Культурология
Различные книги в жанре КультурологияSix Ethics: A Rights-Based Approach to Establishing an Objective Common Morality
New Book Addresses Crippling Nature of Irrational Belief in the 21st Century<br><br>Christian Volz's Six Ethics takes both a philosophical and a pragmatic approach to addressing the dangers posed by irrational belief, and proposes a framework for creating a legal and social environment where rationality and spirituality might be reconciled.<br><br>In the 21st century, as international business continues to expand and the Internet and other means of global communications, as well as immigration, continue to bring people from different cultures and groups into contact, individuals need to be prepared to live side-by-side with others who have very different belief systems as well as be self-aware of the sources and principles of their own beliefs. Six Ethics: A Rights-Based Approach to Establishing an Objective Common Morality is the result of author Christian Volz's quest to understand the nature of belief and the relationship of beliefs and ethics in the face of 21st century issues.<br><br>Volz explains that the late nineteenth century intellectual revolution known as modernism is characterized by the maturing of the concepts of human rights, civil liberties, personal freedoms and, most especially, the constituents of essential human dignity. This new, modern approach has defined these concepts based on science and the cumulative history of human ethics guided by reason and compassion, and has largely enshrined them in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.<br><br>"I believe," Volz says, "that there is a dangerous underestimation of the peril posed to the world's democratic societies and institutions by religious radicals and fundamentalists, of all stripes, who believe that they retain the moral authority to selectively edit these evolved concepts of human rights and dignity. Many conservative people of faith continue to reject science and reason as the basis whereby we measure, evaluate, and make decisions about the material world and the temporal relations among human beings, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of our planet. If we are to effectively counter these religious, authoritarian-conservative movements, it is helpful to understand how we got to where we are."<br><br>Citing numerous contemporary and historical sources—from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville—Six Ethics addresses a broad range of topics, interrelated by their essential relationship to human dignity and rights. These include: the origins and development of ethical, religious and scientific thought; how otherwise rational people can be so easily seduced to embrace irrational beliefs and the societal consequences when they do so; and why anyone believes anything. In doing so, he touches on many fields of study, including a consideration of genetic, psychological, sociological and political influences upon how people think within the context of a group.<br><br>Six Ethics proposes what Volz refers to as Rational Progressivism as a framework within which societies might advance toward genuine equality and true freedom of conscience for a diverse population.
Capital
'A terrific portrait of Delhi right now' SALMAN RUSHDIE
'An astonishing tour de force by a major writer at the peak of his powers' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
WINNER OF THE RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI AWARD FOR LITERARY REPORTAGE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2015
When Rana Dasgupta arrived in Delhi at the turn of the twenty-first century, he had no intention of staying for long, but the city beguiled him – he 'fell in love and in hate with it' – and fifteen years later, Delhi is still his home.
Over these fifteen years, he has watched as the tumult of destruction and creation which accompanies India's economic boom transformed the face of the city. In Capital, he explores the life-changing consequences for Delhi's people, meeting with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts. These encounters, interwoven with over a century of history, plunge us into Delhi's intoxicating, sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation – one that has repercussions not only for India, but for everybody's future.
Civil Religion in Modern Political Philosophy
Inspired by Machiavelli, modern philosophers held that the tension between the goals of biblical piety and the goals of political life needed to be resolved in favor of the political, and they attempted to recast and delimit traditional Christian teaching to serve and stabilize political life accordingly. This volume examines the arguments of those thinkers who worked to remake Christianity into a civil religion in the early modern and modern periods. Beginning with Machiavelli and continuing through to Alexis de Tocqueville, the essays in this collection explain in detail the ways in which these philosophers used religious and secular writing to build a civil religion in the West. Early chapters examine topics such as Machiavelli’s comparisons of Christianity with Roman religion, Francis Bacon’s cherry-picking of Christian doctrines in the service of scientific innovation, and Spinoza’s attempt to replace long-held superstitions with newer, “progressive” ones. Other essays probe the scripture-based, anti-Christian argument that religion must be subordinate to politics espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, both of whom championed reason over divine authority. Crucially, the book also includes a study of civil religion in America, with chapters on John Locke, Montesquieu, and the American Founders illuminating the relationships among religious and civil history, acts, and authority. The last chapter is an examination of Tocqueville’s account of civil religion and the American regime Detailed, thought-provoking, and based on the careful study of original texts, this survey of religion and politics in the West will appeal to scholars in the history of political philosophy, political theory, and American political thought.
