Contemporary suicide terrorists from the Middle East are publicly deemed crazed cowards bent on senseless destruction who thrive in poverty and ignorance. Recent research indicates they have no appreciable psychopathology and are as educated and economically well-off as surrounding populations. A first line of defense is to get the communities from which suicide attackers stem to stop the attacks by learning how to minimize the receptivity of mostly ordinary people to recruiting organizations.

Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns.

Now we need to bring this perspective to Afghanistan and Pakistan — one that is smart about cultures, customs and connections. The present policy of focusing on troop strength and drones, and trying to win over people by improving their lives with Western-style aid programs, only continues a long history of foreign involvement and failure. Reading a thousand years of Arab and Muslim history would show little in the way of patterns that would have helped to predict 9/11, but our (...) predicament in Afghanistan rhymes with the past like a limerick.... There's a good chance that enough factions in the loose Taliban coalition would opt to disinvite their troublesome guest if we forget about trying to subdue them or hold their territory. This would unwind the Taliban coalition into a lot of straggling, loosely networked groups that could be eliminated or contained. This means tracking down family and tribal networks, gaining a better understanding of family ties and intervening only when we see actions by Taliban and other groups to aid Al Qaeda or act outside their region.... To defeat violent extremism in Afghanistan, less may be more — just as it has been elsewhere in Asia. (shrink)

The past three years saw more suicide attacks than the last quarter century. Most of these were religiously motivated. While most Westerners have imagined a tightly coordinated transnational terrorist organization headed by Al Qaeda, it seems more likely that nations under attack face a set of largely autonomous groups and cells pursuing their own regional aims. Repeated suicide actions show that massive counterforce alone does not diminish the frequency or intensity of suicide attack. Like pounding mercury with a hammer, this (...) sort of top-heavy counterstrategy only seems to generate more dispersed and insidious forms of suicide terrorism. Even with many top Qaeda leaders now dead or in custody, the transnational Jihadist fraternity is transforming into a hydra-headed network more difficult to fight than before. Poverty and lack of education per se are not root causes of suicide terrorism. And Muslims who have expressed support for martyr actions and trust in Osama Bin Laden or the late Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin do not as a rule hate democratic freedoms or Western culture, although many despise American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Rising aspirations followed by dwindling expectations – especially regarding civil liberties – are critical factors in generating support for suicide terrorism. The United States, Israel, Russia and other nations on the frontline in the war on terror need to realize that military and counterinsurgency actions are tactical, not strategic responses to suicide terrorism, the most politically destabilizing and psychologically devastating form of terrorism. When these nations back oppressive and unpopular governments this only generates popular resentment and support for terrorism against those governments and their backers. To attract potential recruits away from Jihadist martyrdom – suicide terrorism's most virulent strain - and to dry up its popular support, requires addressing these grievances before a downward spiral sets in where core meaning in life is sought, and found, in religious networks that sanctify vengeance at any cost against stronger powers, even if it kills the avenger. (shrink)

In September President Bush reasserted his commitment to the "road map" for Middle East peace, launched in 2003 to achieve a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian agreement by 2005. He called on Palestinians to renounce terrorism, implicitly urged world leaders to cut ties to Yasser Arafat, and appealed to Israel to end "the daily humiliation" of Palestinians. He framed his remarks within an overall appeal for democracy in the Arab world, citing Iraq as a model of the "transformational power of liberty." In (...) fact, for more than a year the US disastrously ignored Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's pleas to set up elections. Real democracy is the willingness to accept results we may not like. US policy on a future Palestinian state is just as short-sighted. (shrink)

