Some major leftist thinkers, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton, have lately offered readings that claim the relevance of alternative interpretations of the Christian tradition in the face both of the conservative turn in the Catholic Church and of the contemporary secular oblivion of anything that has to do with religion. Furthermore, post-colonial studies have tended to blame the West en bloc for the disasters of past and present colonization, and have attacked the western endeavour to extend (...) universal truths as an ethnocentric device to facilitate and justify exploitation. In Holy Terror, Terry Eagleton both condemns western politics and questions its appeal to universals; but he also hears in this tradition a demand for a relationship with the other which offers an alternative to that established by current politics and capitalist exploitation. The other is the excluded, the oppressed, the exploited; the true material, rather than ideal, universal produced by global capitalist exploitation. As a consequence, anything that happens in any part of the planet belongs in our world and indicts us, though we tend to build barriers around an ideally safe and stable identity that ignores part of its own reality and that is therefore haunted by it. Texts like the Bacchae or the New Testament open the gates of the city and of the heart to the excluded. Terrorists — saints for their own communities and satanic for the rest — offer an example of the other that is impossible to comprehend within our conventional ways of life. Nevertheless, only if we hear in their violence a demand for justice can an exit be found from the vicious circle of violence and revenge. (shrink)

Categories can affect our perception of the world, rendering between-category differences more salient than within-category ones. Across many studies, such categorical perception has been observed for the basic-level categories of one's native language. Other research points to categorical distinctions beyond the basic level, but it does not demonstrate CP for such distinctions. Here we provide such a demonstration. Specifically, we show CP in English speakers for the non-basic distinction between “warm” and “cool” colors, claimed to represent the earliest stage of (...) color lexicon evolution. Notably, the advantage for discriminating colors that straddle the warm–cool boundary was restricted to the right visual field—the same behavioral signature previously observed for basic-level categories. This pattern held in a replication experiment with increased power. Our findings show that categorical distinctions beyond the basic-level repertoire of one's native language are psychologically salient and may be spontaneously accessed during normal perceptual processing. (shrink)

Talks about a man who had it all - looks, wealth, culture, fame, travel, career - and gave it all up to find for himself the answer to his question, Is there actually anything like freedom, enlightenment or liberation behind all the abstractions the religions have thrown at us? This book aims to introduce you to the unknown truth of life.

Religion is intrinsically social, and hence irretrievably organizational, although organization is often seen as the darker side of the religious experience--power, routinization, and bureaucracy. Religion and secular organizations have long received separate scholarly scrutiny, but until now their confluence has been little considered. This interdisciplinary collection of mostly unpublished papers is the first volume to remedy the deficit. The project grew out of a three-year inquiry into religious institutions undertaken by Yale University's Program on Non-Profit Organizations and sponsored by the (...) Lilly Endowment. The scholars who took part in this effort weree challenged to apply new perspectives to the study of religious organizations, especially that strand of contemporary secular organizational theory known as "New Institutionalism." The result was this groundbreaking volume, which includes papers on various aspects of such topics as the historical sources and patterns of U.S. religious organizations, contemporary patterns of denominational authority, the congregation as an organization, and the interface between religious and secular institutions and movements. The contributors include an interdisciplinary mix of scholars from economics, history, law, social administration, and sociology. (shrink)

Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding is one of the most profound and challenging books of the 20th century. This book is a comprehensive explanation, commentary and criticism of this work, which no one, according to the author, has previously attempted.

This book is an investigation into the Western philosophical tradition to determine the balance struck between the knowing of science, and a more personal, intuitive, preconceptual or primordial knowing.

This article focuses on the association between the beliefs of small business owners and managers and their support for the community. Qualitative and quantitative data are utilized in an exploratory examination of two rationales for socially responsible behavior and of two kinds of support. Analyses show that the belief in strengthening the community as an important strategy for business success is positively associated with the provision of nonrisky and risky support. Risky support may threaten short-term business success. However, the belief (...) that a good public image is important for business success is negatively or not significantly associated with either risky or nonrisky support for the community. Findings uphold the position that there are significant variations in enlightened self-interest rationales that are differentially associated with business social performance among small business operators and demonstrate the usefulness of disaggregating social performance into risky and nonrisky variations. (shrink)

Created in 1980, the Health Effects Institute funds research relevant to air quality policy debates and performs other tasks at the boundary between the health effects research community and the air quality policy community. In a 1993 review, the HEI was harshly criticized for a lack of relevance and timeliness in its research products and for poor relationships with its sponsors. Since the review, the HEI has undergone a series of changes that have strengthened its position as a central and (...) respected institution in both the health effects research and air quality policy communities. The apparent success of these recent changes suggests a number of lessons that can be learned about the function of boundary organizations, which bridge the worlds of science and governance. In particular, the HEI’s recent history demonstrates the importance of effective leadership and the importance of maintaining independence without resorting to isolation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 443-450.

According to legal tradition, the ideal judge is entirely dispassionate. Affective science calls into question the legitimacy of this ideal; further, it suggests that no judge could ever meet this standard, even if it were the correct one. What judges can and should do is to learn to effectively manage—rather than eliminate—emotion. Specifically, an emotion regulation perspective suggests that judicial emotion is best managed by cognitive reappraisal and, often, disclosure; behavioral suppression should be used sparingly; and suppression of emotional experience (...) is rarely helpful. We argue that the dispassionate-judge ideal presents a barrier to achieving the flexibility necessary for adaptive judicial emotion regulation. We suggest a new ideal, that of the emotionally well-regulated judge, and propose several directions for future research to strengthen ties between law and psychology, with particular attention to the study of emotion. (shrink)