David Keyt presents a clear and accurate new translation of the the fifth and sixth books of Aristotle's Politics, together with a philosophical and historical commentary. The Politics is a key document in Western political thought; it raises and discusses many political issues, theoretical and practical, which are still widely debated today. The major topics of these two books are equality, democracy, tyranny, revolution, and reform.

David Houston Jones builds a bridge between practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example performance and installation art, as well as photography. Contemporary work in these areas responds both to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. It asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual (...) media and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. Jones's analysis brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity which has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charrière, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, literary studies, modern languages, photography and critical theory. (shrink)

In the most radical rereading of the opening chapters of Genesis since the Zohar, David Kishik reveals the post-secular and post-human implications of an ancient text that is part of our cultural DNA.

In Science, Order and Creativity, David Bohm and F. David Peat argue that science has lost its way in recent years and needs to go beyond a narrow and fragmented view of nature and embrace a wider holistic view that restores the importance of creativity and communication for all humanity - not just scientists. The result of a close collaboration by one of the 20th century's greatest physicists and thinkers, David Bohm, with leading science writer F. (...) class='Hi'>David Peat, provides a rare combination of profound reflection and clear exposition that can be appreciated by anyone concerned with science and its importance in our lives. This new edition includes a new preface and an extended additional chapter by Peat which draws upon further discussions with David Bohm before the latter's death in 1992. A fascinating diagnosis and considered proposal for a cure for science's ills, it is also very accessible entry point to the work of David Bohm. Bohm and Peat contend that science has lost its bearings in the last century in favour of a narrow, abstracted, fragmented approach to nature and reality. Tracing the history of science, Bohm and Peat offer intriguing new insights into how scientific theories come into being, how to eliminate blocks of creativity and how science can lead to a deeper understanding of society, the human condition and the human mind itself. (shrink)

Among the many instruments devised by students of mathematical sciences in ancient Greece, the monochord provides one of the best opportunities to examine the methodologies of those who employed it in their investigations. Consisting of a single string which could be divided at measured points by means of movable bridges, it was used to demonstrate theorems about the arithmetical relationships between pitched sounds in music. This book traces the history of the monochord and its multiple uses down to Ptolemy, bringing (...) together all the relevant evidence in one comprehensive study. By comparing the monochord with a number of other ancient scientific instruments and their uses, David Creese shows how the investigation of music in ancient Greece not only shares in the patterns of demonstrative and argumentative instrument use common to other sciences, but also goes beyond them in offering the possibility of a rigorous empiricism unparalleled in Greek science. (shrink)

The orphaned son of an Anglican clergyman, David Hartley was originally destined for holy orders. Declining to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, he turned to medicine and science yet remained a religious believer. This, his most significant work, provides a rigorous analysis of human nature, blending philosophy, psychology and theology. First published in two volumes in 1749, Observations on Man is notable for being based on the doctrine of the association of ideas. It greatly influenced scientists, theologians, social reformers (...) and poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who named his eldest son after Hartley, had his portrait painted while holding a copy. In Volume 1, Hartley utilises Newtonian science in his observations. He presents a theory of 'vibrations', explaining how the elements of the nerves and brain interact as a result of stimulation, creating 'associations' and emotions. (shrink)

In Paradise Wild, David Oates addresses this and many other provocative questions as he explores the persistent myth of Eden from several different angles. As a lifelong mountaineer and reader of nature literature, as a scholar, as a descendant of naturalist William Bartram, and as a gay ex-Baptist who took to the mountains to test his masculinity, Oates has thought deeply about how nature and culture interact in our lives and about the contemporary debate over wilderness and environment. Paradise (...) Wild brings all these elements together in a lively, genre-hopping book that will move readers emotionally and intellectually, at the same time that it contributes to the ongoing debate in scholarly and environmental circles over the meaning of "nature" and "wilderness." Paradise Wild tells stories, explores major scholarship and literature of nature, and analyzes how the misapplied myth of Eden has mired Americans in a hopeless "Paradise Lost" mentality that belies the true, ever-present wildness in our lives. Oates argues that mourning for a lost paradise is a dead end that cannot help us combat the real damage we're doing to ourselves and the rest of the world. He proposes a healthy re-mythologizing of the Eden story as a way of celebrating "wildness" -- the Eden in each moment and in each cell, that cannot be lost. His book is about welcoming that wildness into the midst of daily life. This bold and original work will appeal to general readers as well as to scholars and students with an interest in environmental literature and philosophy, nature writing, cultural studies, and queer studies. (shrink)

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear and stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing on the disciplines of new media, law, and literary studies, Illegal Literature suggests that extralegal works such as fan fiction are critical to a system that spurs the evolution of culture. Reconsidering voices relegated to the cultural periphery, David S. Roh shows how infrastructure--in the form of legal policy and network distribution--slows or (...) accelerates the rate of change. He analyzes the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes. And, in comparing American fan fiction and Japanese dojinshi, he illustrates how infrastructure and legal climates detract from or encourage fledgling creativity. Illegal Literature fills a crucial gap between the scholarly and the popular by closely examining several modes of marginalized cultural production. Roh makes the case for protecting an environment conducive to literary heresy, the articulation of an accretive rather than solitary authorial genius, and the idea that letting go rather than holding on is important to a generative creative process. In a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit literary and cultural development. (shrink)

Citizens in the contemporary world have become alienated from politics because they conceive of it as an instrumental activity. David Antonini argues that Hannah Arendt's thought can help us recover meaningful political experience: a distinct experience of politics in which citizens can speak and act together.