NOT all groups that the United States government classifies as terrorist organizations are equally bad or dangerous, and not all information conveyed to them that is based on political, academic or scientific expertise risks harming our national security. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, which last week upheld a law banning the provision of “material support” to foreign terrorist groups, doesn't seem to consider those facts relevant.... The two of us are social scientists who study and interact with violent groups in order (...) to find ways out of intractable conflicts. In the course of this work and in our discussions with decision makers in the Middle East and elsewhere we have seen how informal meetings and exchanges of knowledge have borne fruit. It's not that religious, academic or scientific credentials automatically convey trust, but when combined with a personal commitment to peace, they often carry weight beyond mere opinion or desire.... In our own work on groups categorized as terrorist organizations, we have detected significant differences in their attitudes and actions. For example, in our recent interactions with the leader of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad Ramadan Shallah, we were faced with an adamant refusal to ever recognize Israel or move toward a two-state solution. Yet when we talked to Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, he said that his movement could imagine a two-state “peace”. In our time with Mr. Meshal's group, we were also able to confirm something that Saudi and Israeli intelligence officers had told us: Hamas has fought to keep Al Qaeda out of its field of influence, and has no demonstrated interest in global jihad. Whether or not the differences among Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other violent groups are fundamental, rather than temporary or tactical, is something only further exploration will reveal. But to assume that it is invariably wrong to engage any of these groups is a grave mistake.... (shrink)

Zhuang Zi's relation to the Confucian school is reexamined. It is argued that although Zhuang Zi was fond of highlighting the absurdities of the Confucian enterprise, we can nonetheless detect in his writings a great admiration for much of what constituted the central core of the Confucian vision. This essay analyzes Confucius' image of "musical perfection," representing the total concordance of ritual restraints and harmonious freedom; traces the Confucian notion of self-cultivation through Mencius' passage on the "full-flowing energy"; and concludes (...) with an examination of Zhuang Zi's "Butcher Ding" story, showing that while Zhuang Zi's whole concept of self-nurturing is approached from a diametrically opposite angle, he nonetheless ends up celebrating a state of mastery and freedom in many ways identical to Confucius' notion of musical perfection. (shrink)

Introducing the practices of Eastern Hinduism, Shintoism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, a lavishly illustrated volume is complemented by full-color reproductions of sacred art, architecture, symbols, landscapes, ceremonies, and festivals.

The importance of religious cosmology for environmental ethics is explored in a case-study of enchanted and disenchanted world-views in the Sert o of North-east Brazil. Popular Catholicism is shown to have retained an enchanted world-view of humans interacting with saints, souls and animist spirits. In order to differentiate themselves from Catholics, evangelical Protestants pursue a disenchanted view of the natural environment but hold a highly supernatural view of human society. Afro-Brazilian cult members are Catholics who graft an enchanted view (...) of human society on to an enchanted view of nature, producing a hyper-enchanted world-view. The relationship between religious world-view, agricultural modernisation, deforestation and social disparity is evaluated, showing how the process of disenchantment has been highly uneven with the selective elimination of certain enchanted beliefs alongside the persistence of others and their re-adaptation to the contemporary needs of the local population. (shrink)

