Balancing practical and theoretical knowledge,Political Scienceis a comprehensive and jargon-free introduction to the fieldrs"s basic concepts and themes. This bestselling brief text uses diverse real-world examples to show students the value of avoiding simplifications in politics, the relevance of government, and the importance of participation. Written from Mike Roskinrs"s unique and engaging point-of-view,Political Scienceremains the best at providing the clear explanations, practical applications, and current examples that will welcome students to a vital field of study.

In recent years liberals have had much to say about the kinds of reasons that citizens should offer one another when they engage in public political debates about existing or proposed laws. One of the more notable claims that has been made by a number of prominent liberals is that citizens should not rely on religious reasons alone when persuading one another to support or oppose a given law or policy. Unsurprisingly, this claim is rejected by many religious citizens, including (...) those who are also committed to liberalism. In this paper I revisit that debate and ask whether liberal citizens have a moral obligation not to explain their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons alone. I suggest that for most (ordinary) citizens no such obligation exists and that individuals are entitled to explain their support for a specific law and to persuade others of the merits of that law on the basis of religious reasons alone (though there may be sound prudential reasons for not doing so). My argument is grounded in the claim that in most instances advocating laws on the basis of religious reasons alone is consistent with treating citizens with equal respect. However, I acknowledge an exception to that claim is to be found when using religious reasons to justify a law also implies that the state endorses those reasons. For this reason I argue that there is a moral obligation for some (publicly influential) citizens, and especially those who hold public office, to refrain from explaining their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons. I conclude by suggesting that this understanding of the role of religion in public political discourse and the obligations of liberal citizens is a better reflection of our experience of liberal citizenship than that given in some well-known accounts of liberalism. (shrink)

In the first part of this Chapter there is a brief review of my personal experiences with Dorion Cairns, including how and why I came to become his Literary Executor. The Chapter then provides a focused overview of his philosophical life and central ideas, especially his life-long reflections centered on unraveling and developing appropriate language to express adequately and accurately the Husserlian conception of phenomenological method, especially evident, Cairns shows, in Husserl’s exploration of what, in his Logical Investigations, he refers (...) to what the “cautiously shrewd person” does when faced with what is believed to be showed turns out to reveal the basic features of that method. Our already acquired familiarity, in short, especially when matters are vitally important, provides the soundest clue to understanding what Husserl frequently called the fundamental principle of phenomenological method.In his other writings—most unpublished in his lifetime—Cairns similarly elucidate others of Husserl’s central ideas, and beyond that extends his carefully worked out reflections to other issues, including important concepts in ethics and value theory. Of equal importance, I think, are Cairns remarkable translations of Husserl’s at time quite difficult texts, making what would otherwise be inaccessible to us. (shrink)

The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever since Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York destroyed itself at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or remote. Where the sculpture did have some material presence, it often took unexpected forms. As Rosalind Krauss says, “Rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow (...) corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.”However various these experiments may seem, they began with a single motive: to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself. To prevent this new work from becoming just another commodity in the market, artists either produced works so intangible or remote they could not be bought and sold, or disseminated their ideas in so many reproducible forms they could not be monopolized. The political nature of these motives also meant that much of this “sculpture” could be considered “public.” Changing the nature of the art meant changing the role of the audience as well, questioning the purely contemplative role the observer plays in the conventional setting of the museum or gallery. According to Henry Sayre, “As the avant-garde work of art denies its own autonomy, it implicates the audience in its workings.”3 As the aesthetic focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the relationship of the two goes beyond mere implication: the public becomes the sculpture. Artists, like Richard Serra, whose goal is to illuminate the material nature of space and the often tenuous materiality of the observer’s own body, have made “the viewer, in effect, the subject of the work,” to quote Douglas Crimp. Michael North is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets and is currently completing a study of the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. (shrink)

Lennan, Richard Review of: From north to south: Southern scholars engage With Edward Schillebeeckx, edited by Helen F. Bergin, OP, Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2013, pp. 163, epub, $31; hardback, $50; paperback, $37.95; pdf, $19.95.

