Author: David Larocca
File Type: pdf
In The Ecological Thought, eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has argued for the inclusion of dark ecology in our thinking about nature. Dark ecology, he argues, puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. The ecological thought, he says, should include negativity and irony, ugliness and horror. Focusing on this concept of dark ecology and its invitation to add an anti-pastoral perspective to ecocriticism, this collection of essays on American literature and culture offers examples of how a vision of natures darker side can create a fuller understanding of humanitys relation to nature. Included are essays on canonical American literature, on new voices in American literature, and on non-print American media. This is the first collection of essays applying the dark ecology principle to American literature. **
Author: R. Kevin Hill
File Type: pdf
ReviewHills book is to be recommended for its clear expositions of the Critiques, for the information it provides concerning Nietzsches actual reading of Kant, and for its provocative interpretation of Nietzsches debt to Kant. It does much to open the way to new hypotheses concerning Nietzsches Kantianism.--Notre Dame Philosophical ReviewsAbout the AuthorR. Kevin Hill is at Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University.
Author: Harris M. Cooper
File Type: epub
To become informed consumers of research, students need to thoughtfully evaluate the research they read rather than accept it without question. This second edition of a classic text gives students what they need to apply critical reasoning when reading behavioral science research. It updates the original text with recent developments in research methods, including a new chapter on meta-analyses. Part I gives a thorough overview of the steps in a research project. It focuses on how to assess whether the conclusions drawn in a behavioral science report are warranted by the methods used in the research. Topics include research hypotheses, sampling, experimental design, data analysis, interpretation of results, and ethics. Part II allows readers to practice critical thinking with a series of fictitious journal articles containing built-in flaws in method and interpretation. Clever and engaging, each article is accompanied by a commentary that points out the errors of procedure and logic that have been deliberately embedded in the article. This combination of instruction and practical application will promote active learning and critical thinking in students studying the behavioral sciences. **Review This volume provides a valuable background for the skills students must develop to be good consumers and producers of research. Choice Book Description This second edition of a classic text gives students what they need to apply critical reasoning when reading behavioral science research. It begins with a thorough overview of the research process, focusing on how to assess whether the conclusions drawn in a behavioral science report are warranted by the methods used in the research. The book then provides fictional research articles with built-in flaws so readers can practice their critical thinking skills.
Author: Daniel Callahan
File Type: pdf
Daniel Callahan helped invent the field of bioethics more than forty years ago when he decided to use his training in philosophy to grapple with ethical problems in biology and medicine. Disenchanted with academic philosophy because of its analytical bent and distance from the concerns of real life, Callahan found the ethical issues raised by the rapid medical advances of the 1960s--which included the birth control pill, heart transplants, and new capacities to keep very sick people alive--to be philosophical questions with immediate real-world relevance. In this memoir, Callahan describes his part in the founding of bioethics and traces his thinking on critical issues including embryonic stem cell research, market-driven health care, and medical rationing. He identifies the major challenges facing bioethics today and ruminates on its future. Callahan writes about founding the Hastings Center--the first bioethics research institution--with the author and psychiatrist Willard Gaylin in 1969, and recounts the challenges of running a think tank while keeping up a prolific flow of influential books and articles. Editor of the famous liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal in the 1960s, Callahan describes his now-secular approach to issues of illness and mortality. He questions the idea of endless medical progress and interventionist end-of-life care that seems to blur the boundary between living and dying. It is the role of bioethics, he argues, to be a loyal dissenter in the onward march of medical progress. The most important challenge for bioethics now is to help rethink the very goals of medicine.**