The importance of religious cosmology for environmental ethics is explored in a case-study of enchanted and disenchanted world-views in the Sertão of North-east Brazil. Popular Catholicism is shown to have retained an enchanted world-view of humans interacting with saints, souls and animist spirits. In order to differentiate themselves from Catholics, evangelical Protestants pursue a disenchanted view of the natural environment but hold a highly supernatural view of human society. Afro-Brazilian cult members are Catholics who graft an enchanted view of (...) human society on to an enchanted view of nature, producing a hyper-enchanted world-view. The relationship between religious world-view, agricultural modernisation, deforestation and social disparity is evaluated, showing how the process of disenchantment has been highly uneven with the selective elimination of certain enchanted beliefs alongside the persistence of others and their re-adaptation to the contemporary needs of the local population. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 8-30 [Access article in PDF] Dialogue, Responsibility, and Oil and Gas Leasing on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front Scott Friskics "How does nature speak to our concern? That is the question" (Bugbee 1978, 11). It's a late afternoon in mid-March and I'm standing outside my friends' house on the southwest edge of Augusta, Montana, a small town of about 500 residents. I'm here (...) to meet a companion who's headed out from Great Falls to spend the weekend at my cabin, which is located up in the mountains approximately 20 miles west of here. As is often the case, I'm a bit early for our rendezvous. Blame it on unbridled anticipation or a latent preoccupation with punctuality, but my premature arrival offers me a few stolen moments of enforced inactivity with which I can revel in the sensory fullness of a pleasant, pre-spring afternoon.Out here on the plains, spring seems much nearer at hand than it does back up in the mountains. The air's still cool and the wind still bites, but the warm afternoon sun embraces me and unlocks a host of smells long-held in winter's freeze: earthy mud puddles, sweet horse manure, damp hay. [End Page 8]While waiting, I wander over to the nearby corral to greet three gentle, mud-splattered horses. As I absently rub their chins and stroke their long, slender noses, I gaze out beyond the horses, out beyond the soupy corral, beyond the expanse of wrinkled, sere, brown plains. My eyes focus on the blue-shadowed wall of mountains from which I've just emerged: Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. From this vantage point, the Front presents itself as a horizon-filling tidal wave of rock—fluid, walking mountains that, over the course of their long march through time, have been thrust skyward and pushed eastward to where their easternmost reefs and ridges now hang precipitously over the wide expanse of the northern Great Plains.Dead center in my line of vision stands the tilted summit of Crown Mountain—the univocal, eloquent peak that towers about the narrow mountain valley where I live, provides me with the ultimate spatial reference point for my life, and fills my days with the gracious bounty of its abiding presence. From here, however, Crown Mountain presents itself to me not so much as a soloist, but rather as one voice in a chorus of mountain song. Working southward from this orienting center, I encounter Crown Mountain's nameless twin and the rocky ridge line descending to Welcome Pass, above the notch of which rises the deceptively unassuming head of the Scapegoat Massif. Much nearer at hand and dominating the foreground stands the dark cone of Haystack Butte—an intrusive igneous island in a sea of sedimentary mountains. Further south runs the high ridge guarding the headwaters of the Dearborn River, with Steamboat Mountain rising above the rugged country drained by Elk Creek, Blubber Creek, Falls Creek, Cuniff Creek.Working northward from the crown, the mountains are no less spectacular, no less evocative: the slanting summit of Fairview Mountain, the jagged gray wall of Sawtooth Ridge, the low gap of Sun Canyon (where the united Sun River flows out onto the plains and benches of central Montana), the flattened rock face of Castle Reef, and, framing the northern edge of my vista, the rising bulk of Ear Mountain. Of course, standing here in Augusta I'm well aware that what I can see from this spot is less than half of the Front, so my imagination continues north to Blackleaf Canyon, the Birch Creek country, the Badger-Two Medicine, the east slopes of Glacier National Park, and that holy border sentinel, Chief Mountain.I first saw this glorious stretch of country on a blustery November day 16 years ago, and I have yet to encounter another place that speaks to me with such force and beauty, such overwhelming, undeniable eloquence. [End Page 9] And, on this soul-stirring March afternoon, the... (shrink)

While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers--including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond--to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts and phenomena. (...) The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy's impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science. (shrink)

From both popular and scholarly works, the images Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad alGhazālī and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola often emerge in stark contrast: Ghazali, as the champion of mystical Islam, purportedly undermined philosophy in the Muslim world with The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a critique of his predecessors in the Arabic philosophical tradition such as al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā.1 In contradistinction to Ghazali's alleged destruction of philosophy, Pico della Mirandola seemingly wrote the manifesto of philosophy's rebirth in the Italian Renaissance with (...) his Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio De... (shrink)

This is the second of two articles describing the influence of Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The first article critically analyzed common and contrasting images of Ghazali, often presented as the religiously motivated destroyer of philosophy in Islamic traditions,1 and Pico della Mirandola, who is romantically associated with philosophy's "rebirth" in the Italian Renaissance.2 In fact, both Pico della Mirandola and Ghazali attempted to create a coherent synthesis of philosophical and religious tradition; and the first article (...) demonstrated that Ghazali actually influenced Pico della Mirandola in this respect. Supporting Craig... (shrink)

