Author: Robert N. McCauley File Type: pdf The battle between religion and science, competing methods of knowing ourselves and our world, has been raging for many centuries. Now scientists themselves are looking at cognitive foundations of religion--and arriving at some surprising conclusions. Over the course of the past two decades, scholars have employed insights gleaned from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines to illuminate the study of religion. In Why Religion is Natural and Science Is Not, Robert N. McCauley, one of the founding fathers of the cognitive science of religion, argues that our minds are better suited to religious belief than to scientific inquiry. Drawing on the latest research and illustrating his argument with commonsense examples, McCauley argues that religion has existed for many thousands of years in every society because the kinds of explanations it provides are precisely the kinds that come naturally to human minds. Science, on the other hand, is a much more recent and rare development because it reaches radical conclusions and requires a kind of abstract thinking that only arises consistently under very specific social conditions. Religion makes intuitive sense to us, while science requires a lot of work. McCauley then draws out the larger implications of these findings. The naturalness of religion, he suggests, means that science poses no real threat to it, while the unnaturalness of science puts it in a surprisingly precarious position. Rigorously argued and elegantly written, this provocative book will appeal to anyone interested in the ongoing debate between religion and science, and in the nature and workings of the human mind.ReviewMcCauleys richly illustrated and wonderfully accessible book is an intellectual treat. He brings the emerging Cognitive Sciences to bear on the issue of the cognitive awkwardness humans typically feel when trying to grasp the concepts of Theoretical Science, as compared to the cognitive naturalness we typically feel when contemplating the doctrines of Religion. Unlike others, McCauley has no particular doctrinal axe to grind here he is simply concerned to understand a gulf that is familiar to all of us. This is a book that will engage everyone. -- Paul M. Churchland, author of The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul Robert McCauley is a philosopher of science and was a pioneer in creating a cognitive science of religious thought and behaviour. No one could better explain what he calls the naturalness of religion and the unnaturalness of science. In the past, discussions of science and religion have been as sterile as they were poorly informed. McCauley re-examines this contrast in cognitive and evolutionary terms. He shows how our mental systems make religious belief so easy and scientific thinking so difficult, and explores the consequences of these divergent ways of thinking for the future of religious organizations and scientific knowledge. -- Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained In Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not, McCauley strikes a pleasing balance between erudition and precision, and between accessibility and sophistication. This is the best book I have read on the cognitive science of religion and on the cognitive science of science. McCauley makes an exciting contribution to each area and places the so-called science-religion debate on entirely new ground. -- Justin L. Barrett, author of Why Would Anyone Believe in God? About the AuthorRobert N. McCauley is William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University. He is the co-author of Rethinking Religion and Bringing Ritual to Mind.
Author: Deborah B. Gould
File Type: mobi
In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no moreeven as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the authors time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UPs provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movements public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UPs origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.
Author: Ben Highmore
File Type: pdf
Michel de Certeau is becoming increasingly recognised as a cultural theorist whose methodologies could rival those of Foucault. In this engaging book, Ben Highmore provides a stimulating account of Michel de Certeaus work and its relation to the field of cultural studies. The book explores those aspects of de Certeaus work that both challenge and re-imagine cultural studies, highlighting the potential this work has for supplying a critical epistemology and a practical ethics for the study of culture within the arts and humanities more generally. Michel de Certeau Analysing Culture provides an ideal introduction to the work of this extraordinary and important thinker. ReviewTo follow from Tom Conley (Harvard) and Elspeth Probyn (Sydney)Highmores contribution is not a general presentation of de Certeaus thought. Rather, it is a complex, ambitious, and important study that requires some prior knowledge of de Certeaus major works and a familiarity with the discourses, disciplines, and fields of inquiry that have emerged over the past several decades in the wake of post-structuralism and deconstruction. Alain Gabon, Virginia Wesleyan College, Substance, #115, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2008(Alain Gabon )Highmores contribution is not a general presentation of de Certeaus thought. Rather, it is a complex, ambitious, and important study that requires some prior knowledge of de Certeaus major works and a familiarity with the discourses, disciplines, and fields of inquiry that have emerged over the past several decades in the wake of post-structuralism and deconstruction. Alain Gabon, Virginia Wesleyan College, Substance, #115, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2008(, ) About the AuthorBen Highmore is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Author: Daniel L. Overmyer
File Type: pdf
This book is a comprehensive survey of the structure, organization and institutionalization of local community religious traditions in north China villages in the twentieth century. These traditions have their own forms of leaders, deities and beliefs. Despite much local variation one everywhere finds similar temples, images, offerings and temple festivals, all supported by practical concerns for divine aid to deal with the problems of everyday life. These local traditions are a structure in the history of Chinese religions they have a clear sense of their own integrity and rules, handed down by their ancestors. There are Daoist, Buddhist and government influences on these traditions, but they must be adapted to the needs of local communities. It is the villagers who build temples and organize festivals, in which all members of the community are expected to participate and contribute. With chapters on such topics as historical origins and development, leadership and organization, temple festivals, temples and deities, and beliefs and values.
