August 2005
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Teaching, Language & ReferenceNovember 2023Pluriversal sovereignty and the state
Imperial encounters in Sri Lanka
by Ajay Parasram
Presenting a case study of British colonial rule and its aftermath in Sri Lanka, this book explores the collision of competing ontologies in the making of the modern state system. It develops a decolonial theoretical framework informed by the idea of a 'pluriverse' to reveal the empirical and imperial avenues through which the idea of the modern/colonial state became normalised in Ceylon. The book contributes to three areas of scholarly discussion: the politics of ontology as related to sovereignty, postcolonial and decolonial international relations, and globalisation through the colonial encounter. It argues that in order to understand contemporary postcolonial crises rooted in territorial conflicts, we must first understand the historical and conceptual processes that depoliticised and universalised the norm of 'total territorial rule' rather than treating the modern state as a territorial and developmental inevitability.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Study on Literary Anthropology in Shen Congwen's Works
by He Xiaoping
This book takes the homogeneous, isomorphic, and mutual relationship of Shen Congwen's aesthetic thoughts, artistic thoughts and cultural anthropological thoughts as the starting point, and then explores the anthropological characteristics of Shen Congwen's works from the perspective of anthropological ontology, methodology and axiology. The following analyses focusing on the expression form, ideological root, and value and significance to literary creation and cultural construction are an extended study of Shen Congwen's cultural thought, aesthetic thought, artistic creation thought and value.
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Children's & YAAugust 2020Cryptos
by Poznanski, Ursula
Where do we go when Nowhere is the only destination left? Kerrybrook is Jana‘s favourite virtual escape. An idyllic fishing village with beautiful nature and, every now and then, a breeze of fresh air from the nearby sea. Jana, is this world‘s designer and person in power, she’s satisfied with her masterpiece. Best job so far. Until one day, a dead body is found, in both, ’Virtual Reality‘ and the real world. In times of climate change, VR is the only safe place for humankind. That‘s why Jana needs to solve the crime, she’s responsible for stopping the destruction. • CliFi Thriller (Climate Fiction): Climate change & virtual reality • For fans of Black Mirror (Netflix) • All age readers • Strong, female protagonist • Highly relevant topic WHITE RAVENS recommendation (2021): "In the not too distant future, the world is an inhospitable place: droughts, storms, floods. That’s why world designers construct »alternative realities«, such as landscapes populated by dinosaurs, life at court in the Middle Ages, and surfing and chilling out on a beach. People can switch between these worlds at will and, when they die there, they are not truly dead; instead, they merely return to the »real world« – same as at night when they sleep. Then they are reunited with their body, which is lying inside a capsule. In »Cryptos«, Ursula Poznanski pulls out all the stops of storytelling: She embeds numerous references to human and intellectual history in an action-packed and extremely suspenseful thriller plot. In the process, she raises central existential and ontological questions that result from the interplay between the real and the virtual worlds. This complex dystopian novel is narrated in such an enjoyable way that readers will hardly notice their brains going into overdrive as they devour it."