There is a section in Samuel Delany’s magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of “other,” of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed norm.1 Delany recounts his reaction to his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold of a “gym-sized room” dimly lit by blue bulbs. The (...) room was full of people, some standing, the rest an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall. My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment very close to fear. I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2Watching the scene establishes for Delany a “fact that flew in the face” of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as “isolated perverts,” as subjects “gone awry.” The “apprehension of massed bodies” gave him a “sense of political power”:what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex. [M, p. 174] 2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 , p. 173; hereafter abbreviated M. Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most recently, of Gender and the Politics of History and is currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring arguments about equality and difference. (shrink)

Complexity science has witnessed a number of advances since the publication of Jervis's System Effects. These advances better allow us to untangle the messy elements in a system and predict sets of likely outcomes. However, just because a system is complex doesn't mean that all the ideas relating to complexity—such as agent-based modeling, path dependency, tipping points, between-class versus within-class effects, and networks—are necessarily relevant. One of our tasks is to determine whether they are—and, if so, their implications. As examples, (...) we use China's role in the formation of the United States housing bubble; the federal government's bailout of AIG and Bear Stearns but not Lehman Brothers; and China's failure to experience a regime change such as the Middle East's Arab Spring. (shrink)

This anthology provides an accessible introduction to East Asian Buddhism, focusing specifically on China, Korea, and Japan. It begins with a detailed historical introduction that includes an overview of the development of the various schools of Buddhism in East Asia and traces the transmission of Buddhism from Northwest India to China in the first century CE, and then to Korea and Japan in the fourth and sixth centuries CE. The first part of the book contains five chapters that (...) offer creative pedagogies that can help college professors infuse East Asian Buddhism into their courses. The second part includes six interdisciplinary chapters that explore thematic links between East Asian Buddhism and religious studies, philosophy, film studies, literature, and environmental studies. (shrink)

: Thoreau's engagement with and perspectives on the Orient are considered here. Within Thoreau's Hindu appropriations, the 'practical' importance for Thoreau of yogic practices is reemphasized. Thoreau's often-cited Buddhist links are questioned. Instead, it is Thoreau's explicit use of Confucian and Persian Sufi materials that deserve reemphasis, as do, in retrospect, some striking thematic convergences with Taoism. Thoreau's 'Light from the East' focuses on ethical and mystical techniques, infused with lessons from Nature for 'a very Yankee sort of Oriental.'.

This chapter contains sections titled: Allotment Associations The Allotment Site New Relationships: Councillors and Gardeners Conclusions Notes.

Translation often proceeds as if languages already existed, as if the task of the translator were to make an appropriate selection from available resources. Clive Scott challenges this tacit assumption. If the translator is to do justice to himself/herself as a reader, if the translator is to become the creative writer of his/her reading, then the language of translation must be equal to the translators perceptual experience of, and bodily responses to, source texts. Each renewal of perceptual and physiological (...) contact with a text involves a renewal of the ways we think language and use our expressive faculties (listening, speaking, writing). Phenomenology and particularly the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty underpins this new approach to translation. The task of the translator is tirelessly to develop new translational languages, ever to move beyond the bilingual into the multilingual, and always to remember that language is as much an active instrument of perception as an object of perception. Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the British Academy. (shrink)

With the diversification of philosophy, and the dismantling of stark divides in philosophical methodology in the West, the character of philosophy appears more indeterminate than ever—and demands fresh investigations not only into the character of philosophy, but also the concept of indeterminacy itself. The over-arching aim of this collection, which brings together a wide range of philosophical and inter-disciplinary perspectives, is to bring into focus the prominence and significance of indeterminacy as a common thread in recent Asian philosophy, continental thought, (...) and other philosophical approaches. The theme of indeterminacy can be traced throughout the history of both Western and Asian philosophy. Among the pre-Socratics, Anaximander stands out as recognizing (though not fully clarifying) its significance in his famous formulation of the first principle of philosophy as the apeiron—the indeterminate. In modern philosophy, indeterminacy appears time and again as a recurrent theme in post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy. This volume shines a spotlight on the way indeterminacy arises as an important theme for relatively neglected thinkers in the Western tradition, such as F.W.J. Schelling, and it offers fresh perspectives on the significance of indeterminacy for well-read thinkers such as Husserl and Hegel. What is more, this volume includes chapters that bring out the presence and importance of indeterminacy in the various schools of Chinese and Japanese philosophy (among others), such as in various forms of Daoist thinking and the Kyoto school, which cannot be underestimated. By bringing these schools of thought into dialogue with each other, we hope that the volume will enrich the thinking of all traditions, East, West, and beyond. (shrink)