A generation ago, Barber and Rifkin [The North Will Rise Again: Pensions, Politics and Power in 1980s (Beacon Press, Boston)] envisioned a new strategy for American Labor that would make extensive use of the capital in multi-employer and public pension plans. They argued that organized labor could influence how these funds were invested in order use this capital as both a weapon in struggles with recalcitrant management and as a tool to generate new union jobs. A number of union (...) officials took this advice seriously, to make labor-connected individuals and organizations were among the most determined and successful investor activists of the 1990s. It is, however, hard to find evidence that this activism has effectively met the goals of organized labor, leading to the ironic conclusion that the innovations of labor's investor activist will do more to assist the investment community than the American labor movement. (shrink)

The problem this article focuses on is not the isolated individual act of corruption, but the systematic, pervasive sub-system of corruption that can and has existed across historical periods, geographic areas, and political-economic systems. It is important to first understand how corrupt and unethical subsystems operate, particularly their network nature, in order to reform and change them while not becoming what we are trying to change. Twelve key system elements are considered that include case examples from Asia, Latin America, the (...) Mediterranean, and North America. A key operating feature of corruption sub-systems is that they are relatively stable networks rather than exceptional, independent, individual events. Drawing on social network, social movement, and action-learning theories, six theory building propositions concerning ethical corruption reform are developed. (shrink)

This chapter summarises the results of the Krajina Project, which was established in 1998 to investigate the archaeological remains, material culture and continuing ethnographic legacy of this distinctive late medieval/early modern frontier society. The project has focused on an area in the north-west corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina, between Kladuŝa and Bihać, known as the Bihaćka Krajina. This was one of the last districts in the region to be conquered by the Ottoman state, not falling to the sultan's forces until the (...) late sixteenth century — a territorial high water mark. The ethnographic evidence provides significant insights into the continuing legacy of the Ottoman-Hapsburg frontier in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.1 (2004) 155-157 [Access article in PDF] In Memoriam John F. Callahan John Francis Callahan, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Classics at Georgetown University, died 14 July 2003 after open-heart surgery performed 6 June and was buried with full military honors 17 September at Arlington National Cemetery. His funeral Mass at the Old Post Chapel was concelebrated by his old friend and former (...) colleague, Father Edward W. Bodnar, S.J., who had also concelebrated a memorial Mass in the Jesuit Chapel at Georgetown 5 August.John served on the Board of Editors and the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Ideas from 1970 until his death and was Vice-President from 1985. Throughout thirty-three years, during which he never missed a meeting until the last, he devoted unstinted time and energy to the affairs of the Journal, rigorously scrutinizing every problem, from matters of editorial policy through changes in leadership, location, and membership on the Editorial Board to proposals for expenditures and questions of format and style. He was a meticulous reader of manuscripts and applied the most stringent standards to his consideration of both content and modes of expression. No mistake in Greek typography escaped his vigilance. He brought to the annual meetings a distinctive elegance and an unusual sense of collegiality that derived both from his devotion to the Journal itself and from his long friendship with some of the older members of the Board, such as Paul Kristeller and Richard McKeon.John was a life member of the American Philological Association (since 1940) and served with distinction from 1976 to 1986 as its delegate to the International Federation of Classical Studies (FIEC), attending its meetings in Budapest and Helsinki. A scholar of exceptionally wide-ranging interests, he was best known for his studies of the concept of time in ancient philosophy and his critical edition of Gregory of Nyssa, De oratione dominica et De beatitudinibus, which he completed at Dumbarton Oaks after he retired from Georgetown.Born in Chicago 13 May 1912, he began the study of Greek and Latin at St. Ignatius Prep, where he was also introduced to opera, a lifelong passion, by one of his Jesuit teachers. He received the A.B. in 1933 and the A.M. in 1934 from Loyola University, Chicago, which on Founder's Day, 1965, honored him with an award for distinguished contributions to classical scholarship. He received the Ph.D. in 1940 from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Richard McKeon and Werner Jaeger, the two principal, very different influences on his approach to philosophy and philology. Henry Prescott and Carl Darling Buck were two other members of that fabulous generation of classical scholars at Chicago who made a lasting impression on him. His interest in Plautus, Greek and Roman linguistics, and comparative grammar continued throughout his life, contributing to what a former colleague at Dumbarton Oaks has described as an uncanny ability to penetrate beneath the surface of the classical languages, to "peer into their deep structure."John was a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, 1936-37, Instructor at Loyola University, 1937-40, Visiting Instructor, Harvard University, 1940-41, Assistant Professor, Loyola University, 1941-43, Associate Professor and Professor of Classics and Philosophy, Georgetown University, from 1946 until he retired in 1978, and Project Director at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, 1977-86. He served in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946, working in Naval Communications. He rarely [End Page 155] spoke of his part in breaking the Japanese code, but often referred to such comrades in arms as Sam Atkins and Richmond Lattimore, who like him returned to teaching as soon as World War II was over.John's teaching was enriched by his research, which was supported by a notable succession of fellowships, from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1947, the Ford Foundation for the Advancement of Education, 1953-54, the Fulbright Commission, 1953-55, the Guggenheim Foundation, 1958-59, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1967. He... (shrink)