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley’s writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley’s philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates the (...) breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley’s philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley’s work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries. (shrink)

An edition of the recently discovered notebook used in the seventeenth-century by John Wallis to teach language to the 'deaf mute' Alexander Popham, who could not inherit unless he could speak - one of the most famous cases in the history of deaf education. David Cram and Jaap Maat place the work in its personal, social, and scientific contexts.

Widely regarded as the founder of the Islamic philosophical tradition, and as the single greatest philosophical authority after Aristotle by his successors in the medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian communities, Alfarabi was a leading figure in the fields of Aristotelian logic and Platonic political science. The first complete English translation of his commentary on Aristotle's Topics, Alfarabi's Book of Dialectic, or Kitāb al-Jadal, is presented here in a deeply researched edition based on the most complete Arabic manuscript sources. David (...) M. DiPasquale argues that Alfarabi's understanding of the Socratic art of dialectic is the key prism through which to grasp his recovery of an authentic tradition of Greek science on the verge of extinction. He also suggests that the Book of Dialectic is unique to the extent to which it unites Alfarabi's logical and political writings, opening up novel ways of interpreting Alfarabi's influence. (shrink)

Why does agency-the capacity to make choices and to act in the world-matter to us? Why is it meaningful that our intentions have effects in the world, that they reflect our sense of identity, that they embody what we value? David Kyuman Kim addresses these crucial questions by uncovering the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Through a critical engagement with the work of theorists such as Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and Stanley Cavell, Kim argues that (...) late modern and postmodern agency is found most effectively at work in what he calls "projects of regenerating agency" or critical and strategic responses to loss. Agency as melancholic freedom begins and endures, Kim maintains, through the moral and psychic losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including the moral identities shaped by secularized modernity and the multifold forms of alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, gender, class, and sexuality discrimination and oppression. Kim calls for renewing the sense of urgency in our political and moral engagements by seeing agency as a vocation, where the aspiration for self-transformation and the human need for hope are fundamental concerns. (shrink)

In this uniquely and timely collection, David LaRocca offers us a thoughtful reminder that the very possibility and urgent task of thinking, of our acting and judging, ethics and politics, rests upon a willing exposure to an aspect of our everyday and ordinary experience that is hard to grasp and eludes most, perhaps all, epistemic criteria. Metaphysicians, mystics, and moral perfectionists of all stripes have called this 'the transcendental', thus risking the fatal misunderstanding that this means only 'the transcendent', (...) leading to the dualist assumption that we are citizens of two separate (earthly and heavenly) cities or (phenomenal and noumenal) worlds. Yet the truth is far more simple, if much harder to accept and then also live by. We are what we are, here and now. Yet we're not, therefore, irrevocably bound by what thus is said 'to be' -- much less by the proverbial powers that will always be -- in what we can still further imagine and aim or hope for, against the odds, as it were. In this brilliantly edited and introduced anthology, LaRocca presents us with the broadest selection of authors, philosophers, visionaries, and artists, who have expressed this simple, difficult truth and freedom in the most profound and varied ways."--Hent de Vries's review, p. [i]. (shrink)

Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images (...) of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war. Drawing upon analyses of iconic and critically acclaimed war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), Restrepo (2010), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), this volume's examination of the genre creates new ways of thinking about the philosophy of war. A fascinating look at the manner in which combat and its aftermath are depicted cinematically, The Philosophy of War Films is a timely and engaging read for any philosopher, filmmaker, reader, or viewer who desires a deeper understanding of war and its representation in popular culture. (shrink)

Milan, David An atheist and his christian friend are engaged in cordial conversation. The latter is taken aback and is rather indignant when his atheist friend declaims, 'On this question of the existence of god I believe that our respective positions are much closer than you imagine'. The Christian's firm riposte is that, by definition, such a harmony of viewpoints is impossible. Unfazed, his non-believing friend offers a thoughtful defence of his claim. He begins, 'You know that, since time (...) immemorial, humankind has taken unto itself all manner of gods, and that almost all of these tribal deities have long since vanished into obscurity.'. (shrink)