Author: Renee C. Romano
File Type: pdf
Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of changed in 1994, and more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened, resulting in over a dozen trials. Yet, as Renee C. Romano shows, addressing the nations troubled racial past will require more than legal justice. **Review [An] insightful new book on the cold cases of the civil rights era. (Kevin Boyle Washington Post 2014-10-10) Since 1990, varied agendas have intersected to push for reopening the more than 100 unsolved, racially motivated murders from the civil rights era. These effortson the parts of family members, local groups, journalists, prosecutors, and law professorshave led not only to convictions of murderers like Edgar Ray Killen and Byron De La Beckwith, but also to commemoration, dialogthrough truth commissions such as the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliationand legislation, most notably the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007. In a splendid cultural and intellectual history of this movement, Romano explores what it means Romano observes that legal justice, even when it leads to successful prosecution, does not equal social justice. (E. R. Crowther Choice 2015-02-01) Over the last two decades, the violent death throes of Jim Crow have been replayed in courtrooms across the South, as prosecutors have reopened some of the most notorious murders of the civil rights era. In this wise, probing, gently skeptical book, Romano considers why these prosecutions are happening now, the truths they reveal and conceal, and what they tell us about Americas continuing racial odyssey. (James T. Campbell, author of Middle Passages African American Journeys to Africa, 17872005) An extremely important and engaging book. Romano provides a much needed link between the racist violence of our past and the persistence of white supremacy in our post-racial era. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in justice and democracy. (Emilye Crosby, author of A Little Taste of Freedom The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi) [A] timely and significant workRomano brilliantly demystifies the false binary of villainous white men like Beckwith or Edgar Ray Killen who represent vestiges of a violent racial past with a more enlightened color-blind societyConsidering the current partisan and racial divide over the prosecution of police shootings of unarmed black men, this book is a must-read for historians, legal analysts, and journalists interested in understanding the larger meanings of civil rights or racially explosive trials in America. (Chanelle Rose American Historical Review) About the Author Renee C. Romano is Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies at Oberlin College.
Author: Fredric M Menger
File Type: pdf
This book delves into one of the greatest riddles perplexing modern science Why are humans so smart? In a format understandable even by the non-expert, the author investigates the origins of human intelligence, starting with classical Darwinian concepts. Thus, the strengths and beauty of natural selection are presented with many examples taken from natural history. Common criticisms of Darwin, from scientists and non-scientists alike, are confronted and shown to be either inconclusive or outright false. The author then launches into a discussion of human intelligence, the most important feature of human evolution, and how it cannot be fully explained by mutational selection. Modern humans are smarter than what is demanded by our evolutionary experience as hunter-gatherers. The difficulty lies in the inability of natural selection to answer the following question how can a complex set of genes, controlling expensive traits with little immediate benefit, come into permanent existence within a short time period in every member of a small population (which was dispersed and geographically isolated over a huge planet) which had a low reproductive output and a low mutation rate? The book concludes with a speculative epigenetic theory of intelligence that does not require DNA mutations as a source of evolution. Although the book is comprehensible by anyone with a college education, this last section in particular should intrigue both layman and expert alike. Contents Evolution Darwin and Natural Selection Darwin Analyzed Lamarck The Thin Bone Vault Definition of Intelligence A Brief History of the Mind Population Culture Animal Intelligence Evolutionary Potential Elementary Genetics Gene Variability, Examples Directed Mutations Genetics and Intelligence Evolution of Intelligence, an Epigenetic Model Epigenetics The Cranial Feedback Mechanism.