Sometimes the dialogue which you read inkoans or the dialogue that takes place in the interview room doesn't make sense, it's not intended to make sense because it's not a rational, linear sequential thing, thisBodhidharma, whatever you think it is it's not. It's not an idea, it's not a concept, it's alive and it's working. How to see that, how to express that is what the dynamics of interview, ofDharma talk are about.

Higher education is increasingly unable to engage usefully with global emergencies, as its functions are repurposed for value. Discourses of entrepreneurship, impact and excellence, realised through competition and the market, mean that academics and students are increasingly alienated from themselves and their work. This book applies Marx’s concept of alienation to the realities of academic life in the Global North, in order to explore how the idea of public education is subsumed under the law of value. In a landscape (...) of increased commodification of higher education, the book explores the relationship between alienation and crisis, before analysing how academic knowledge, work, identity and life are themselves alienated. Finally, it argues that through indignant struggle, another world is possible, grounded in alternative forms of organising life and producing socially-useful knowledge, ultimately requiring the abolition of academic labour. This pioneering work will be of interest and value to all those working in the higher education sector, as well as those concerned with the rise of neoliberalism and marketization within universities. (shrink)

There are close affinities between James' theory of time as discussed in A Pluralistic Universe and the so-called epochal theory of time offered by Alfred North Whitehead. In this paper I examine James' theory and compare it with the views of Henri Bergson.

Tourism is one of the socio-economic trends that significantly contributes to the shift of the planetary system into the Anthropocene regime. At the same time, it is also a socio-cultural practice characteristic of the imperial mode of living, or consumerism. Thus, it is a form of commodification of nature, also a way of deepening social inequalities between a privileged minority of the global population and an exploited majority providing services to those whose socio-economic status allows them to travel for fun (...) and commoditised “experience”. This is not an inevitable activity, an activity in which environmental costs (carbon footprint, water footprint, energy consumption, and waste production) are necessary to ensure the basic resources of life. Tourism is therefore a form of luxury consumption. For any tourism model to be, not only, environmentally sustainable but also socially just, or at least acceptable, it would have to be accessible to all people. Ecotourism should also have to meet the criterion of a solidarity mode of living referred to as sufficiency. This is hardly conceivable in the climatic, demographic, and political regime of the Anthropocene. The latter is likely to be characterized by, among other things, mass migration of climate or environmental refugees on the one hand and climate apartheid of the states of the global North on the other. Ecotourism, accessible to an even smaller proportion of the world`s population than the current mass tourism, will thus be more likely to accentuate the social and environmental inequalities of which it is already a significant manifestation. Therefore, the question is whether the concept of ecotourism is not just another manifestation of greenwashing, i.e. an attempt to legitimize economic, social, and cultural activities that devastate the social and environmental environment. (shrink)