This is the first complete edition of the Chronicon Anonymi Cantuariensis, a contemporary narrative that provides valuable insights into medieval war and diplomacy, written at Canterbury shortly after the mid-fourteenth century. The previous edition, published in 1914, was based on a manuscript from which the text for the years 1357 to 1364 was missing. Presented here in full with a modern English translation, the chronicle provides a key narrative of military and political events covering the years from 1346 to 1365. (...) Concentrating principally on the campaigns of the Hundred Years War and their impact upon the inhabitants of south-east England, the author took advantage of his position on the main news route between London and Paris to provide a detailed account of a crucial phase in British and European history. (shrink)

From very early on, Western philosophers have been obsessed with the understanding of a relatively few works of philosophy which have played a disproportionately large and fundamental role in developing the Western philosophical canon, dominating the curriculum in the past and in the present; there is no indication that they will not do so in the future.Uses and Abuses of the Classics examines the various ways in which the different periods of the history of philosophy have approached these texts. The (...) editors have chosen for analysis some of the major philosophers from periods of the history of philosophy in which the interpretation of the classics has been particularly significant.Contributions to this book include entries on: Aristotle's reading of Plato; Averroes on Aristotle; Nietzsche on the Beginnings of Western Philosophy; and Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. (shrink)

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

Pragmatism, Experience, and the Given The doctrine of the Given is that subjects have direct non-inferential awareness of content of their experiences and apprehensions, and that some of a subject's beliefs are justified on the basis of that subject's awareness of her experiences and apprehensions. Pragmatist criticisms of the Given as a myth are shown here not only to be inadequate but to presuppose the Given. A model for a pragmatist account of the Given is then provided in terms of (...) refinements of Dewey's theory of experience. The doctrine of the Given is implicated in the functions of inquiry insofar as one must take it that experience is a source of justification. (shrink)

“Natural logic” was proposed by Lewis Henry Morgan as the engine of cultural evolution, concluding that the “course and manner” of cultural development “was predetermined, as well as restricted within narrow limits of divergence, by the natural logic of the human mind.” This essay argues that Morgan’s conception of natural logic aids the project of settler colonialism. Rather than being a false account of human agency, however, it is a conception of natural logic that is produced through the systematic narrowing (...) of possibilities for agency, human, and otherwise. This narrowed logic is thus only a part of a differently conceived logic of agency that is also general and normative. The discussion proceeds in four sections: first, a presentation of Morgan’s conception of natural logic and its origins; second, an analysis of four colonizing implications of Morgan’s view; third, examples of further developments of natural logic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the work structuralist and post-structuralist theorists; and, last, a brief introduction of a decolonial logic that provides a broader alternative conception of the structure of agency, human, and otherwise, and that avoids the oppressive effects of the reductionism of the natural logic received from Morgan and his successors. (shrink)

Many fans of Diogenes of Sinope laud his parrhesia, free speech used for critique. However, Diogenes abused not only the powerful but also the socially marginalized. We argue that interpreters of Diogenes cannot explain away the undeniably troublesome things that Diogenes said about those at the margins. But we also argue that Diogenes ought nonetheless to be preserved. Some of his chreiai can be reminders of how to be courageous and fight for the downtrodden, and others can serve as reminders (...) of how easily those aspirations can be forgotten. We offer a variety of ways to interpret Diogenes, especially since the figure of Diogenes is an historical composite from centuries of sources. But we arrive at a position of loving antagonism toward Diogenes, loving Cynic commitments to autarkeia and against wealth and power, and disapproving when Cynics fell short of their commitments and critical aspirations. (shrink)

Inspired by a debate between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, this work traces the development of natural history from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the science of plants and animals has emerged from the common conceptions of folkbiology.