Exploring Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology is a uniquely accessible and engaging introduction to philosophy. Steven M. Cahn brings together exceptionally clear recent essays by noted philosophers and supplements them with influential historical sources. Most importantly, the articles have been carefully edited to make them understandable to every reader. The readings are enhanced by concise introductions, study questions, explanatory notes, and suggestions for further reading.
This book provides original evidence arguing for dignity as an indicator of public health, by offering a scientific framework for measuring dignity and its social determinants. Hitlin and Andersson show that dignity can be efficiently measured by using simple survey items that ask individuals whether there is "dignity" in their life or in how they are treated by others. National survey data show that unhappiness, sadness, anger, and lower general health are far more common for those reporting undignified lives. These differences in reported dignity come from inequalities in social and economic resources and from experiences of disrespect, threat, or life stress. Social groups with less power generally report lower levels of dignity linked to these multifaceted resource and stress inequalities, which are examined throughout the book. Hitlin and Andersson show that dignity possesses universal value for health and well-being in America, providing a scientific basis for collective consensus and social inspiration.
While complex global problems cry out for solutions devised with moral sensitivity and responsibility, a more common mentality tends to prevail, one that assumes those going the right way (“us”) are endangered by others (“them”) going the wrong way. Philosopher Steven Fesmire calls this approach “moral fundamentalism,” the idea that only we have access to the right diagnosis and prescription to our problems. Moral fundamentalism causes us to oversimplify, neglect broader context, take refuge in dogmatic absolutes, ignore possibilities for common ground, assume privileged access to the right way to proceed, and shut off honest inquiry. Moral fundamentalism--exacerbated by social media silos--also makes the worst of native impulses toward social bonding and antagonism. This depletes social capital and makes it impossible to debate and achieve superordinate goals, such as public health, justice, security, sustainability, peace, and democracy. Drawing from John Dewey's pluralistic and pragmatic approach, Fesmire develops an alternative to the oversimplification of moral fundamentalism and the arbitrariness of relativism. He proposes a “pragmatic pluralism” that can be applied to complex ethical, political, educational, and policy problems--without flattening variability among values or presuming that abstract theories determine what we ought to do. He argues that the single-right-way premise that logically underlies moral fundamentalism is both unwarranted and constrictive, and that grand philosophical quests for unifying principles can still be accommodated within a wider pluralistic approach. In an engaging style, Fesmire shows the reader a new perspective on the challenges and promises of democratic decision-making in societies that are struggling to grow beyond moral fundamentalism.
A major reassessment of the British government's communication of the goals of World War II and how its propaganda undermined the people's faith in the reliability of war news and the credibility of political leaders. While waging war against enemies overseas, governments also need to win the hearts and minds of their own citizens. The media is critical to delivering the official message, raising public support for war, maintaining morale, spelling out what is to be achieved, downplaying setbacks, and presenting a bright vision of the postwar future. In public memory, the British people were united in their support for World War II. Yet this popular image of the People's War neglects the fact that the war had to be sold. In this work stretching from appeasement in 1938 through victory, award-winning historian Steven Casey examines how media, government, and armed forces worked to convince the British public to support the war, as well as the ways the British home front often questioned and challenged the official line. Using a vast array of primary sources, some of them previously untapped, he looks at the broad range of problems and policies that needed to be defended and explained, censored and concealed. The venues range widely from the battlefield to the football field, from the rubble-strewn cities of blitzed Britain to the faraway outposts of Empire. In his chronological narrative of the war, Casey shines light on numerous high-profile episodes, including Munich and Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and Blitz, evacuation and rationing, and the campaigns in the Africa, Asia, and Europe. Throughout, Casey stresses how the British military forged a relationship with reporters, how this relationship shaped news coverage of the fighting, and how this coverage in turn exerted a profound impact on every other dimension of the government's private and public actions. No one before has examined how all the branches of the armed services kept the home front informed about progress and especially setbacks. Officials, Casey argues, failed to communicate effectively with the British people, which undermined public trust and called the credibility of the political leadership into question. Remarkably, the BBC and Fleet Street sometimes relayed German communiqués to the public because the British government failed to release timely reports of its own. The Skeptic Isle provides a bold reassessment of how the British government sold the Second World War to the British public. It powerfully showcases how the attempt to mold and manipulate coverage of battles created a major credibility gap that cast a long shadow over the British government's efforts to sell the different dimensions of the Second World War to the home front.
