Philosophers, theorists, writers and such commentators use various yardsticks of measurement when trying to gauge the temperature and general well-being of the human condition. This book seeks to investigate the state of the human condition as it stands in the 21st century, thus far. To this end, the concepts of democracy and postmodernism are given much attention in this book. Several threats to 21st century democracy are examined, as 'real' world issues are highlighted as examples for you the reader to assimilate. This exercise exposes that some threats to democracy are underpinned by the factors of religion and religious fanaticism. This reality is shown to be an indication of a retarded state of human development, so metaphysical philosophy and postmodernism are proffered as concepts that encapsulate the ideological medicine that is necessary to remedy this state of retardation. The postmodern debate is therefore assessed, as this book seeks to further define postmodernism while trying to transform this intriguing and otherwise profound concept, into a more cognitively palatable philosophical construct. A metaphysical interpretation of postmodernism is given in an endeavour to reveal that postmodernism has an eclectic core that is, in part, spiritual in nature. Time graphs are provided, showing the developmental trajectory of both modernism and postmodernism, as they progress through time. It is hoped that these graphs serve to show even clearer, what is the real situation of societal evolution before and during the reign of postmodernism.
By one of the nation's foremost legal historians, a groundbreaking history of the pioneering American role in establishing the modern laws of war. In the fateful closing days of 1862, just three weeks before Emancipation, Abraham Lincoln's top military advisors commissioned a code of rules to govern the armies of the United States in a newly intensified war effort. The code Lincoln issued the next spring helped shape the remaining two years of Civil War. Its rules on torture, prisoners of war, assassination, and more quickly became foundations of the modern laws of war and today's Geneva Conventions. Yet the hidden story of Lincoln's code, and of the decades of controversy that lay behind it, has never been told. In this masterful and strikingly original history, John Witt charts the alternately troubled and triumphant course of the laws of war in America from the Founding Founders to the dawn of the modern era, revealing the history of a code that reshaped the laws of war the world over. Ranging from the Revolution to the War of 1812, from war with Mexico to the Civil War, from Indian wars to the brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines, Witt tells a story that features presidents as well as men in the throes of battle, one that spans war-makers and pacifists, Indians and slaves. In a time of heated controversy about the nation's conduct in the war on terror, Lincoln's Code is a compelling story of ideals under pressure and a landmark contribution to our understanding of the American experience."--
The practice of selling one's tale of woe to make a buck has long been a part of American culture. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America is a powerful cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship and calamity during the nineteenth century. Ann Fabian examines the tales of beggars, convicts, ex-slaves, prisoners of the Confederacy, and others to explore cultural authority, truth-telling, and the nature of print media as the country was shifting to a market economy. This well-crafted book describes the fascinating controversies surrounding these little-read tales and returns them to the social worlds where they were produced. Drawing on an enormous number of personal narratives—accounts of mostly poor, suffering, and often uneducated Americans—The Unvarnished Truth analyzes a long-ignored tradition in popular literature. Historians have treated the spread of literacy and the growth of print culture as a chapter in the democratization of refinement, but these tales suggest that this was not always the case. Producing stories that purported to be the plain, unvarnished truth, poor men and women edged their way onto the cultural stage, using storytelling strategies far older than those relying on a Renaissance sense of refinement and polish. This book introduces a unique collection of tales to explore the nature of truth, authenticity, and representation.
A haunting voyage through the peculiar--and peculiarly American--world of human skull collecting. Ann Fabian's remarkable and moving study illuminates as few other works have the powerful hold that the dead and their remains continue to have upon the living". Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.
Do things such as performance indicators, valuation formulas, consumer tests, stock prices or financial contracts represent an external reality? Or do they rather constitute, in a performative fashion, what they refer to? The Provoked Economy tackles this question from a pragmatist angle, considering economic reality as a ceaselessly provoked reality. It takes the reader through a series of diverse empirical sites – from public administrations to stock exchanges, from investment banks to marketing facilities and business schools – in order to explore what can be seen from such a demanding standpoint. It demonstrates that descriptions of economic objects do actually produce economic objects and that the simulacrum of an economic act is indeed a form of realization. It also shows that provoking economic reality means facing practical tests in which what ought to be economic or not is subject to elaboration and controversy. This book opens paths for empirical investigation in the social sciences, but also for the philosophical renewal of the critique of economic reality. It will be useful for students and scholars in social theory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and economics.
The great expansion of economic activity since the end of World War II has caused an unprecedented rise in living standards, but it has also caused rapid changes in earth systems. Nearly all types of natural capital—the world’s stock of resources and services provided by nature—are in decline. Clean air, abundant and clean water, fertile soils, productive fisheries, dense forests, and healthy oceans are critical for healthy lives and healthy economies. Mounting pressures, however, suggest that the trend of declining natural capital may cast a long shadow into the future. Nature’s Frontiers: Achieving Sustainability, Efficiency, and Prosperity with Natural Capital presents a novel approach to address these foundational challenges of sustainability. A methodology combining innovative science, new data sources, and cutting-edge biophysical and economic models builds sustainable resource efficiency frontiers to assess how countries can sustainably use their natural capital more efficiently. The analysis provides recommendations on how countries can better use their natural capital to achieve their economic and environ mental goals. The report indicates that significant efficiency gaps exist in nearly every country. Closing these gaps can address many of the world’s pressing economic and environmental problems—economic productivity, health, food and water security, and climate change. Although the approach outlined in this report will entail demanding policy reforms, the costs of inaction will be far higher.
