Difficult to know and impossible to forget, Ludwig Wittgenstein is remembered as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He published only one book in his lifetime - a masterpiece that moulded the evolution of philosophy and baffled his teachers. Spanning most of his life, from his early encounters with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge to a final trip to New York via the Russian Front, Wittgenstein: The Crooked Roads tracks the journeys of a tortured soul. William Lyons, Professor Emeritus (...) of Philosophy, Trinity College, Dublin, has written a moving and philosophically acute journey through successive decades of Wittgenstein's career. The play received its world premiere on 19 April 2011 at the Riverside Studios. (shrink)

This article grapples with the causes of India’s microfinance crisis. By contrasting Bangladesh’s highly successful Grameen model with the allegedly “universalizable” version of India’s SKS Microfinance, trust or social capital is isolated—not just narrowly interpreted within standard economic theory, but more broadly construed—as the essential element accounting for the early success of microfinance. It is argued that the microfinance experience has been widely misinterpreted, in both analytical and policy terms. This article suggests inherent limits in extending the model to for-profit (...) institutions and, in particular, to the pace of scaling up. (shrink)

Aware of the decline and imminent demise of many integrated steel mills in the United States and fascinated by their monumental architecture, machinery, and the culture of work and community that was inextricably connected to them, Joseph Elliott photographed the mills in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania from 1989 until final shutdown in 1997. This book appeals to the growing fascination with industrial archaeology and will be an inspiration for the preservation and re-use of these relic structures.

Ecology and sustainability are current narratives about the behavior of humans toward themselves and the environment. Ecology is defined as a science, and a philosophy of ecology has become a recognized domain of the philosophy of science. For some, sustainability is an accepted, important moral goal. In 2013, a Special Issue of the journal Sustainability dealt with many of the relevant issues. Unfortunately, the economic, ideological, and psychological barriers to ethical behavior and corresponding social action remain great as well as (...) obvious. In this paper, I propose that a new, non-standard and non-propositional logic of real processes, Logic in Reality (LIR) grounded in physics applies to the science and philosophy of these narratives and helps to explicate them. Given the ecological role of organizations and institutions, reference is often made to organizational or institutional logics as guides to ecological practice. This paper suggests that these logics are either too abstract or too informal to have an impact in a conflictual world. Recognition of the suggested new, transdisciplinary logical dimension of ecological processes may provide credibility and support to new initiatives in ecology and its philosophy. (shrink)

Covering a timely topic, which is more and more frequently in the news, this book offers vignettes that will sharpen the reader's ability to recognize and respond to difficult situations sparked by identity differences among faculty, staff, and students in college and university settings. The authors provide a systematic guide to addressing interpersonal conflicts that arise out of issues of identity difference, both for individuals and for campus work teams who provide direct service to students. Managing Diversity Flashpoints in Higher (...) Education empowers readers to diagnose diversity flashpoint situations and positively address them without creating defensiveness and barriers to dialogue. The authors include an overview of the changing ethnic, racial, and gender composition of students in higher education in the United States and the major trends in campus responses to the changing student population. They offer an approach to creating higher education environments that welcome people of all cultural characteristics and promote civility on campus. The book is founded on the authors' research on diversity flashpoints in higher education for which they interviewed a national sample of student affairs professionals. The authors identified uncomfortable interpersonal situations with faculty members in which the discomfort arose from student identity difference. This process led to the formulation of strategies for using vignettes in professional development sessions. (shrink)

Why study Aḥmad al-Ghazali -- Initiatic influence -- Literary influence -- Studies on Aḥmad al-Ghazali -- The goal of this book -- Sources for the Aḥmad al-Ghazali tradition -- The life and times of Aḥmad al-Ghazali -- Aḥmad al-Ghazali's spiritual practice -- The roots of Aḥmad al-Ghazali's teachings -- Aḥmad al-Ghazali's metaphysics of love -- Conclusion.

Wegner vacillates between considering the experience of will as a directly-sensed feeling and as a cognitive construct. Most of his book is devoted to examples of erroneous cognition. The brain basis of will as an immediately-sensed emotion receives minimal attention.

To explain the connection, this book presents a new paradigm of nature and couples it with a convincing explanation of how our right brain hemispheres have a ...

Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in (...) animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible. (shrink)

This edited collection represents an ongoing conversation for bringing healing cultures into suffering and evil. The pluralistic perspectives emerge from the creativity of this unique community of interpreters.

Are the conclusions reached by mature sciences merely “likely stories” or are they “really true”? Questions of this sort have been live issues from Étienne Tempier’s March 1277 condemnation of theses of the Radical Aristotelians of Paris to the May 2005 Kansas State Board of Education deliberations on Darwinism. One major difficulty with the view that scientific findings are “really true” is that, from the historical record, all such statements are recognized as being revisable, even replaceable. Several attempts to formalize (...) a notion of “approximate truth” have addressed this difficulty—without notable success. This book proposes a new solution to the problem—a resolution that stands in the tradition of the American Pragmatists: Peirce, James, and Dewey. (shrink)

Do doctors fix patients? Or do they heal them? For all of modern medicine’s many successes, discontent with the quality of patient care has combined with a host of new developments, from aging populations to the resurgence of infectious diseases, which challenge medicine’s overreliance on narrowly mechanistic and technical methods of explanation and intervention, or “fixing’ patients. The need for a better balance, for more humane “healing” rationales and practices that attend to the social and environmental aspects of health and (...) illness and the experiencing person, is more urgent than ever. Yet, in public health and bioethics, the fields best positioned to offer countervailing values and orientations, the dominant approaches largely extend and reinforce the reductionism and individualism of biomedicine. The collected essays in To Fix or To Heal do more than document the persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have gained so little traction. The contributors examine the moral appeal of reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control. This paradigm-challenging volume advances new lines of criticism of our dominant medical regime, even while proposing ways of bringing medical practice, bioethics, and public health more closely into line with their original goals. Precisely because of the centrality of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue, challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of our ethical and political discourse. (shrink)

The main idea in this series of essays is that subjective awareness depends upon the intralaminar nuclei of each thalmus. This implies that the internal structure and external relations of ILN make subjective awareness possible. An array of material relevant to this proposal was briefly reviewed in Part I. This Part II considers in more detail some semantic aspects and a bit of philosophic background as these pertain to propositions 0, 1, and 2 of Part I. Part II should be (...) read in conjunction with Part I. (shrink)