“If anthropology and history once begin to collaborate in the study of … societies, it will become apparent that the one science can achieve nothing without the help of the other,” said Claude Levi-Strauss. This statement is so immediately sensible in a plain, common-sense way, that only an examination of historical and anthropological practices reveal that such a collaboration is neither as frequent nor as complete as it ought to be.Anthropologists traditionally studied preliterate societies, historians, literate ones. Preliterate societies lack (...) written documents (or such documents are rare and often unreliable since they are usually written by untrained observers from outside the culture) and anthropologists found themselves with only oral traditions from which to reconstruct the past. Oral traditions, myths, tales, legends and so on are part of every culture; but the value of such traditions as a source of historical information was considered doubtful by most anthropologists, and historians seemingly had no need of them. The functionalist school of anthropology contributed to our understanding by recognizing the value and importance of oral histories in terms of the functions such tales fulfill in a given society. (shrink)

In queste pagine è delineata la vicenda esistenziale e intellettuale di Edith Stein. Donna straordinaria, è stata capace di racchiudere nella sua persona molte "possibili" vite. Le ha realizzate come ebrea e cattolica, fenomenologa e filosofa cristiana, docente e monaca carmelitana, agnostica e santa. Si tratta di un processo vitale dagli apparenti salti qualitativi, i quali si volgono all'ascolto di un medesimo nucleo identitario. Questa viva "formazione di sé" ha condotto Edith Stein a una "donazione di sé", culminata (...) nell'Olocausto. Il Diario di Edith si sovrappone ai pensieri di Angela Ales Bello, in veste di narratrice d'eccezione. Con la sentita partecipazione della narratrice, e insieme mantenendo il distacco critico della studiosa, viene scoperta la storia di un'anima. Le emozioni e le conquiste intellettuali trovano una sintesi grazie al peculiare approccio ai "fenomeni" che Edith Stein aveva appreso alla scuola di Edmund Husserl, di Tommaso d'Aquino e di Teresa D'Avila. Sintesi mirabile di pensatori che "si danno la mano" al di là dello spazio e del tempo--Front flap. (shrink)

Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker, perhaps the greatest in history. Yet he was preoccupied by an ordinary question: how to be happy. His deepest belief was that we can all be happy in a meaningful, sustained way - and he led by example. In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don't know your Odyssey from your Iliad. In ten practical lessons we come to (...) understand more about our own characters and how to make good decisions. We learn how to do well in an interview, how to choose a partner and lifelong friends, and how to face death or bereavement"--Inside front cover. (shrink)

This chapter uses feminist standpoint theory to investigate Diotima’s epistemic advantage in Plato’s Symposium. Scholars have wondered why Diotima – a woman speaking about the role of erōs in gestation, childbirth, and childrearing – voices the view that Plato privileges most among all the symposiasts (Halperin 1990, Evans 2006, Hobbs 2007). Feminist standpoint theory is useful in developing a novel answer to this question; it supposes that oppressed groups, because they occupy different social locations, often develop epistemic privileges over their (...) dominant counterparts, especially with respect to finding lacunae in dominant narratives (cf. Hartsock 1987, Collins 1990, Harding 1987 and 1993, and Intemann 2016). This chapter proposes that Diotima’s unique social location – she is an older, non-Athenian woman, well versed in gestation, childbirth, and childrearing – disposes her to know something about erōs that the dominant group, the Athenian pederasts, do not. What she knows is that having erōs for something does not merely inspire one to pursue or possess it; by attending to how erōs affects women, she argues that it also manifests as a desire to reproduce what is beloved and care for it. Diotima’s standpoint is epistemically revelatory, then, because it establishes that love is far more than the pursuit of beauty; it is a creative and laborious act. Moreover, her standpoint is ethically revelatory, since she argues that the highest form of love entails fostering and nourishing virtue in others. Understood in this way, Diotima is espousing something like a protofeminist ethics of care. (shrink)

Edith Stein's (1891-1942) pivotal philosophical study of being. Includes two appendixes: "Martin Heidegger's Philosophy of Existence" and "The Interior Castle".

