Academic

Why did Martin Heidegger, the giant of continental philosophy, believe in 1933 that Hitler is the future of Europe? And why does Slavoj Žižek, "the most dangerous philosopher in the West", support Heidegger's right wing militancy? Heidegger and Žižek are not only erudite thinkers on human being but also incorrigible revolutionaries who even after the catastrophic failures of their favourite revolutions - the October revolution for Žižek and the National Socialist revolution for Heidegger - want to overcome capitalism; undemocratically, if necessary. The two share a spirited and sophisticated rejection of the liberalist worldview and the social order based on it. The problem is not that liberalism is factually wrong, but rather that it is ethically bad. Both argue for building and educating a new collective based on human finitude and communality. In the tradition of the Enlightenment, Žižek advocates a universalist revolution, whereas Heidegger sees the transformation rooted in particular historical existence, inviting a bewildering array of mutually exclusive criticisms and apologies of his view. The crisis that Heidegger and Žižek want to address is still here, but their unquestioned Europocentrism sets a dark cloud over the whole idea of revolution. hole idea of revolution.

A monster stalks the earth―a sluggish, craven, dumb beast that takes fright at the slightest noise and starts at the sight of its own shadow. This monster is the market. The shadow it fears is cast by a light that comes from the future: the Keynesian crisis of expectations. It is this same light that causes the world’s leaders to tremble before the beast. They tremble, Jean-Pierre Dupuy says, because they have lost faith in the future. What Dupuy calls Economy has degenerated today into a mad spectacle of unrestrained consumption and speculation. But in its positive form―a truly political economy in which politics, not economics, is predominant―Economy creates not only a sense of trust and confidence but also a belief in the open-endedness of the future without which capitalism cannot function. In this devastating and counterintuitive indictment of the hegemonic pretensions of neoclassical economic theory, Dupuy argues that the immutable and eternal decision of God has been replaced with the unpredictable and capricious judgment of the crowd. The future of mankind will therefore depend on whether it can see through the blindness of orthodox economic thinking.

Contemporary social and political theory has reached an impasse about a problem that had once seemed straightforward: how can individuals make ethical judgments about power and politics? Crisis of Authority analyzes the practices that bind authority, trust, and truthfulness in contemporary theory and politics. Drawing on newly available archival materials, Nancy Luxon locates two models for such practices in Sigmund Freud's writings on psychoanalytic technique and Michel Foucault's unpublished lectures on the ancient ethical practices of "fearless speech," or parrhesia. Luxon argues that the dynamics provoked by the figures of psychoanalyst and truth-teller are central to this process. Her account offers a more supple understanding of the modern ethical subject and new insights into political authority and authorship.

Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel's fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorian writers used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts--by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy--Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend the processes of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of "still life": a decentered lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individual self-culture.

Language policy issues are imbued with a powerful symbolism that is often linked to questions of identity, with the suppression or failure to recognise and support a given endangered variety representing a refusal to grant a 'voice' to the corresponding ethno-cultural community. This wide-ranging volume, which explores linguistic scenarios from across five continents, seeks to ignite the debate as to how and whether the interface between people, politics and language can affect the fortunes of endangered varieties. With chapters written by academics working in the field of language endangerment and members of indigenous communities on the frontline of language support and maintenance, Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages is essential reading for researchers and students of language death, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, as well as community members involved in native language maintenance.

Canada has not always had the role of 'friendly neighbor to the north.' In fact, the seemingly peaceful history of relations between the United States and Canada is punctuated with instances of border disputes, annexation manifestos and trade disagreements. David R. Spencer reveals the complexity of this relationship through a fascinating examination of political cartoons that appeared both in the U.S. and Canada from 1849 through the 1990s. By first examining both the cultural and political differences and similarities between the two nations, Spencer lays the groundwork for the main focus of his study - deeper analysis of the political perspectives of the editorial cartoons. Including 141 actual cartoons of the time, Spencer provides meaningful references to the historical material covered. An intriguing study by a leading Canadian-American scholar, this work is sure to interest many across the disciplines of journalism history, cartoons, media studies, communication and international relations.

