Groundless

Groundless
Author: Gregory Evans Dowd
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2016-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421418665

The fascinating—and troubling—story of powerful rumors that circulated and influential legends that arose in early America. Why did Elizabethan adventurers believe that the interior of America hid vast caches of gold? Who started the rumor that British officers purchased revolutionary white women’s scalps, packed them by the bale, and shipped them to their superiors? And why are people today still convinced that white settlers—hardly immune as a group to the disease—routinely distributed smallpox-tainted blankets to the natives? Rumor—spread by colonists and Native Americans alike—ran rampant in early America. In Groundless, historian Gregory Evans Dowd explores why half-truths, deliberate lies, and outrageous legends emerged in the first place, how they grew, and why they were given such credence throughout the New World. Arguing that rumors are part of the objective reality left to us by the past—a kind of fragmentary archival record—he examines how uncertain news became powerful enough to cascade through the centuries. Drawing on specific case studies and tracing recurring rumors over many generations, Dowd explains the seductive power of unreliable stories in the eastern North American frontiers from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The rumors studied here—some alluring, some frightening—commanded attention and demanded action. They were all, by definition, groundless, but they were not all false, and they influenced the classic issues of historical inquiry: the formation of alliances, the making of revolutions, the expropriation of labor and resources, and the origins of war.

Groundless Belief

Groundless Belief
Author: Michael Williams
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1999-07-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780691009070

In this essay Michael Williams attacks phenomenalism and empiricism. He examines and rejects the idea that, unless our beliefs are answerable to a 'given' element in experience, objective knowledge will be impossible.

Wittgenstein and Heidegger

Wittgenstein and Heidegger
Author: David Egan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 113410829X

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are arguably the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Their work not only reshaped the philosophical landscape, but also left its mark on other disciplines, including political science, theology, anthropology, ecology, mathematics, cultural studies, literary theory, and architecture. Both sought to challenge the assumptions governing the traditions they inherited, to question the very terms in which philosophy’s problems had been posed, and to open up new avenues of thought for thinkers of all stripes. And despite considerable differences in style and in the traditions they inherited, the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are striking. Comparative work of these thinkers has only increased in recent decades, but no collection has yet explored the various ways in which Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be drawn into dialogue. As such, these essays stage genuine dialogues, with aspects of Wittgenstein’s elucidations answering or problematizing aspects of Heidegger’s, and vice versa. The result is a broad-ranging collection of essays that provides a series of openings and provocations that will serve as a reference point for future work that draws on the writings of these two philosophers.

Groundless Grounds

Groundless Grounds
Author: Lee Braver
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2012-02-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262300966

An in-depth comparison of Wittgenstein and Heidegger shows how the views of both philosophers emerge from a fundamental attempt to dispense with the transcendent. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important—and two of the most difficult—philosophers of the twentieth century, indelibly influencing the course of continental and analytic philosophy, respectively. In Groundless Grounds, Lee Braver argues that the views of both thinkers emerge from a fundamental attempt to create a philosophy that has dispensed with everything transcendent so that we may be satisfied with the human. Examining the central topics of their thought in detail, Braver finds that Wittgenstein and Heidegger construct a philosophy based on original finitude—finitude without the contrast of the infinite. In Braver's elegant analysis, these two difficult bodies of work offer mutual illumination rather than compounded obscurity. Moreover, bringing the most influential thinkers in continental and analytic philosophy into dialogue with each other may enable broader conversations between these two divergent branches of philosophy. Braver's meticulously researched and strongly argued account shows that both Wittgenstein and Heidegger strive to construct a new conception of reason, free of the illusions of the past and appropriate to the kind of beings that we are. Readers interested in either philosopher, or concerned more generally with the history of twentieth-century philosophy as well as questions of the nature of reason, will find Groundless Grounds of interest.

Groundless Existence

Groundless Existence
Author: Michael Marder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2010-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0826434088

Groundless Existence discusses the implicit phenomenological and existential foundations of Schmitt's political philosophy. The book's unique contribution lies in its claim that Schmitt decisively breaks with the metaphysical tradition and predicates the political on the 'groundless' categories of existence, including risk, decision, and agonism. This argument is substantiated by both tacit and explicit existentialist and phenomenological underpinnings of Schmitt's work, discussed here for the first time in book form.The book provides an insight into the implications of Schmitt's thought reconceptualized in the light of contemporary political developments. An essential text for anyone interested in the political theory of Carl Schmitt, it offers a new reading of Schmitt's work against the double background of phenomenology and existentialism.

Medical Bondage

Medical Bondage
Author: Deirdre Cooper Owens
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2017-11-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0820351342

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

Groundless Paths

Groundless Paths
Author: Karl Brunnholzl
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 897
Release: 2012-08-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0834829509

The Abhisamayalamkara summarizes all the topics in the vast body of the prajñaparamita sutras. Resembling a zip-file, it comes to life only through its Indian and Tibetan commentaries. Together, these texts not only discuss the "hidden meaning" of the prajñaparamita sutras—the paths and bhumis of sravakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas—but also serve as contemplative manuals for the explicit topic of these sutras—emptiness—and how it is to be understood on the progressive levels of realization of bodhisattvas. Thus these texts describe what happens in the mind of a bodhisattva who meditates on emptiness, making it a living experience from the beginner's stage up through buddhahood. Groundless Paths contains the first in-depth study of the Abhisamayalamkara (the text studied most extensively in higher Tibetan Buddhist education) and its commentaries from the perspective of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism. This study consists mainly of translations of Maitreya's famous text and two commentaries on it by Patrul Rinpoche. These are supplemented by three short texts on the paths and bhumis by the same author, as well as extensive excerpts from commentaries by six other Nyingma masters, including Mipham Rinpoche. Thus this book helps close a long-standing gap in the modern scholarship on the prajñaparamita sutras and the literature on paths and bhumis in mahayana Buddhism. Arya Maitreya's Ornament of Clear Realization, with its Indian and Tibetan commentaries, presents the complex dynamics of the path to liberation as a succession of realizations of the empty nature of all phenomena. This presentation is a powerful antidote to whatever two-dimensional views we might hold about spiritual experience and the journey to enlightenment.

Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems

Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems
Author: Alysson Bessani
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015-05-04
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319191292

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, DAIS 2015, held as part of the 10th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2015, in Grenoble, France, in June 2015. The 14 full papers and 3 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. They deal with topics such as fault tolerance, privacy, resource management, social recommenders and cloud systems.

Groundlessness

Groundlessness
Author: Rashanda Booker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2018-11-21
Genre:
ISBN: 9781790107285

Pain is a sign that something is wrong, signaling there is a larger concern that requires attention. Acknowledging and deciding to trace the source of the pain is not an easy process. However, it is imperative to dig deep to find the source of the pain. Not often do we view examining pain as a positive opportunity. Usually, in that moment, the pain is so uncomfortable that we desire instead to find a way to make it quickly go away and hope the underlying concern magically disappears as well. When the ground is quickly pulled from underneath you, and you are challenged to find your footing, an opportunity of a lifetime lies on the other side of unpacking the pain. When emotional pain hits, there is an instinctive decision to fight or retreat. Dr. Rashanda R. Booker decided to fight! In this transparent and raw story, she takes us along her personal journey from pain to peace and shares her triumph of becoming healed, whole, and full of peace.