Electoral control refers to attempts by an election's organizer to influence the outcome by adding/deleting/partitioning voters or candidates. The important paper of Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick [1] that introduces control proposes computational complexity as a means of resisting control attempts: Look for election systems where the chair's task in seeking control is itself computationally infeasible.We introduce and study a method of combining two or more candidate-anonymous election schemes in such a way that the combined scheme possesses all the resistances to (...) control possessed by any of its constituents: It combines their strengths. From this and new resistance constructions, we prove for the first time that there exists a neutral, anonymous election scheme that is resistant to all twenty standard types of electoral control. (shrink)

Electoral control refers to attempts by an election's organizer to influence the outcome by adding/deleting/partitioning voters or candidates. The important paper of Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick [1] that introduces control proposes computational complexity as a means of resisting control attempts: Look for election systems where the chair's task in seeking control is itself computationally infeasible.We introduce and study a method of combining two or more candidate-anonymous election schemes in such a way that the combined scheme possesses all the resistances to (...) control possessed by any of its constituents: It combines their strengths. From this and new resistance constructions, we prove for the first time that there exists a neutral, anonymous election scheme that is resistant to all twenty standard types of electoral control. (shrink)

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1972.

The tendency in the past has been for aruhropobgists to rationalize away the native claim that spirits exist. But in this study, a number of incidents, some of which happened to the author, are described and used to bring this positwistic assumption into question. The author shows that "participant observation" in the fullest sense requires taking the final leap and "going native" in the most complete way possible.

Mussar Yoga is a spiritual practice that engages the whole self in the process of spiritual transformation. It bridges the Jewish spiritual practice of self-study, and the cultivation and discipline of ethical behavior known as Mussar ("instruction" in Hebrew) with the Eight Limbs of Yoga, the ancient Indian eight-fold path for creating union between mind, body and spirit. Mussar provides the structure and focus of the journey of self-inquiry, while yoga offers a means for embodying it. In this clear and (...) structured introduction to Mussar Yoga, you will learn how to explore the physical dimension of soul traits--ethical behaviors and attitudes--such as humility, generosity, enthusiasm and gratitude through yoga poses and the yogic practice of breath work. Intended for the novice as well as the yoga expert, each exercise is accompanied by step-by-step instructions, helpful photographs, mantras and journaling exercises. With practice, Mussar Yoga can help free you from established negative patterns of being, increase your capacity for compassion and acts of goodness, and help you develop a more fulfilling, meaningful life. (shrink)

Edith Wyschogrod presents the first full-length study in English of the important contemporary French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It is a revision of the author’s earlier study and includes discussions of his recent writings as well as current scholarship. Dr. Wyschogrod’s extensive discussion of Levinas's relation to Judaism, especially his use of literature from the Torah and other religious writings, will be of interest to religious scholars. The author compares Levinas’s thought with that of his contemporaries, most notably Jacques Derrida (...) and Husserl. (shrink)

La proposition de cet article est de se saisir du « temps de l’expérience » des parcs éoliens citoyens en Frise du Nord (Allemagne) en le confrontant à la fois aux pulsations politiques des expérimentations techniques et à la fois aux rythmes des vents, comme ce qui permettrait d’en prendre soin, pour penser la continuité des épreuves de transition dans le temps mais aussi dans l’espace, dans une perspective démocratique de multiplication des expériences de transition.

Edith Stein comes alive through these warm, totally attentive letters. She joins a deeply sensitive heart with her keen intelligence, revealing herself to be a wise mentor and a caring friend available to anyone who approached her. Here we learn what was truly important to her: the total well-being of those who treasured her letters enough to preserve them even while suffering the havoc of war and oppression. This volume offers the first English translation of the majority of her (...) surviving letters, with 4 photos and a fully linked index of recipients. (shrink)

"I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely ...

We investigate the effect on the complexity of adding the universal modality and the reflexive transitive closure modality to modal logics. From the examples in the literature, one might conjecture that adding the reflexive transitive closure modality is at least as hard as adding the universal modality, and that adding either of these modalities to a multi-modal logic where the modalities do not interact can only increase the complexity to EXPTIME-complete. We show that the first conjecture holds under reasonable assumptions (...) and that, except for a number of special cases which we fully characterize, the hardness part of the second conjecture is true. However, the upper bound part of the second conjecture fails miserably: we show that there exists a uni-modal, decidable, finitely axiomatizable, and canonical logic for which adding the universal modality causes undecidability and for which adding the reflexive transitive closure modality causes high undecidability. (shrink)