The essential guide to the world’s most influential development thinkers, this authoritative text presents a unique guide to the lives and ideas of leading contributors to the contested terrain of development studies. Reflecting the diverse, interdisciplinary nature of the area, the book includes entries on: * modernisers like Hirshman, Kindleberger and Rostow * dependencistas such as Frank, Cardoso and Amin * progressives like Prebisch, Helleiner and Streeten * political leaders enunciating radical alternative visions of development, such as Mao, Nkrumah and Nyerere * progenitors of religiously or spiritually inspired development, such as Gandhi and Ariyaratne * development-environment thinkers like Blaikie, Brookfield and Shiva. This is a fascinating and readable introduction to the major figures that have shaped the field, ideal for anyone studying or working in the area.

In 1888, Mark Twain reflected on the writer's special feel for words to his correspondent, George Bainton, noting that "the difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter." We recognize differences between a politician who is "willful" and one who is "willing" even though the difference does not cross word-stems or parts of speech. We recognize that being "held up" evokes different experiences depending upon whether its direct object is a meeting, a bank, or an example. Although we can notice hundreds of examples in the language where small differences in wording produce large reader effects, the authors of The Power of Words argue that these examples are random glimpses of a hidden systematic knowledge that governs how we, as writers or speakers, learn to shape experience for other human beings. Over the past several years, David Kaufer and his colleagues have developed a software program for analyzing writing called DocuScope. This book illustrates the concepts and rhetorical theory behind the software analysis, examining patterns in writing and showing writers how their writing works in different categories to accomplish varying objectives. Reflecting the range and variety of audience experience that contiguous words of surface English can prime, the authors present a theory of language as an instrument of rhetorically priming audiences and a catalog of English strings to implement the theory. The project creates a comprehensive map of the speaker and writer's implicit knowledge about predisposing audience experience at the point of utterance. The book begins with an explanation of why studying language from the standpoint of priming--not just meaning--is vital to non-question begging theories of close reading and to language education in general. The remaining chapters in Part I detail the steps taken to prepare a catalog study of English strings for their properties as priming instruments. Part II describes in detail the catalog of priming categories, including enough examples to help readers see how individual words and strings of English fit into the catalog. The final part describes how the authors have applied the catalog of English strings as priming tools to conduct textual research.

This book offers a stimulating introduction to the links between areas of global governance, human rights global economy and international law. By drawing on a range of diverse subject areas, Errol P. Mendes argues that the foundations of global governance, human rights and international law are undermined by a conflict or ‘tragic flaw’, where insistence on absolute conceptions of state sovereignty are pitted against universally accepted principles of justice and human rights resulting in destructive self-interest for both the state and the global community. The book explores how human rights and international law are applied in some of the critical institutions of global governance and in the operations of the global private sector, and how States, institutions and global civil society struggle to fight this ‘tragic flaw’. The book is brought up to date by considering developments in the role of the IMF, the World Bank, bilateral investment treaties; the likely failure of the Doha round of WTO negotiations; the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis; and the role of the International Criminal Court and the evolving Responsibility to Protect doctrine in international peace and security crises in the Middle East, Central and West Africa among other regions of the world. With its intensely interdisciplinary approach, this book motivates new thinking in the realm of global governance and international law, and promotes the development of new strategies for negotiating between conflicting leadership and organisational values within global institutions. The book will be of great interest and use to students and researchers of public international law, international relations and political science, business and human rights, global governance and international trade and economic law.

This collection of essays emerged out of intense conversations on multi-sited ethnography, prompted by a workshop held at the University of Sussex that brought together researchers from different institutional backgrounds and affiliations in Europe, the United States and Africa – including George Marcus himself, the person most associated with the term and the method. These researchers were brought together not only to discuss the shifting meaning of the concept in anthropology, but also to see how it has influenced actual research projects that have spanned the world. The volume that has resulted is not meant to be read as a program but as an extended provocation, an argument that multi-sitedness can be good not only to think, but also to act, both with and through. Arguably, this creation of a dynamic, shifting perspective is not so different from anthropology itself – a discipline dependent on the cultivation of aesthetic, embodied and intellectual sensibilities in relation to the world at large.