I'm No Hero
Henry Friedman was robbed of his adolescence by the monstrous evil that annihilated millions of European Jews and changed forever the lives of those who survived. When the Nazis overran their home town near the Polish-Ukrainian border, the Friedman family was saved by Ukrainian Christians who had worked at their farm. Henry, his mother, his younger brother, and a young schoolteacher�who had been hired by his father when Jews were forbidden to attend school�were hidden in a loft over the animal stalls at a neighbor�s farm; his father hid in another hayloft half a mile away.When the family was liberated by the Russians after eighteen months in hiding, Henry, at age fifteen, was emaciated and too weak to walk. The Friedmans eventually made their way to a displaced persons camp in Austria where Henry learned quickly to wheel and deal, seducing women of various ages and nationalities and mastering the intricacies of dealing in the black market. In I�m No Hero, he confronts with unblinking honesty the pain, the shame, and the bizarre comedy of his passage to adulthood.The family came to Seattle in 1949, where Henry Friedman has made his home ever since. In 1988 he returned with his wife to Brody and Suchowola, where he succeeded in finding Julia Symchuk, who, as a young girl, had warned his father that the Gestapo was looking for him, and whose family had hidden the Friedmans in their loft. The following year he was able to bring Julia to Seattle for a triumphal visit, where she was honored in many ways, although, as Friedman writes, �in her own country she had never been honored with anything except hard work.�Like many other survivors, Henry Friedman has found it difficult to confront his past. Like others, too, he has felt the obligation to bear witness. Now retired, he devotes much of his time to telling his story, which he believes is a message of hope, to thousands of schoolchildren throughout the Pacific Northwest. He has received national recognition for his role in establishing the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and as a founder of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.
Theater of Acculturation
Generations of tourists visiting Rome have ventured into the small section between the Tiber River and the Capitoline Hill whose narrow, dark streets lead to the charming Fountain of the Tortoises, the brooding mass of the Palazzo Cenci, and some of the best restaurants in the city. This was the site of the Ghetto, within whose walls the Jews of Rome were compelled to live from 1555 until 1870. Kenneth Stow, leading authority on Italian Jews, probes Jewish life in Rome in the early years of the Ghetto.Jews had been residents of Rome since before the days of Julius Caesar, but the 16th century brought great challenges to their identity and survival in the form of Ghettoization. Intended to expedite conversion and cultural dissolution, the Ghetto in fact had an opposite effect. The Jews of Rome developed a subculture, or microculture, that ensured continuity. In particular, they developed a remarkably effective legal network of rabbinic notaries, who drew public documents such as contracts, took testimony, and arranged for disputes to go to arbitration. The ability to settle disputes relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other internal matters gave Jews the illusion that they, rather than the papal vicar, were running their own affairs.Stow applies his concept of �social theater� to illuminate the role-playing that Jews adopted as a means of survival within the dominant Christian environment. He also touches briefly on Jewish culture in post-Emancipation Rome, elsewhere in Europe, and in America, and points the way toward a comparison with the acculturational strategies of other minorities, especially African Americans.
Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity
Generations of scholars have debated the influence of Greco-Roman culture on Jewish society and the degree of its impact on Jewish material culture and religious practice in Palestine and the Diaspora of antiquity. Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity examines this phenomenon from the aftermath of Alexander�s conquest to the Byzantine era, offering a balanced view of the literary, epigraphical, and archeological evidence attesting to the process of Hellenization in Jewish life and its impact on several aspects of Judaism as we know it today.Lee Levine approaches this broad subject in three essays, each focusing on diverse issues in Jewish culture: Jerusalem at the end of the Second Temple period, rabbinic tradition, and the ancient synagogue. With his comprehensive and thorough knowledge of the intricate dynamics of the Jewish and Greco-Roman societies, the author demonstrates the complexities of Hellenization and its role in shaping many aspects of Jewish life�economic, social, political, cultural, and religious. He argues against oversimplification and encourages a more nuanced view, whereby the Jews of antiquity survived and prospered, despite the social and political upheavals of this era, emerging as perpetuators of their own Jewish traditions while open to change from the outside world.
