Epistola publishing house is a family-owned company founded in 2009. We seek to provide quality reading with variety of themes to enrich the lives of young readers. Our books have distinctively educational purpose, inspiring discussion with parents, teachers or other children. In order to provide the best possible reading and achieve quality, we collaborate with renowned domestic and foreign authors.
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Singapore's largest independent publisher of fiction and non-fiction for all ages. Check out our latest catalogue here: July – December 2018 (PDF.)
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The book offers a novel lens to situate Europeanisation as violence - through institutions and technologies of development, cultural heritage, and borders, among others - by bringing South and East within a relational frame. Through four inter-related sections, it foregrounds Europeanisation as infrastructural violence and colonial asymmetries, slow violence and the construction of stratified subalternities, epistemic dispossession, and border epistemologies.
This volume collects and revises the key essays of Gunther Teubner, one of the world's leading sociologists of law. Written over the past twenty years, these essays examine the 'dark side' of functional differentiation and the prospects of societal constitutionalism as a possible remedy. Teubner's claim is that critical accounts of law and society require reformulation in the light of the sophisticated diagnoses of late modernity in the writings of Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida and select examples of modernist literature. Autopoiesis, deconstruction and other post-foundational epistemological and political realities compel us to confront the fact that fundamental democratic concepts such as law and justice can no longer be based on theories of stringent argumentation or analytical philosophy. We must now approach law in terms of contingency and self-subversion rather than in terms of logical consistency and rational coherence.
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— The seminal work reissued — A science and philosophy classic — On the occasion of the author's 80th birthday According to evolutionary epistemology, the fact that we can know the world is neither coincidence nor divine providence, but has a natural explanation. Thinking and cognition are achievements of the human brain. Our cognitive structures fit into our world because they have evolved in adaptation to this world. This fit is not ideal, but it is enough for survival under competition. Gerhard Vollmer was instrumental in developing evolutionary epistemology. In his standard work, he explains the achievements and failures of our cognitive apparatus.
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Since the mid-2000s, the harsh reality of call centre employment for a generation of young workers in Portugal has been impossible to ignore. With its endless rows of small cubicles, where human agents endure repetitive telephone conversations with abusive clients under invasive modes of technological surveillance, discipline and control, call centre work remains a striking symbol of labour precarity, a condition particularly associated with the neoliberal generational disenchantment that 'each generation does better than its predecessor'. This book describes the emergence of a regime of disciplined agency in the Portuguese call centre sector. Examining the ascendancy of call centres as icons of precarity in contemporary Portugal, this book argues that call centre labour constitutes a new form of commodification of the labouring subject. De Matos argues that call centres represent an advanced system of non-manual labour power exploitation, due to the underestimation of human creativity that lies at the centre of the regimented structures of call centre labour. Call centres can only guarantee profit maintenance, de Matos argues, through the commodification of the human agency arising from the operators' moral, relational and social embedded agentive linguistic interventions of creative improvisation, decision-making, problem-solving and ethical evaluation.
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This book provides a powerful diagnosis of why the global governance of science struggles in the face of emerging powers. Through unpacking critical events in China and India over the past twenty years, it demonstrates that the 'subversiveness' assumed in the two countries' rise in the life sciences reflects many of the regulatory challenges that are shared worldwide. It points to a decolonial imperative for science governance to be responsive and effective in a cosmopolitan world. By highlighting epistemic injustice within contemporary science, the book extends theories of decolonisation.
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This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann's systems theory, the book examines how each approaches epistemology. It opens by looking at twentieth-century epistemology, particularly the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It then moves on to discuss structuralism, poststructuralism, critical realism, the epistemological problematics of Foucault's writings and the dialectics of systems theory. This unique work takes a comparative look at structuralism and post-structuralism's epistemological theory with special reference to scientific reason. It also investigates Luhmann's works in epistemology. The aim is to explore whether the focal point for epistemology and the sciences remain that social and political interests actually form a concrete point of concern for the sciences as well.
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The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their 'War of Independence' and the Palestinians their 'Nakba', or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse. This book, available at last in paperback, explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel's war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin's central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine.
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"Lao Tzu", also known as "moral classics," Taoist classics, according to legend, is the late Spring and Autumn Chu people Lao Ji, all received a total of 81 chapters. Lao Tzu is a speech collection of Lao Tzu's philosophical thoughts, systematically expounding Lao Tzu's outlook on the universe, politics and epistemology. "Tao" is the basic category in which Lao Zi-Zhe does not think. Lao-tzu believes that "Tao" is the origin of the universe. It is independent of anything else and changes constantly and continuously. And "virtue" Is the concrete application of "Tao" in life, social and political life. The English translation of this book is one of the more influential English versions, with some revisions made in the book. The book is accompanied by the silk book Laozi unearthed in the Mawangdui Han Tomb of Changsha in 1972.
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Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans' relationship to the environment.