Some of the most important authors in British poetry left their mark on literature before 1600, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and, of course, William Shakespeare. This guide to British poetry from the beginnings to the year 1600 features approximately 600 entries ranging in length from 300 to 2,500 words.

Visible light communication (VLC) is an evolving communication technology for short-range applications. Exploiting recent advances in the development of high-power visible-light emitting LEDs, VLC offers an energy-efficient, clean alternative to RF technology, enabling the development of optical wireless communication systems that make use of existing lighting infrastructure. Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers from across the world, this concise book sets out the theoretical principles of VLC, and outlines key applications of this cutting-edge technology. Providing insight into modulation techniques, positioning and communication, synchronisation, and industry standards, as well as techniques for improving network performance, this is an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers in the fields of visible light communication, optical wireless communication, and industrial practitioners in the field of telecommunications.

Is China building a new empire in rural Africa? Over the past decade, China's meteoric rise on the continent has raised a drumbeat of alarm. China has 9 percent of the world's arable land, 6 percent of its water, and over 20 percent of its people. Africa's savannahs and river basins host the planet's largest expanses of underutilized land and water. Few topics are as controversial and emotionally charged as the belief that the Chinese government is aggressively buying up huge tracts of prime African land to grow food to ship back to China. In Will Africa Feed China?, Deborah Brautigam, one of the world's leading experts on China and Africa, probes the myths and realities behind the media headlines. Her careful research challenges the conventional wisdom; as she shows, Chinese farming investments are in fact surprisingly limited, and land acquisitions modest. Defying expectations, China actually exports more food to Africa than it imports. Is this picture likely to change? African governments are pushing hard for foreign capital, and China is building a portfolio of tools to allow its agribusiness firms to "go global." International concerns about "land grabbing" are well-justified. Yet to feed its own growing population, rural Africa must move from subsistence to commercial agriculture. What role will China play? Moving from the halls of power in Beijing to remote irrigated rice paddies of Africa, Will Africa Feed China? introduces the people and the politics that will shape the future of this engagement: the state-owned Chinese agribusiness firms that pioneered African farming in the 1960s and the entrepreneurial private investors who followed them. Their fascinating stories, and those of the African farmers and officials who are their counterparts, ground Brautigam's deeply informative, deftly balanced reporting. Forcefully argued and empirically rich, Will Africa Feed China? will be a landmark work, shedding new light on China's evolving global quest for food security and Africa's possibilities for structural transformation.

The epic genre has at its heart fascination and horror at viewing death. Epic heroes have active visual power, yet become objects, turned into monuments, watched by two main audiences: the gods above and the women on the sidelines. This stimulating and ambitious study investigates the theme of vision in Greek and Latin epic from Homer to Nonnus, bringing the edges of epic into dialogue with the most celebrated moments (the visual confrontation of Hector and Achilles, the failure of Turnus' gaze), revealing epic as both massive assertion of authority and fractured representation. It demonstrates the complexity of epic constructions of gender: from Apollonius' Medea toppling Talos with only her eyes to Parthenopaeus as object of desire. On display are the vertical gaze of the gods, mortal responses, prophets as penetrative viewers and rape victims, ecphrasis as objectification, women on the walls gazing sidelong, heroic bodies fragmented and fetishized.

This captivating book presents a new, unified picture of the everyday world around us. It provides rational, scientific support for the idea that there may well be more to our reality than meets the eye… Accessible and engaging for readers with no prior knowledge of quantum physics, author Ruth Kastner draws on the popular transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics to explain our ‘quantum reality.’ Her book focuses on modern-day examples and deals with big philosophical questions as well as ideas from physics. If you have any interest in quantum physics, this book is for you — whether you be a physics student or academic, or simply an inquisitive reader who wants to delve deeper into the reality of the world around you. Dr Ruth Kastner has received two National Science Foundation awards for the study of interpretational issues in quantum theory. Readership: Undergraduate students and readers interested in quantum physics.

