Creating East and West

Creating East and West
Author: Nancy Bisaha
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812201299

As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works. These compositions included Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Most scholars have seen this vast literature as atypical of Renaissance humanism. Nancy Bisaha now offers an in-depth look at the body of Renaissance humanist works that focus not on classical or contemporary Italian subjects but on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, Bisaha probes these texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of self and other. Medieval concepts of Islam were generally informed and constrained by religious attitudes and rhetoric in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith. While humanist thinkers of the Renaissance did not move entirely beyond this stance, Creating East and West argues that their understanding was considerably more complex, in that it addressed secular and cultural issues, marking a watershed between the medieval and modern. Taking a close look at a number of texts, Bisaha expands current notions of Renaissance humanism and of the history of cross-cultural perceptions. Engaging both traditional methods of intellectual history and more recent methods of cross-cultural studies, she demonstrates that modern attitudes of Western societies toward other cultures emerged not during the later period of expansion and domination but rather as a defensive intellectual reaction to a sophisticated and threatening power to the East.

Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare

Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare
Author: Mark Cobb
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2012-08-09
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0199571392

Spirituality and healthcare is an emerging field of research, practice and policy. Healthcare organisations and practitioners are therefore challenged to understand and address spirituality, to develop their knowledge and implement effective policy. This is the first reference text on the subject providing a comprehensive overview of key topics.

Humanism and Democratic Criticism

Humanism and Democratic Criticism
Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2004
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780231122641

brought on by advances in technological communication, intellectual specialization, and cultural sensitivity -- has eroded the former primacy of the humanities, Edward Said argues that a more democratic form of humanism -- one that aims to incorporate, emancipate, and enlighten --

New Horizons in Eastern Humanism

New Horizons in Eastern Humanism
Author: Tu Weiming
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2011-03-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0857731181

China now attracts global attention in direct proportion to its increasing economic and geopolitical power. But for millennia, the philosophy which has shaped the soul of China is not modern Communism, or even new forms of capitalism, but rather Confucianism. And one of the most striking phenomena relating to China's ascendancy on the world stage is a burgeoning interest, throughout Asia and beyond, in the humanistic culture and values that underlie Chinese politics and finance: particularly the thought of Confucius passed on in the Analects. In this stimulating conversation, two leading thinkers from the Confucian and Buddhist traditions discuss the timely relevance of a rejuvenated Confucian ethics to some of the most urgent issues in the modern world: Sino/Japanese/US relations; the transformation of society through education and dialogue; and the role of world religions in promoting human flourishing. Exploring correspondences between the Confucian and Buddhist world-views, the interlocutors commit themselves to a view of spirituality and religion that, without blurring cultural difference, is focused above all on the 'universal heart': on harmony between people and nature that leads to peace and to a hopeful future for all humanity.

East West Mimesis

East West Mimesis
Author: Kader Konuk
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2010-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804775753

East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.

Forgotten Founders and Other Neglected Social Theorists

Forgotten Founders and Other Neglected Social Theorists
Author: Christopher T. Conner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 149857372X

This edited volume highlights the work of ten forgotten and neglected social theorists in the hope of reinvigorating interest in their work and their potential contributions to the analysis of contemporary social issues. Each chapter includes a brief biographical sketch, an overview of the selected theorist’s work and significance, and the relevance of their work to one or more contemporary social issues. While other similar texts tend to focus primarily on intellectual biography, our emphasis here is on the scholar’s theories and their application to contemporary social issues. We provide a contextualization of each scholar’s work, using present-day social issues or problems. Many of these individuals played a significant role in the development of sociology. Our hope is to provide a resource that will help re-integrate these marginalized social theorists, rescuing them from obscurity and elevating their status.

Humanism

Humanism
Author: Tony Davies
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2006-10-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134836120

Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes of modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault.

The Best of the Humanist

The Best of the Humanist
Author: Charles Murn
Publisher: Humanist Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-05-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0931779782

Humanism is the progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity. For the past ninety years, The Humanist Magazine and its predecessor The New Humanist have published the most profound and provocative humanist writing in America. This volume focuses on the first forty-five years of the magazine, from 1928 to 1973, and on the philosophical discussion that formed its heart. The work of thinkers as accomplished as Buckminster Fuller, Corliss Lamont, B. F. Skinner, Frank Lloyd Wright, Lucile Green, and Isaac Asimov is included, along with that of many others. Editor Charles Murn has organized the essays into eleven chapters, providing an overview of the evolution of humanist thinking in each area. CHAPTER 1: Some Essentials of Humanist Philosophy CHAPTER 2: Types of Humanism CHAPTER 3: The Source and Nature of Humanist Values CHAPTER 4: Scientific Method and Scientific Knowledge in Humanist Philosophy CHAPTER 5: Humanism Explores the Unknown and Defines the Uncertain CHAPTER 6: Religious Humanism as Nontheistic, Naturalistic, and Instrumental CHAPTER 7: The Roles of Emotion and Spirituality in Humanism CHAPTER 8: Working Out Humanist Morals and Ethics CHAPTER 9: Humanistic Psychology and Freedom CHAPTER 10: Humanism, Science, and the Arts and Humanities CHAPTER 11: Humanism Comes to Value Other Life Forms and Nature