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Law plays an essential part in the conservation of wildlife and ecosystems. The study of wildlife and nature conservation law is an important component of a wide range of programmes of study including wildlife conservation, environmental management and environmental law. This book is a study and revision guide for students following such programmes. It contains 600 multiple choice questions (and answers) set at three levels - foundation, intermediate and advanced - and grouped into 10 major topic areas: 1. Principles of Wildlife and Nature Conservation Law 2. History of Wildlife and Nature Conservation Law 3. Species Protection and Exploitation I - EU and International Law 4. Species Protection and Exploitation II - National Laws 5. Protected Areas and Habitats I - EU and International Laws 6. Protected Areas and Habitats II - National Laws 7. Planning, Pollution, Restoration and Conservation Funding 8. Wildlife Trade, Animal Collections and Alien Species 9. Wildlife Law Enforcement and Penalties 10. Legal Texts This book has been produced in a convenient format so that it can be used at any time, in any place. It allows the reader to learn and revise the meaning of terms used in wildlife and nature conservation law and study the role of legislation at national, European Union (EU) and international level in the protection of individual species, habitats and landscapes. It uses examples from a wide variety of taxa, habitats and protected areas selected from a range of jurisdictions from the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia to Antarctica and the High Seas. Topics include the control of hunting, the conservation of trees and forests, the protection of National Parks and wilderness areas, wildlife trade and the organisations involved in the enforcement of wildlife laws. The structure of the book allows the study of one topic area at a time, progressing through simple questions to those that are more demanding. Some of the questions require students to use their knowledge to interpret information provided in the form of photographs and legal texts.
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Taking an interdisciplinary view and starting from plain social legal issues, this book discusses a series of important theoretical issues in China’s contemporary law and jurisprudence, such as legal circumvention and legal pluralism, legal localization, legal specialization, substitution between market and law, and jurisprudential methodology. In order to demonstrate the inseparable relationship between law and other disciplines, the author pioneered in introducing interdisciplinary thoughts to the jurisprudential study of China and integrated it into Chinese jurisprudence.
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Critical theory and Independent Living explores intersections between contemporary critical theory and disabled people's struggle for self-determination. The book highlights the affinities between the Independent Living movement and studies of epistemic injustice, biopower, and psychopower. It discusses in depth the activists' critical engagement with welfare-state paternalism, neoliberal marketisation, and familialism. This helps develop a pioneering comparison between various welfare regimes grounded in Independent Living advocacy. The book draws on the activism of disabled people from the European Network on Independent Living (ENIL) by developing case studies of the ENIL's campaigning for deinstitutionalisation and personal assistance. It is argued that this work helps rethink independence as a form of interdependence, and that this reframing is pivotal for critical theorising in the twenty-first century.
In The Path of the Law, Holmes discusses his personal philosophy on legal practice. The Common Law is a series of lectures that established Holmes's reputation as a witty and articulate writer.
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The mediated Arctic analyses the multiple relations between geography and cultural production that have long shaped - and are currently transforming - the circumpolar world. It explores how twenty-first-century cultural practitioners imagine and poeticise various elements of Arctic geography, and in doing so negotiate pressing environmental, (geo)political, and social concerns. From the plasmatic force of ice in Disney's Frozen films to the spatial vocabulary of circumpolar Indigenous hip hop, it addresses Arctic geographical imaginaries in a wide range of media, including literature, cinema, comic books, music videos, and cartographic art. The book brings together a plurality of voices from within and outside the circumpolar North, both in terms of the works analysed and in its own collaborative scholarly practice. The book bridges Indigenous and Southern mediations of the Arctic and combines different epistemologies to do justice to these imaginaries in their diversity.
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Law across imperial borders offers new perspectives on the complex legal connections between Britain's presence in Western China in the western frontier regions of Yunnan and Xinjiang, and the British colonies of Burma and India. Bringing together a transnational methodology with a social-legal focus, it demonstrates how inter-Asian mobility across frontiers shaped British authority in contested frontier regions of China. It examines the role of a range of actors who helped create, constitute and contest legal practice on the frontier-including consuls, indigenous elites and cultural mediators. The book will be of interest to historians of China, the British Empire in Asia and legal history.
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This volume brings together insights which look at the intersection of governance, culture and conflict resolution in India and the European Union. Two very different but connected epistemic, cultural and institutional settings, which have been divided by distance, colonialism and culture; yet have recently been brought closer together by ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, neoliberal state and development projects. The differences are obvious in terms of geography, culture, the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. This is the first book to compare contemporary Indian and European Union approaches to peace and is based on strong case studies and rigorous analysis. Postgraduate students, peace and conflict researchers, policy-makers and practitioners will benefit immensely from insights provided in this book. ;
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This book provides an accessible collection of translated legal sources through which the exploits of criminals and developments in the English criminal justice system (c.1215-1485) can be studied. Drawing on the wealth of archival material and an array of contemporary literary texts, it guides readers towards an understanding of prevailing notions of law and justice and expectations of the law and legal institutions. Tensions are shown emerging between theoretical ideals of justice and the practical realities of administering the law during an era profoundly affected by periodic bouts of war, political in-fighting, social dislocation and economic disaster. Introductions and notes provide both the specific and wider legal, social and political contexts in addition to offering an overview of the existing secondary literature and historiographical trends. This collection affords a valuable insight into the character of medieval governance as well as revealing the complex nexus of interests, attitudes and relationships prevailing in society during the later Middle Ages.