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2018An Introduction to Philosophy of Library Science
by Tang Liguang
The mission of philosophy is to lead the trend of the times and history. The theoretical construction of philosophy of library science will also assume the historical responsibility of leading the development of contemporary library science theory and practice. This book takes Marx's practical materialism as the theoretical foundation, and examines the thinking mode and main issues of library philosophy, the view of practice and materialism, library dialectics, the labor of librarians and their alienation, the philosophical cultivation and creation of librarians, and such major theoretical issues including various contemporary issues, to a certain extent. Based on this, a theoretical framework based on practical materialism was attempted. This book is a comprehensive work written by the author on the basis of his works Study on Axiology of Library, Study on Ontology of Library,and Study on Epistemology of Library. It is suitable for all who care about library existence and development to read.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2024The anthropology of ambiguity
Theory, praxis and critique
by Mahnaz Alimardanian, Timothy Heffernan
This volume puts ambiguity and its generative power at the centre of analytical attention. Rather than being cast negatively as a source of confusion, bewilderment or as a dangerous portent, ambiguity is held as the source of the dynamic between knowledge and experience and of certainty amid uncertainty. It positions human life between the realms of mystery and mastery where ambiguity is understood as the experience and expression of life and part of navigating the human condition. In turn, the tension between the tradition in anthropology of examining cultural certitudes through ethnographic description and efforts to challenge dominant expressions of incertitude are explored. Each chapter presents ethnographic accounts of how people engage individually and collectively with the self, the other, human-made institutions and the more-than-human to navigate ambiguity in a world affected by viral contagion, climate change, economic instability, labour precarity and (geo)political tension.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2022Voices from the underworld
by Fabian Graham, Yangwen Zheng, Richard Madsen
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2022Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan
The cult of the Two Grand Elders
by Fabian Graham
In Singapore and Malaysia, the inversion of Chinese Underworld traditions has meant that Underworld demons are now amongst the most commonly venerated deities in statue form, channelled through their spirit mediums, tang-ki. The Chinese Underworld and its sub-hells are populated by a bureaucracy drawn from the Buddhist, Taoist and vernacular pantheons. Under the watchful eye of Hell's 'enforcers', the lower echelons of demon soldiers impose post-mortal punishments on the souls of the recently deceased for moral transgressions committed during their prior incarnations. Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan offers an ethnography of contemporary Chinese Underworld traditions, where night-time cemetery rituals assist the souls of the dead, exorcised spirits are imprisoned in Guinness bottles, and malicious foetus ghosts are enlisted to strengthen a temple's spirit army. Understanding the religious divergences between Singapore and Malaysia (and their counterparts in Taiwan) through an analysis of socio-political and historical events, Fabian Graham challenges common assumptions about the nature and scope of Chinese vernacular religious beliefs and practices. Graham's innovative approach to alterity allows the reader to listen to first-person dialogues between the author and channelled Underworld deities. Through its alternative methodological and narrative stance, the book intervenes in debates on the interrelation between sociocultural and spiritual worlds, and promotes the destigmatisation of spirit possession and discarnate phenomena in the future study of mystical and religious traditions.
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Literature & Literary StudiesOctober 2023
Spectral Dickens
The uncanny forms of novelistic characterization
by Alexander Bove
Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens' illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in nineteenth-century visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.
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SociologyNovember 2016Death and security
Memory and mortality at the bombsite
by Charlotte Heath-Kelly. Series edited by Peter Lawler, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet
Making a bold intervention into critical security studies literature, this book explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security. It considers the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman alongside literature from the sociology of death, before undertaking a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Centre in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. By interviewing the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, the book shows that practices of memorialisation are a retrospective security endeavour - they conceal and re-narrate the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority. The book will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of critical security studies, memory studies and international politics.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2009Tensions in the struggle for sexual minority rights in Europe
Que(e)rying political practices
by Nico Beger
Tensions in the struggle for sexual minority rights in Europe, newly available in paperback, is the first queer and poststructuralist reading of political rights concepts in the specific European transnational context. In the last thirty years Europe has seen the rise of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movements fighting nationally and transnationally for participation rights in society. In addition academic theorists have increasingly paid attention to the epistemological and ontological roles gender and sexuality play in modern politics. However, in the political process of arguing for rights the centrality of those roles is mostly hidden from view in official institutional and movement discourses. This book investigates the conceptual themes of lesbian, gay and transgender rights and lobby politics in Europe and their open and hidden relations to binary and hierarchical orders of dominance. It contributes to an understanding of the conditions upon which politics of inclusion, participation, social justice and equality rest and why struggles for sexual minority rights have been so difficult and slow. It illuminates how the paradigms of political discourse constitute, consolidate and contest the meaning and cultural significance of gender and sexuality on modern, democratic, capitalist European societies. ;
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EducationOntologies for Developing Things
Making Health Care Futures Through Technology
by Jensen, C. B.