IntroductionIn recent years, there has been something of an explosion of news stories about various college and university campuses across North America experiencing heightened levels of political advocacy and political unrest. Visible examples include the “canceling” of invited speakers who have been deemed offensive by select student groups1 or petitions calling for the removal of instructors who have been accused of using harmful language.2 While these examples shed light on some of the more intense political debates circulating in higher (...) educational institutions, they are also newsworthy stories precisely because they suggest strong divisiveness in worldviews in action—the contradiction between different…. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibility that the development of the Chavín Horizon may have stimulated the expansion of one of the major central Andean language families, particularly Aymara, once spread much more widely and further north than today. Pre-Chavín cultures on the coast and in the highlands are reviewed and found to be unlikely sources of this expansion. While the Chavín Horizon may provide a possible source for the first expansion of Aymara, in terms of both its chronology and (...) widespread geographical impact, the ‘strong hypotheses’ proposed to explain the expansion are found to be unconvincing, particularly that linking the expansion to the adoption of maize as a staple. Other hypotheses emphasizing the role of religion and cosmopolitanism are proposed as possible alternatives. The current discussion is placed within the larger context of the history of Andean archaeology and historical linguistics and is viewed as an important step forward in resolving this long-standing problem. (shrink)

In a 1987 paper Thomas Morris introduced the phrase ‘perfect being theology’ and argued that in our efforts to construct an adequate theistic conception of God the most fruitful procedure will be for us to engage in reflection and dialogue about what a maximally perfect being would be like . To some of us that approach seems so obvious as to be without a significant alternative, but there are other approaches that have been followed – such as working up a (...) conception of God solely from the statements in a purported repository of divine revelation, such as the Bible . Another approach has been to study a wide range of religious scriptures to see what common conception of the divine can be found in them or most plausibly constructed from them. Those approaches, Morris said, have left us with something unsatisfactorily incomplete, static, and perhaps self-contradictory. Morris argued, a la St. Anselm and René Descartes, that the notion of a maximally perfect being is the north star that has been at the heart of the theistic traditions of the world, and it is that notion that we must explore and elaborate in order that we might construct an adequate conception of God. I agree. (shrink)

When the modern artist is seen as moving about in a nebulous area between two opposing worlds, that of life or immediate experience and that of art or established truth, I think it is appropriate to discuss this activity in terms of metaphor. Indeed the present concern for metaphor in the academic and artistic communities is but one of many reflections of our sense that life is a process of the gradual attainment of knowledge through experience, whether sensuous or intellectual. (...) Like our artists, we strive to create a picture of our world, yet that picture is never complete; for we continually pass on to new experiences and new images of reality. Not only do we grow and change but our world seems to change with us. Although the truths revealed through our art are founded in our experience, they seem more permanent and public than the acts of discovery leading to them. A principle once established and integrated with a body of other established truths enters into recorded history perhaps to be revered, disputed, or reinterpreted, but nevertheless to remain. The individual experience or discovery, however, passes; with the individual, only the sense of the continuing search yields personal identity. In a changing world, metaphor renders the truth of experience as the truth of knowledge, for it is the means of passing from individual immediacy to an established public world; the new must be linked to the old, and the experience of any individual must be connected with that of his society. Excluding the possibility of the creation of entirely new worlds and the resultant transformation of all personal identities, acts of genius or dramatic breakthroughs in fields of study can affect our present world order only if they are joined to it by means of a powerful metaphor. Indeed establishing the metaphoric bridge itself may be considered the act of genius, and the entry into new areas of knowledge is its consequence. Richard Shiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Seeing Cézanne" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation". (shrink)

The Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have bequeathed to the world a rich religious and cultural heritage which has been enormously influential through the centuries up to the present. While this is easily evident in the modern practices of these monotheisms, it is also profoundly present in the development of their diverse intellectual traditions with theological and philosophical insights and analyses seeking to understand and explain the nature of the presence of the divine to human beings. The present collection of essays (...) by a wide array of North American scholars provides a dozen studies of language, discourse, debate, and reasoning with a focus on theological and philosophical issues central to these three traditions that commonly call Abraham their human and/or spiritual father. Collectively these essays represent a dialogue among those who work at crossroads of theology, philosophy, history, language, and religion. Their dialogue adds to the growing library of works that seek to highlight collaboration and common ground between these religious and philosophical traditions. The dialogue is multi-directional, taking place within various religions and philosophical perspectives, as well as between religion, theology, and philosophy. It is also multi-purpose in that it seeks to transcend the mere theoretical, and to reveal the concrete; the thinkers, philosophers, and theologians discussed in these essays were deeply concerned with mutual understanding and peaceful co-existence, a goal that has become even more desirable in this post-9/11 world. (shrink)

This volume insists that, if we are to properly face the challenges of the coming century, we need to re-examine international politics and development through the prism of ethics and morality. International relations must now contend with a widening circle of participants reflecting the diversity and unevenness of status, memory, gender, race, culture and class. Contributors to this volume challenge North America's privileged position in world politics, suggest initiatives for improving the quality of human existence in tangible ways, and (...) critique the conventional wisdom on how we think we can create peace and justice. Re-Framing the International shows that, when we develop projects for world reform, we must remember that the most basic prevailing assumptions of modern law, politics, and culture are by no means as obvious, natural, or progressive as we formerly thought. (shrink)

Writers presenting Buddhism to European and North American audiences have often availed themselves of philosophical terminology from modern traditions to convey presumably less familiar ideas coming from various classical and medieval Asian settings. Since the Buddha and many philosophers who developed his ideas seem to have stressed the importance of practice over theory, Buddhism is frequently described as practical or even pragmatic in its orientation. Since there have been few unpleasant clashes between traditional Buddhist beliefs and the findings of (...) modern science, and nothing that would compare in importance to the confrontations between Darwinians and Creationists, many Buddhist apologists have been able to get away with characterizing theirs as a religion that is scientific in spirit; many Buddhists, especially Therav ¯. (shrink)

Philosophy was born in China in the 6th century, in the person of Confucius. But to properly understand this beginning and its development, we need to recall the beginning of the Zhou dynasty in the 11th century BC. Animated by a vision of the Mandate of Heaven for their rule, the Zhou rulers initiated and maintained a dynasty in north China aimed at achieving a civilized life for all human beings on earth. After a brief sketch of this background, (...) Richard Gotshalk attempts an exposition of the six major figures who gave shape to the early Chinese tradition of philosophy: Confucius, Mo-zi, Lao-zi, Mencius, Zhuang-zi, and Xun-zi. Presenting the thought of each separately, Gotshalk concludes the work by drawing together some of the basic themes and emphases which mark the early Chinese realization of philosophical thought and that distinguishes philosophy in its beginnings in China from philosophy in its beginnings in India and Greece. (shrink)

Apuleius of Madauros, writing in the latter half of the second century CE in Roman North Africa, is best known to us today for his Latin fiction, the Metamorphoses aka The Golden Ass, about a man who turned into a donkey and back again. However, he was also a Platonic philosopher, who, even though many of his writings are lost, wrote a range of rhetorical and philosophical works which survive to this day. This book examines these works to reveal (...) how Apuleius' Platonism is a result of his 'impersonation of philosophy', that is, a rhetorically powerful methodological tool that allows him to 'speak' on behalf of Plato and his philosophy. This book is the first exploration of the full scope of his idiosyncratic brand of Platonism across his multifarious literary corpus and is a major contribution to the study of the dynamic between literature and philosophy in antiquity and beyond. (shrink)