Pollution is ubiquitous in Greek tragedy: matricidal Orestes seeks purification at Apollo's shrine in Delphi; carrion from Polyneices' unburied corpse fills the altars of Thebes; delirious Phaedra suffers from a 'pollution of the mind'. This book undertakes the first detailed analysis of the important role which pollution and its counterparts - purity and purification - play in tragedy. It argues that pollution is central in the negotiation of tragic crises, fulfilling a diverse array of functions by virtue of its qualities and associations, from making sense of adversity to configuring civic identity in the encounter of self and other. While primarily a literary study providing close readings of several key plays, the book also provides important new perspectives on pollution. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars and students not only in classics and literary studies, but also in the study of religions and anthropology.
A nuanced reframing of the dual importance of reading and observation for early modern naturalists. Historians traditionally argue that the sciences were born in early modern Europe during the so-called Scientific Revolution. At the heart of this narrative lies a supposed shift from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of things. The attitude of the new-style intellectual broke with the text-based practices of erudition and instead cultivated an emerging empiricism of observation and experiment. Rather than blindly trusting the authority of ancient sources such as Pliny and Aristotle, practitioners of this experimental philosophy insisted upon experiential proof. In A Centaur in London, Fabian Kraemer calls a key tenet of this master narrative into question—that the rise of empiricism entailed a decrease in the importance of reading practices. Kraemer shows instead that the early practices of textual erudition and observational empiricism were by no means so remote from one another as the traditional narrative would suggest. He argues that reading books and reading the book of nature had a great deal in common—indeed, that reading texts was its own kind of observation. Especially in the case of rare and unusual phenomena like monsters, naturalists were dependent on the written reports of others who had experienced the good luck to be at the right place at the right time. The connections between compiling examples from texts and from observation were especially close in such cases. A Centaur in London combines the history of scholarly reading with the history of scientific observation to argue for the sustained importance of both throughout the Renaissance and provides a nuanced, textured portrait of early modern naturalists at work.
Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.
Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).
The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album’s inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn’t bluegrass, but “roots music,” a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out? In Genre in Popular Music, Fabian Holt provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, Holt embarks on a wide-ranging and ambitious collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to O Brother, but also the impact of rock and roll’s explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes in Chicago have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, Holt finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture—fundamental both to musical practice and experience and to the social organization of musical life.
Electron spin resonance spectroscopy is the method used to determine the structure and life expectancy of a number of radicals. Written by Fabian Gerson and Walter Huber, top experts in the field of electron spin resonance spectroscopy, this book offers a compact yet readily comprehensible introduction to the modern world of ESR. Thanks to its comprehensive coverage, ranging from fundamental theory right up to the treatment of all important classes of organic radicals and triplet-state molecules that can be analyzed using ESR spectroscopy, this unique book is suitable for users in both research and industry. Instead of using complex mathematical derivations, the authors present a readily understandable approach to the field by interpreting sample spectra and classifying experimental data. In short, the ideal book for newcomers to the subject and an absolute must-have for everyone confronted with ESR spectroscopy and wanting to become acquainted with this widely-used method of analysis.
This book explores the behavior of networks of electric and hybrid vehicles. The topics that are covered include: energy management issues for aggregates of plug-in vehicles; the design of sharing systems to support electro-mobility; context awareness in the operation of electric and hybrid vehicles, and the role that this plays in a Smart City context; and tools to test and design massively large-scale networks of such vehicles. The book also introduces new and interesting control problems that are becoming prevalent in the EV-PHEV's context, as well as identifying some open questions. A particular focus of the book is on the opportunities afforded by networked actuation possibilities in electric and hybrid vehicles, and the role that such actuation may play in air-quality and emissions management.
This book focuses on the creation of space as an activity. The argument draws not only on aspects of movement in time, but also on a cultural and specifically social context influencing the creation of the spatial habitus. The book reconsiders existing theories of time and space in the field of urban planning and develops an updated account of spatial activity, experience and space-making. Recent developments in spatial practice, specifically related to new technologies, make this an important and timely task. Integrating spatial-temporal dynamics into the way we think about cities aids the implementation of sustainable forms of urban planning. The study is composed of two different case studies. One case is based on fieldwork tracking individual movement using GPS, the other case utilises data mined from Twitter. One of the key elements in the conclusion to this book is the definition of temporality as a status rather than a transition. It is argued that through repetitive practices as habitus, time has presence and agency in our everyday lives. This book is based on the work undertaken for a PhD at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and was and accepted as thesis by University College London in 2013.
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