Author: R. Bracht Branham
File Type: pdf
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) has become a name to conjure with. We know this because he is now one of those thinkers everyone already knows - without necessarily having to read much of him! Doesnt everyone now know how polyphony functions, what carnival means, why language is dialogic but the novel more so, how chronotopes make possible any concrete artistic cognition and that utterances give rise to genres that last thousands of years, always the same but not the same? Like Marx and Freud in the twentieth century, or Plotinus and Plato in the fourth, a familiarity with Bakhtins thinking is so commonly assumed, at least in the Humanities, as to be taken for granted. He is no longer an author but a field of study in his own right. As Craig Brandist (of the Bakhtin Centre at Sheffield University) reports the works of the [Bakhtin] Circle are still appearing in Russian and English, and are already large in number. There are now several thousand works about the Bakhtin Circle. The freedom given to contributors to address any text or topic under the general rubric of The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative has produced a remarkable variety of essays ranging widely over different periods, genres, and cultures. While most of the contributors chose to explore Bakhtins theory of genre or to take issue with his account of one genre, Greek romance, the remaining contributions defy such convenient categories. What all the essays share with one another (and those collected in Bakhtin and the Classics) is the attempt to engage Bakhtin as a reader and thinker.
Author: Eugenio Bolongaro
File Type: pdf
Looking at five of Italo Calvinos often neglected early novels The Young People of Po, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight, and The Watcher, Eugenio Bolongaro argues that these works, written between 1948 and 1963, contain a sustained meditation on the role of the intellectual and on the irreducible ethical and political dimension of literature. This meditation provides an insight into a crucial moment in Calvinos development as a writer, and allows Bolongaro to lay the groundwork for a more political reading of Calvinos later work.Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature firmly situates Calvino within his historical context - the cultural revival of post-World War II Italy - by relating these early novels to Calvinos political and critical writings which played an important role in the cultural debates of the time. This approach provides a key to understanding Calvinos work in a new light, ably demonstrating that Calvinos full literary significance cannot be understood in isolation from the politics and cultural movements of the period. One of the few book-length English-language works on Calvinos early writings, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literatur will prove to be an indispensable tool to Italianists and literary studies scholars.**
Author: John C. Knapp
File Type: pdf
This book presents an ethical framework which evaluates the legitimacy ofthe practice of ghostwriting. It explores the connection between personalauthenticity and the use of ghostwriters in corporate, political, legal, highereducation, and scientific contexts. It then examines the history ofghostwriting as a professional practice and introduces a model for ethicalanalysis. In this book, the authors shrewdly address crucial ethical questions suchas When is it acceptable for a leader to claim the words of a ghostwriter astheir own? When may this be inappropriate or even dangerouslymisleading? What are the consequences when public awareness of thispractice leads to cynicism about the authenticity of leaders and theircommunications? And when, if ever, is the use of a ghostwriter ethical?This book will be welcomed by scholars and practitioners alike as anoriginal and timely contribution to the literature of business, politics, andcommunications. **
Author: Stacy E. Holden
File Type: pdf
Previously published histories and primary source collections on the Iraqi experience tend to be topically focused or dedicated to presenting a top-down approach. By contrast, Stacy Holdens A Documentary History of Modern Iraq gives voice to ordinary Iraqis, clarifying the experience of the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Jews, and women over the past century. Through varied documents ranging from short stories to treaties, political speeches to memoirs, and newspaper articles to book excerpts, the work synthesizes previously marginalized perspectives of minorities and women with the voices of the political elite to provide an integrated picture of political change from the Ottoman Empire in 1903 to the end of the second Bush administration in 2008. Covering a broad range of topics, this bottom-up approach allows readers to fully immerse themselves in the lives of everyday Iraqis as they navigate regime shifts from the British to the Hashemite monarchy, the political upheaval of the Persian Gulf wars, and beyond. Brief introductions to each excerpt provide context and suggest questions for classroom discussion. This collection offers raw history, untainted and unfiltered by modern political framework and thought, representing a refreshing new approach to the study of Iraq. **
Author: Youlian Hong
File Type: pdf
The Routledge Handbook of Biomechanics and Human Movement Science is a landmark work of reference. Now available in a concise paperback edition, it offers a comprehensive and in-depth survey of current theory, research and practice in sports, exercise and clinical biomechanics, in both established and emerging contexts.Including contributions from many of the worlds leading biomechanists, the book is arranged into five thematic sectionsullbiomechanics in sportsllinjury, orthopedics and rehabilitationllhealth and rehabilitationlltraining, learning and coachingllmethodologies and systems of measurement. lulDrawing explicit connections between the theoretical, investigative and applied components of sports science research, this book is both a definitive subject guide and an important contribution to the contemporary research agenda in biomechanics and human movement science. It is essential reading for all students, scholars and researchers working in sports biomechanics, kinesiology, ergonomics, sports engineering, orthopaedics and physical therapy.About the AuthorYoulian Hong is the Distinguished Professor at the China Chengdu Sports University and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a fellow and the Past President of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports.Roger Bartlett is Professorof Sports Biomechanics in the School of Physical Education, University of Otago, New Zealand. He is an Invited Fellow of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports (ISBS) and the European College of Sports Sciences. The Routledge Handbook of Biomechanics and Human Movement Scienceis a landmark work of reference. Now available in a concise paperback edition, it offers a comprehensive and in-depth survey of current theory, research and practice in sports, exercise and clinical biomechanics, in both established and emerging contexts.Including contributions from many of the worlds leading biomechanists, the book is arranged into five thematic sectionsBiomechanics In SportsInjury, Orthopedics And RehabilitationHealth And RehabilitationTraining, Learning And CoachingMethodologies And Systems Of Measurement Drawing explicit connections between the theoretical, investigative and applied components of sports science research, this book is both a definitive subject guide and an important contribution to the contemporary research agenda in biomechanics and human movement science. It is essential reading for all students, scholars and researchers working in sports biomechanics, kinesiology, ergonomics, sports engineering, orthopaedics and physical therapy.