Zakhor
“Mr. Yerushalmi’s previous writings . . . established him as one of the Jewish community’s most important historians. His latest book should establish him as one of its most important critics. Zakhor is historical thinking of a very high order – mature speculation based on massive scholarship.” – New York Times Book Review
Language and Human Behavior
“What this book proposes to do,” writes Derek Bickerton, “is to stand the conventional wisdom of the behavioral sciences on its head: instead of the human species growing clever enough to invent language, it will view that species as blundering into language and, as a direct result of that, becoming clever.” According to Bickerton, the behavioral sciences have failed to give an adequate account of human nature at least partly because of the conjunction and mutual reinforcement of two widespread beliefs: that language is simply a means of communication and that human intelligence is the result of the rapid growth and unusual size of human brains.Bickerton argues that each of the properties distinguishing human intelligence and consciousness from that of other animals can be shown to derive straightforwardly from properties of language. In essence, language arose as a representational system, not a means of communication or a skill, and not a product of culture but an evolutionary adaptation.The author stresses the necessity of viewing intelligence in evolutionary terms, seeing it not as problem solving but as a way of maintaining homeostasis—the preservation of those conditions most favorable to an organism, the optimal achievable conditions for survival and well-being. Nonhumans practice what he calls “on-line thinking” to maintain homeostasis, but only humans can employ off-line thinking: “only humans can assemble fragments of information to form a pattern that they can later act upon without having to wait on that great but unpunctual teacher, experience.”The term protolanguage is used to describe the stringing together of symbols that prehuman hominids employed. “It did not allow them to turn today’s imagination into tomorrow’s fact. But it is just this power to transform imagination into fact that distinguishes human behavior from that of our ancestral species, and indeed from that of all other species. It is exactly what enables us to change our behavior, or invent vast ranges of new behavior, practically overnight, with no concomitant genetic changes.” Language and Human Behavior should be of interest to anyone in the behavioral and evolutionary sciences and to all those concerned with the role of language in human behavior.
To Sing with Pigs Is Human
Melanesia has been the research focus of some of anthropology�s legendary names. In the best tradition of Melanesian scholarship, Jane Goodale writes here of the Kaulong who live in the deep forests of New Britain, an island in the vast territory of Papua New Guinea. Even in the last half of the twentieth century, the Kaulong�s contact with the outside world through government patrols and missionaries has been minimal. Their story enhances our understanding of Melanesia and adds new and significant material to the comparison of Oceanic cultures and societies.In the course of her fieldwork with them, Goodale recognized that everything of importance to the Kaulong–every event, every relationship, every transaction–was rooted in their constant quest for recognition as human beings. She addresses here questions central to Kaulong society: What is it that makes an individual human? How is humanity, or personhood, achieved and maintained?In their consuming concern with their status as human beings, the Kaulong mark progress on a continuum from nonhuman (animal-like) to the most respected level of humanity–the political Big Men and Big Women. Knowledge is the key to movement along the continuum, and acquiring, displaying and defending knowledge are at the heart of social interaction. At all-night �singsings,� individuals compete through song in their knowledge of people, places, and many other aspects of their forested world. The sacrifice of pigs and distribution of pork to guests completes the ceremonial display and defense of knowledge and personhood.While To Sing with Pigs will be welcomed by anthropologists and area specialists, it will appeal on a broader level to anyone interested in this still remote part of the world. Goodale's analysis of songs and their ritual context adds unusual depth to the ethnography. Fascinating field photographs and readable text prove again that anthropology can be both scholarly and lively.