Uncertainty and Its Discontents

Uncertainty and Its Discontents
Author: Peter J. Katzenstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2022-07-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009080288

Worldviews are the unexamined, pre-theoretical foundations of the approaches with which we understand and navigate the world, and this volume provides the first major study of worldviews in international relations. Advances in twentieth century physics and cosmology questioning anthropocentrism have fostered the articulation of alternative worldviews, rivalling conventional Newtonian humanism and its assumption that the world is constituted by controllable risks. This matters for accepting uncertainties that are an indelible part of many spheres of life including public health, the environment, finance, security and politics – uncertainties that are concealed by the conventional presumption that the world is governed only by risk. The confluence of risk and uncertainty requires an awareness of alternative worldviews, alerts us to possible intersections between humanist Newtonianism and hyper-humanist Post-Newtonianism, and reminds us of the relevance of science, religion and moral values in world politics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Heavens on Earth

Heavens on Earth
Author: Michael Shermer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1627798560

A scientific exploration into humanity’s obsession with the afterlife and quest for immortality from the bestselling author and skeptic Michael Shermer In his most ambitious work yet, Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality along with utopian attempts to create heaven on earth. For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. From radical life extension to cryonic suspension to mind uploading, Shermer considers how realistic these attempts are from a proper skeptical perspective. Heavens on Earth concludes with an uplifting paean to purpose and progress and how we can live well in the here-and-now, whether or not there is a hereafter.

The Question of God

The Question of God
Author: Armand Nicholi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2003-08-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780743247856

Compares and contrasts the beliefs of two famous thinkers, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, on topics ranging from the existence of God and morality to pain and suffering.

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

Meritocracy and Its Discontents
Author: Zachary M. Howlett
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501754459

Meritocracy and Its Discontents investigates the wider social, political, religious, and economic dimensions of the Gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, as well as the complications that arise from its existence. Each year, some nine million high school seniors in China take the Gaokao, which determines college admission and provides a direct but difficult route to an urban lifestyle for China's hundreds of millions of rural residents. But with college graduates struggling to find good jobs, some are questioning the exam's legitimacy—and, by extension, the fairness of Chinese society. Chronicling the experiences of underprivileged youth, Zachary M. Howlett's research illuminates how people remain captivated by the exam because they regard it as fateful—an event both consequential and undetermined. He finds that the exam enables people both to rebel against the social hierarchy and to achieve recognition within it. In Meritocracy and Its Discontents, Howlett contends that the Gaokao serves as a pivotal rite of passage in which people strive to personify cultural virtues such as diligence, composure, filial devotion, and divine favor.

Art and Its Discontents

Art and Its Discontents
Author: Richard Read
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780271022963

Although interest in the painter, poet, and art writer Adrian Stokes (1902&–1972) has been growing in recent years, Art and Its Discontents is the first biographical study of this pivotal figure in British modernism. Focused on Stokes's formative years, the book offers important new insights into his intellectual development, his growing commitment to the arts, and his eventual turn to the art criticism that would win him international renown. Even as Richard Read follows Stokes from his London childhood to his travels in Italy and his psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, he weaves Stokes's experiences and writings into the great social and cultural issues of his era. Stokes's friendship with Ezra Pound is given its due, but Read balances his exploration of Stokes's modernist ideas with detailed discussion of his profound debt to the teachings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Seen in this broad perspective, Stokes emerges as a thinker who bridged Victorian and modernist cultures and renewed the British tradition of aesthetic criticism.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
Author: Christopher Lasch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 594
Release: 1991-09-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0393348423

"A major and challenging work. . . . Provocative, and certain to be controversial. . . . Will add important new dimension to the continuing debate on the decline of liberalism." —William Julius Wilson, New York Times Book Review Can we continue to believe in progress? In this sobering analysis of the Western human condition, Christopher Lasch seeks the answer in a history of the struggle between two ideas: one is the idea of progress - an idea driven by the conviction that human desire is insatiable and requires ever larger production forces. Opposing this materialist view is the idea that condemns a boundless appetite for more and better goods and distrusts "improvements" that only feed desire. Tracing the opposition to the idea of progress from Rousseau through Montesquieu to Carlyle, Max Weber and G.D.H. Cole, Lasch finds much that is desirable in a turn toward moral conservatism, toward a lower-middle-class culture that features egalitarianism, workmanship and loyalty, and recognizes the danger of resentment of the material goods of others.

Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing

Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing
Author: Peter Kreeft
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2013-02-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 168149230X

A major book on the subject of heaven, this expanded edition examines the hunger for heaven that is so strong in all of us. Fascinating and upbeat, Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing thoroughly explores the psychological and theological dimensions of this search for total joy and for the ultimate reality that grounds it.

The Myth of an Afterlife

The Myth of an Afterlife
Author: Michael Martin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 709
Release: 2015-03-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0810886782

Because every single one of us will die, most of us would like to know what—if anything—awaits us afterward, not to mention the fate of lost loved ones. Given the nearly universal vested interest in deciding this question in favor of an afterlife, it is no surprise that the vast majority of books on the topic affirm the reality of life after death without a backward glance. But the evidence of our senses and the ever-gaining strength of scientific evidence strongly suggest otherwise. In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death, Michael Martin and Keith Augustine collect a series of contributions that redress this imbalance in the literature by providing a strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date casebook of the chief arguments against an afterlife. Divided into four separate sections, this collection opens with a broad overview of the issues, as contributors consider the strongest evidence of whether or not we survive death—in particular the biological basis of all mental states and their grounding in brain activity that ceases to function at death. Next, contributors consider a host of conceptual and empirical difficulties that confront the various ways of “surviving” death—from bodiless minds to bodily resurrection to any form of posthumous survival. Then essayists turn to internal inconsistencies between traditional theological conceptions of an afterlife—heaven, hell, karmic rebirth—and widely held ethical principles central to the belief systems supporting those notions. In the final section, authors offer critical evaluations of the main types of evidence for an afterlife. Fully interdisciplinary, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death brings together a variety of fields of research to make that case, including cognitiveneuroscience, philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, moralphilosophy, psychical research, and anomalistic psychology. As the definitive casebookof arguments against life after death, this collection is required reading for anyinstructor, researcher, and student of philosophy, religious studies, or theology. It issure to raise provocative issues new to readers, regardless of background, from thosewho believe fervently in the reality of an afterlife to those who do not or are undecidedon the matter.

Microfinance and Its Discontents

Microfinance and Its Discontents
Author: Lamia Karim
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816670943

The first feminist critique of the much-lauded microcredit process in Bangladesh.