Casper Bruun Jensen is one of the most intellectually accomplished and creative theorists of second-generation Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as one of the most active and productive researchers in the field. In Ontologies for Developing Things, he offers a series of highly original delineations and vigorous defenses of recent developments--or, as he calls them “dispositions”--in STS (ontological, performative, pragmatist, and so forth) through a series of parallel narrations of his own onsite studies of the introduction of new medical-information technologies in Denmark and Canada. Ontologies for Developing Things is a work of unflagging intelligence and intellectual energy, spilling over with new ideas, surprising angles, sharp perceptions and interesting juxtapositions, and written with correspondingly attractive punch and force. Readers interested in information technologies, contemporary developments in social studies of science, and related cultural and political theory will find the book immensely engaging and endlessly useful. - Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Duke University and Brown University [author of Scandalous Knowledge: Science Truth and the Human and/or Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion]
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Humanities & Social SciencesIlluminationist Philosophy
(Ishragh)
by Hassan Mo'allemi, PhD
Philosophy of Ishraq is the intermediate stage between the Peripatetic (Masha) philosophy and transcendentalism. It is both reformation and groundwork; it reforms the Masha philosophy and lays the groundwork for the transcendentalism. Ishraq Philosophy just like its preceding philosophies aims at the presentation of an orderly cosmos with its hierarchies in which every creature has its own determined sphere of existence. It specifically endeavors to give an account of the place of Man in this system and does so through methods of Ishraq and logical reasoning. The impressionability of Islamic philosophies from the Quran and the tradition of the twelve inerrant Imams, is in full show in the Ishraq philosophy; even the evolution of the Islamic philosophy is easily discernable in it. The book is organized into four chapters. The following topics are consecutively addressed: The Ishraq Philosophy, The critics of the Sheikh al'Ishraq on Masha Philosophy, epistemology of them Ishraq Philosophy, Ontology of the Ishraq Philosophy. At the end of each chapter there are summaries, reviews and questions on the themes explored.
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February 2020
Being Unfolded
Edith Stein on the Meaning of Being
by Thomas Gricoski, William Desmond
Being Unfolded responds to the question, ‘What is the meaning of being for Edith Stein.’ In Finite and Eternal Being Stein tentatively concludes that ‘being is the unfolding of meaning.’ Neither Stein nor her commentators have elaborated much on this suggestive phrase. Thomas Gricoski argues that Stein’s mature metaphysical project can be developed into an ‘ontology of unfolding.’ The differentiating factor of this ontology is its resistance to both existentialism and essentialism. The ‘ontology of unfolding’ is irreducibly relational. Being Unfolded proceeds by testing a relational hypothesis against Stein’s theory of the modes of being (actual, essential, and mental being). From the phenomenological perspective, Gricoski examines Stein’s theory of the relation of consciousness and being. From the scholastic perspective, he examines Stein’s account of the relation of essence and existence in material being, living being, and human being. And from both perspectives he considers the relation of divine being to actual being and their essences. This book is limited to Stein’s theory of the meaning of being, without making an explicit confrontation with Heidegger. It offers two primary contributions to Stein studies: a systematic analysis of Stein’s modes of being, especially essential being, and an exposition and expansion of her overlooked concept of unfolding. Being Unfolded also contributes to the broader field of contemporary metaphysics by developing Stein’s theory of being as an experiment in fundamental ontology. While other relational ontologies focus on relations between beings, this exploration of unfolding examines being’s inner self-relationality.
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Literature & Literary StudiesSeptember 2021Jardin-cendre
by Hugues Corriveau
Jardin-cendre est un recueil fort, maîtrisé, dans lequel le poète revient avec lucidité sur les deuils de son existence : ceux de l’enfance, de ses parents, de son frère, de ses amis.es, de ses espoirs et, enfin, de sa propre vie. L’écriture concise, où chaque vers semble découpé au couteau, aborde l’émotion avec délicatesse et retenue. Un livre marquant habité d’une grande profondeur de l’être. - A strong and masterful book of poems in which the poet returns with lucidity to the mourning of his existence: those of his childhood, his parents, his brother, his friends, his hopes and, finally, his own life. The concise writing, where each verse seems to be cut with a knife, approaches the emotion with delicacy and restraint. A striking book inhabited by a great depth of being. GRAND PRIX QUÉBECOR DU FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE LA POÉSIE
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EducationRadical Constructivism
A Relativist Epistemic Approach to Science Education
by Quale, A.