Author: Tim Callahan
File Type: pdf
Dissects modern scenarios of the end of the world Investigates the claims of fundamentalist ministers As the millennium approaches many claim we are living in the end times. Is our world coming to an end as described in the Book of Revelation? By comparing the predictions to actual history, as well as to each other and by noting evidence of historical anachronisms and faulty scholarship on the part of fundamentalist apologists, Callahan subjects the prophecies of the Bible to four rigorous questions 1) Is the prophecy true, false or too vague to be specifically interpreted? 2) If the prophecy is true was it written before or after the fact? 3) If it was written before the fact, was its fulfillment something that could be predicted based on a logical interpretation of the events of the prophets day? 4) Was the prophecy directive or deliberately fulfilled by someone with knowledge of the prophecy?**
Author: Paul A. Djupe
File Type: pdf
Why did Donald Trump attract a record number of white evangelical voters without unified supportand despite nontrivial antipathy from evangelical leaders? The editors and leading scholars that contribute to the timely volume The Evangelical Crackup? answer this question and provide a comprehensive assessment of the status of evangelicals and the Christian Right in the Republican coalition.The expected crackup with the Republican Party never happened. Each chapter in this cogent volume includes analyses of the 2016 election to explain whyand why that is critical. Chapters examine policy priorities, legal advocacy, and evangelical loyalty to the Republican Party rhetoric, social networks, and evangelical elite influence and the political implications of movements within evangelicalism, such as young evangelicals, Hispanics, and the Emergent Church movement.Contributors include Daniel Bennett, Mark Brockway, Ryan P. Burge, Brian R. Calfano, Jeremy Castle, Kimberly Conger, Daniel A. Cox, Kevin den Dulk, Sarah Allen Gershon, Tobin Grant, Robert P. Jones, Geoffrey Layman, Andrew R. Lewis, Ronald J. McGauvran, Joshua Mitchell, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, Jacob R. Neiheisel, Elizabeth Oldmixon, Adrian D. Pantoja, David Searcy, Anand Edward Sokhey, J. Benjamin Taylor, Robert Wuthnow, and the editors
Author: Peter Hitchens
File Type: pdf
The old rules of Left and Right no longer apply. Left-wingers keenly support the bombing of Belgrade and the invasion of Iraq. Tories warn against the threat to civil liberties. The progressive BBC gives a fair hearing to the Conservative Party. Socialist journalists turn and rend Ken Livingstone. In democratic London, merely expressing your opinion can be seriously bad for your career, while in autocratic Moscow you can say pretty much what you like, provided you dont do anything about it. The tearing down of the old Iron Curtain may have allowed markets to sweep into the old Warsaw Pact lands - but it has also permitted revolutionary left-wing ideas to spread like a bacillus through the West. Nobody really cares any more about the old shibboleths of state ownership. The British Labour Party - which opposed nuclear weapons, supposedly on principle, when they mattered - is quite happy to spend billions on the same weapons now that they are unnecessary. The supposed right is as confused and nonsensical as the supposed left. Neo-conservatives run vast budget deficits at home and engage in utopian adventures abroad. They are actively opposed to old conservative ideas such as national sovereignty, strong families and rigorous selective education, and happy to bend the knee to left-wing orthodoxies from man-made global warming to egalitarianism. The political compass is broken, its needle swinging wildly and meaninglessly. The existing political parties have converged, or perhaps simply retreated in confusion on to what looked like safe territory, the often tried and repeated failed policies of Fabian Social Democracy, now worsened by 1960s sexual and social radicalism. They are no longer adversaries, their personnel are interchangeable and they struggle to find ways to distinguish themselves from each other. They simply ignore - or deny - huge areas of human experience and concern from mass immigration to the collapse of marriage and the disappearance of order and rigour in the state education system. Yet conventional wisdom continues to insist that formal politics can and should continue as it did before - and that an exasperated and increasingly angry electorate should place its hopes in a mere change of personnel at the next election. Peter Hitchens argues for the re-establishment of proper adversary politics and the rediscovery of principle. **Review [Hitchens] writes with much of the verve and brio of his elder brother [Christopher Hitchens] and with a greater regard for detail and accuracy. Anthony Howard, New Statesman Hitchens is in general exhilaratingly good when attacking the hypocrisies and stupidities of specific individuals... The best parts of the book are the vivid (and self-ironical) scenes of foreign reporting. Steven Poole, The Guardian About the Author Peter Hitchens is a British journalist, author and broadcaster. He witnessed most of the final scenes of the Cold War, and was a resident correspondent in the Soviet capital and in Washington DC. He frequently revisits both Russia and the USA. He currently writes for the Mail on Sunday, where he is a columnist and occasional foreign correspondent, reporting most recently from Iran, North Korea, Burma, The Congo and China.