Is something true because we believe it to be so or because it is true? How can a culturally bound community achieve scientific knowledge when values, attitudes, and desires shape its beliefs? In this book an eminent philosopher considers various schools of thought on the nature of truth. David Weissman argues that truth exists in the correspondence between statement and fact: what can be said about our world can be measured against a reality that has a character and existence (...) independent of any property we ascribe to it. Weissman begins by evaluating the transcendental paradigm of Kant that has exercised enormous influence in the development of Western thought over the past two hundred years. He develops his critique of the Kantian model, in which value judgments underlie the perception or construction of truth, asserting that it is seriously flawed because it renders a determination of truth impossible. Weissman examines various value-driven perspectives on truth developed by such philosophers as Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty, for whom truth is only the set of affirmations, principles, and procedures sanctioned by power and value. However, says Weissman, truth is the required adjunct to desire. Knowing who we are, where we have been, and the consequences of what we have done is the essential preparation for choosing what to do next. We must respect the integrity of a world we have not made and find our way within it with the help of attitudes and desires that have been informed by truth. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction How it Works Sources of Error and Uncertainty DNA Typing Results as Legal Evidence The Legal Reception of DNA Typing DNA Typing and the Judicial Assessment of Scientific Evidence Social Impact: Criminal Investigation and Adjudication Conclusion Notes.

The shape and turnover of photoreceptor membranes appears to depend on associated actin filaments. In dipterans, the photoreceptor membrane is microvillar. It is turned over by the addition of new membrane at the bases of the microvilli and by subsequent shedding, mostly from the distal ends. Each microvillus contains actin filaments as a component of its cytoskeletal core. Two myosin I‐like proteins co‐localize with the actin filaments. It is suggested that one of the myosin I‐like proteins might be linked to (...) the microvillar membrane. By interacting with the actin filaments, this motor should move the membrane of a microvillus in a distal direction, thus providing a possible mechanism for the turnover of the membrane.A vertebrate photoreceptor cell contains a small cluster of actin filaments in its connecting cilium at the site where new transductive disk membranes are formed. Disruption of the actin filaments perturbs disk morphogenesis. The most likely explanation for this perturbation is that the process of initiating a new disk is inhibited. Conventional myosin (myosin II) is found in the connecting cilium with the same distribution as actin. A simple model is proposed to illustrate how the actin–myosin system of the connecting cilium might function to initiate the morphogenesis of a disk membrane. (shrink)

One of Noam Chomsky's earliest contributions is the idea that a theory of the unbounded construction of hierarchical structures should incorporate a computational system that generates the structures. This chapter focuses on the structure building system, what is sometimes called the computational system, as a source of explanation. In some sense it is the fundamental source of explanation in generative grammar, as it accounts for the central question of the unbounded hierarchical nature of the syntax of human language. The architecture (...) of the computational system of early generative grammar involves a device that carries out elementary operations following a procedure that maps strings of symbols to strings of symbols in two passes (a phrase structure sub‐procedure and a transformational sub‐procedure). (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Emmanuel Levinas’ earliest development of thought is presented here as a phenomenological endeavor, i. e. in its relation to Husserl and Heidegger as well as in its own effort to give an appropriate philosophical account of,things themselves‘. The latter task is shown to have a transcendental dimension as it is a self-awareness of conscious life in which the faithful analysis of concrete phenomena and the concept of this life itself have to be brought into attunement. The perspective of Levinas’ phenomenological (...) gaze is then presented in these terms and shows two fairly distinct stages. Up to the mid-1930s Levinas appears as a follower of Martin Heidegger, when he advocates an appropriate approach to being in all its richness and therefore criticizes Husserl’s alleged intellectualism. Later, with a radicalized perspective, Levinas’ own philosophical project advocates an appropriate account of the problem of radical alterity beyond experience and phenomenology.He therefore criticizes both Husserl and Heidegger and remodels phenomenology so that it can adequately,understand‘ radical alterity and at the same time confine itself before it. (shrink)

It is by now something of a cliché of Green discourse that environmental degradation and devastation is grounded in a sharp opposition – the legacy, it is often charged, of Christian metaphysics – between the human and the non-human, between the realms of culture and nature. If one is to understand, let alone endorse, the very general environmentalist ambition to dissolve the dualism of the human and the non-human, it is by questioning rather more tractable and particular dichotomies, like that (...) between art and nature appreciation, where it would seem wise to begin. (shrink)

The fundamental principles of the classical utilitarian school characterize this trend as an administrative and legal criminology. This had two implications. On the one hand, the motives, and ultimate causes of the behavior and the unequal consequences of an arbitrary rule were ignored. On the other hand, the role of the judge was reduced to enforcing the law, while it was up to the judge to set a penalty for each offence. At the end of the nineteenth century, these principles (...) saw the gradual emergence of another punitive episteme that had emerged as a result of the colonization of the legal space by the positive sciences and etiological action programs. This was not a planned and pre-established course, but the confluence of a series of theories and programs for penal prevention that Michel Foucault summarized as the realization that the law was increasingly functioning as a norm. Now, criminality, besides being the object of scientific interest, also constitutes the indicator of a social problem and therefore its insertion in an economy of changing power. (shrink)