This book addresses the topic of science education, from the viewpoint of the theory of radical constructivism. It takes a closer look at the "image of science" that is projected, in the presentation of it to students and to the general public. This leads into a broad discussion of the notions of learning and knowing, specifically referring to issues of epistemology (the nature of scientific knowledge) and ontology (what science can tell us about the world), and the implications of these issues for science education. In particular, a detailed analysis is given of the dichotomy of relativism vs. realism, and its consequences for the concept of truth in science. The scope of the book may be inferred by its table of contents: 1. What is science? 2. The role of technology and mathematics 3. Constructivism – a theory of learning and knowing 4. Reality, truth and viability 5. The metaphor of truth 6. The story of science 7. The game of prediction and retrodiction 8. Towards a radical-constructivist philosophy of physics 9. Ontological aspects of radical constructivism 10. The what and why of science education The book is targeted at philosophers of science, science educators at university and college level, and science teachers in secondary school.
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July 2018
Human Embryos, Human Beings: A Scientific and Philosophical Approach
A Scientific and Philosophical Approach
by Samuel B. Condic, Maureen L. Condic
The overall purpose of Human Embryos, Human Beings is to establish the ontological status of the human embryo, in light of the most recent biological evidence. The thesis of the book is that sound philosophical reasoning and the available scientific evidence support the claim that a human being is present from the moment of fertilization onward (the “immediate hominization” view) and does not support the contrary claim that a human being appears only after a time following fertilization (the “delayed hominization” view). Included in the scope of this argument is an examination of several long-standing philosophical arguments claiming that immediate hominization is false; a detailed examination of several arguments claiming that though immediate hominization is possible, both evidence and argument best support the delayed hominization view or some alternate view; and an examination of several cases where natural defect or scientific manipulation make determining the ontological status of the embryo more difficult. The book also includes a presentation of hylomorphism, as this is the philosophical viewpoint employed by the authors to analyze the question. Human Embryos, Human Beings is based on the premise that philosophical and scientific approaches are not in conflict, with the most comprehensive understanding of human embryos being achieved by application of a rigorous hylomorphic philosophy to the best available scientific data. Often, one finds either a thorough and well-reasoned philosophical account or a detailed scientific account. This book makes a welcome addition to the field by integrating both of these needed elements into a single text.
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EducationAuthentic Science Revisited
In Praise of Diversity, Heterogeneity, Hybridity
by Roth, W.-M.
Since its appearance in 1995, Authentic School Science has been a resource for many teachers and schools to rethink and change what they are doing in and with their science classrooms. As others were trying to implement the kinds of learning environments that we had described, our own thinking and teaching praxis changed in part because of our dissatisfaction with our own understanding. Over the years, we have piloted ever-new ways of organizing science lessons to figure out what works and how both successful and not-so-successful ways of doing science education should be theorized. In this period, we developed a commitment to cultural-historical activity theory, which does not dichotomize individual and collective, social and material, embodied and cultural forms of knowing, and so on. It turns out now that the problem does not lie with the level of agreement between school science and laboratory science but with the levels of control, authority, mastery, and authorship that students are enabled to exercise. Thus, as this book shows, even field trips may deprive students of science authenticity on outdoor activities and even classroom-based science may provide opportunities for doing science in an authentic manner, that is, with high levels of control over the learning environment, authority, master, and authorship. Ultimately, our understanding of authenticity emphasizes its heterogeneous nature, which we propose to think in terms of a different ontology, an ontology of difference, which takes mixtures, heterogeneity, and hybridity as its starting point rather than as poor derivatives of self-same, pure entities including science, scientific concepts, and scientific practice. In Authentic Science Revisited, the authors offer a refreshing new approach to theorizing, thinking, and doing authentic science.