This book attempts to explain the core of physics, the origin of everything and anything. It explains why physics at the most fundamental level, and especially quantum mechanics, has moved away from naive realism towards abstraction, and how this means that we can begin to answer some of the most fundamental questions which trouble us all, about space, time, matter, etc. It provides an original approach based on symmetry which will be of interest to professionals as well as lay people. In the book, virtually no prior knowledge is assumed, but the readers are allowed to participate in a discussion of very deep ideas. Throughout the book, the readers are guided through some important ideas which need to be explained mathematically. The key fact is that the mathematics is not about calculation but about concepts. Much of it can be simplified using coloured text and diagrams. This means that ideas which are important to everyone who wants to know how the universe is structured are not glossed over as being too difficult for anybody but the experts. This book is written for a wide audience. Experts will gain a great deal, but so will lay readers. This would be an ideal book for students to read before progressing to another book by the author, The Foundations of Physical Law.

This lively book offers a wide-ranging study of Greek notions of mind and human selfhood from Homer through Plotinus. A. A. Long anchors his discussion in questions of recurrent and universal interest. What happens to us when we die? How is the mind or soul related to the body? Are we responsible for our own happiness? Can we achieve autonomy? Long asks when and how these questions emerged in ancient Greece, and shows that Greek thinkers’ modeling of the mind gave us metaphors that we still live by, such as the rule of reason or enslavement to passion. He also interrogates the less familiar Greek notion of the intellect’s divinity, and asks what that might mean for us. Because Plato’s dialogues articulate these themes more sharply and influentially than works by any other Greek thinker, Plato receives the most sustained treatment in this account. But at the same time, Long asks whether Plato’s explanation of the mind and human behavior is more convincing for modern readers than that contained in the older Homeric poems. Turning to later ancient philosophy, especially Stoicism, Long concludes with an exploration of Epictetus’s injunction to live life by making correct use of one’s mental impressions. An authoritative treatment of Greek modes of self-understanding, Greek Models of Mind and Self demonstrates how ancient thinkers grappled with what is closest to us and yet still most mysterious―our own essence as singular human selves―and how the study of Greek thought can enlarge and enrich our experience.

Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocated the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life’s becoming on Earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche. In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of “studying” life and in the Socratic ideal of an “examined” life and remains a deep source of wisdom about living.

An analysis of convergent evolution from molecules to ecosystems, demonstrating the limited number of evolutionary pathways available to life. Charles Darwin famously concluded On the Origin of Species with a vision of “endless forms most beautiful” continually evolving. More than 150 years later many evolutionary biologists see not endless forms but the same, or very similar, forms evolving repeatedly in many independent species lineages. A porpoise's fishlike fins, for example, are not inherited from fish ancestors but are independently derived convergent traits. In this book, George McGhee describes the ubiquity of the phenomenon of convergent evolution and connects it directly to the concept of evolutionary constraint―the idea that the number of evolutionary pathways available to life are not endless, but quite limited. Convergent evolution occurs on all levels, from tiny organic molecules to entire ecosystems of species. McGhee demonstrates its ubiquity in animals, both herbivore and carnivore; in plants; in ecosystems; in molecules, including DNA, proteins, and enzymes; and even in minds, describing problem-solving behavior and group behavior as the products of convergence. For each species example, he provides an abbreviated list of the major nodes in its phylogenetic classification, allowing the reader to see the evolutionary relationship of a group of species that have independently evolved a similar trait by convergent evolution. McGhee analyzes the role of functional and developmental constraints in producing convergent evolution, and considers the scientific and philosophical implications of convergent evolution for the predictability of the evolutionary process.

The role of the operating department practitioner has evolved considerably in recent years, and both trainee and practising ODPs need a practical, up-to-date resource on terminology and current practice. Each entry in the second edition of Operating Department Practice A-Z has been fully updated and contains both a short definition and a more detailed description of the term or procedure, with supporting information to give the reader a deeper understanding of the field. In addition, the book contains useful appendices on medical terminology and abbreviations, normal values, medical and scientific symbols, and a list of useful websites for further reference. Written by two of the UK's most experienced Operating Department Practice lecturers, Operating Department Practice A-Z, second edition provides practical, concise information for all peri-operative staff members.