarily irresolvable.

From Revolution to Revolution (1973) examines England, Scotland and Wales from the revolution of 1688 when William became King, to the American Revolution of 1776. In this period lies the roots of modern Britain, as it went from being underdeveloped countries on the fringe of European civilization to a predominating influence in the world. This book examines the union of the island, development of an organized public opinion and national consciousness, as well as Parliament and its factions, the landed and business classes. Views on religion, art, architecture and the changing face of the countryside are also examined, as is the tension between London and the rest of the island. The important issues of colonial expansions in Ireland, America, India and Africa are also analysed.

The Court and the Country (1969) offers a fresh view and synthesis of the English revolution of 1640. It describes the origin and development of the revolution, and gives an account of the various factors - political, social and religious - that produced the revolution and conditioned its course. It explains the revolution primarily as a result of the breakdown of the unity of the governing class around the monarchy into the contending sides of the Court and the Country. A principal theme is the formation within the governing class of an opposition movement to the Crown. The role of Puritanism and of the towns is examined, and the resistance to Charles I is considered in relation to other European revolutions of the period.

A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990) ranges broadly over the political and literary terrain of the seventeenth century, examining the importance of the English Revolution as a decisive event in English and European history. It emphasises the historical significance of the English Revolution, exploring not only its causes but also its long term consequences, basing both in a broad social context and viewing it as a necessary condition of England's having nurtured the first Industrial Revolution.

Reflections on the Puritan Revolution (1986) examines the damage done by the Puritans during the English Civil War, and the enormous artistic losses England suffered from their activities. The Puritans smashed stained glass, monuments, sculpture, brasses in cathedrals and churches; they destroyed organs, dispersed the choirs and the music. They sold the King's art collections, pictures, statues, plate, gems and jewels abroad, and broke up the Coronation regalia. They closed down the theatres and ended Caroline poetry. The greatest composer and most promising scientist of the age were among the many lives lost; and this all besides the ruin of palaces, castles and mansions.

A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (1954) examines the large range of political doctrines which played their part in the English revolution - a period when modern democratic ideas began. The political literature of the period between 1645, when the Levellers first seized upon the revolution's wider implications, and 1660, when Charles II restored the monarchy to power, is here studied in detail.