Historical perspective shows that concerns about the "kids these days" are as old as civilization itself. Today's young people are healthier than in the past and less likely to drink, smoke, or engage in reckless sex. The digital age has enabled them to learn, grow, and connect with the world in ways that were previously unimaginable. There is greater acceptance and understanding of diverse backgrounds, identities, and orientations, giving many children more freedom to express themselves and find communities that support them. Many young people are more politically knowledgeable and and socially aware than previous generations, speaking out about climate change, gun control, and social justice. Nonetheless, autism, attention deficit disorders, allergies, obesity, learning disorders, and online bullying, as well as suicidal ideation and self-harm, have become more prevalent. School shootings and the 24/7 news cycle make the world seem more dangerous for children than it actually is. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources along with census data, reports, and surveys, Steven Mintz and Peter N. Stearns bring much-needed historical perspective to the profound transformations that have taken place in American childhood since World War II and their impact on children's well-being. Balancing genuine improvements with significant losses, they analyze how shifts in family life, education, and culture have reshaped childhood for good and for ill. Acutely attentive to issues of diversity in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and race, this book places contemporary controversies-- rising rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, and emotional distress-- within a historical context, challenging simplistic explanations that blame social media, the internet, or the decline of marriage. Instead, it reveals the deeper structural, cultural, and historical forces driving the challenges and opportunities facing today's children. The American Child examines the radical transformations in schooling, childrearing practices, children's play, kids' culture, and other areas to offer valuable insights on how childhood has changed, the consequences of those shifts, and what can be done to make childhood better.
Pandemics are global outbreaks of novel or re-emerging infectious diseases, and reveal aspects of humanity rarely seen in calmer times. Pandemics will likely become more prevalent in the coming years due to climate change, the growing global population, and other factors. Psychology plays an essential role in pandemics, in which people's beliefs, emotions, and behaviors influence the spreading and containment of infection. Uncertainty is an inherent aspect of pandemics; when faced with novel pathogens, people cope with these invisible, uncertain threats in various ways, including coping strategies that provide only an illusion of control, making people calmer but not safer. Other psychological phenomena observed during pandemics include polarized fear reactions (excessive alarm vs. undue disregard for the threat), fleeing, panic-buying, xenophobia, rumors and conspiracy theories, protests about wearing protective facemasks, anti-vaccination attitudes, lockdown protests, increases in mood and anxiety disorders, and other societal problems. Efforts to manage one problem (e.g., lockdown to stem the spread of infection) may worsen other problems (e.g., mental health). The New Psychology of Pandemics offers a comprehensive analysis of these and other issues concerning the psychology of pandemics, to prepare for future global outbreaks of infectious diseases. The book explores promising new directions for maintaining and improving mental health and enhancing adherence to pandemic mitigation measures such as social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
American Infidelity is a timely, provocative exploration of a forgotten chapter in American history--one that still echoes in our most urgent cultural debates. In the final decades of the 19th century, America stood at a cultural crossroads. Evangelical Protestantism reigned supreme, shaping laws, morals, and public life. But beneath the surface, a bold countercurrent surged--freethinkers, feminists, and sexual radicals who dared to imagine a freer, more equal society. In American Infidelity, historian Steven K. Green tells the riveting story of this ideological showdown. At its center were two powerful forces: a rising movement of skeptics and reformers who challenged religious orthodoxy and social convention, and the reactionary crusaders--led by the infamous Anthony Comstock--who fought to silence them. These "infidels," as Comstock branded them, weren't just questioning God--they were demanding access to birth control, advocating for divorce reform, and championing women's autonomy over their minds and bodies. Figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton pushed feminism beyond the vote, calling for sexual and economic liberation. Freethought leaders rejected the idea that America was a Christian nation, insisting instead on reason, inquiry, and personal freedom. But their vision of a more open society collided head-on with a moral panic that sought to preserve traditional values at all costs. Green's gripping narrative reveals how this battle over belief, sex, and power shaped the cultural DNA of the United States. Drawing on vivid historical sources, he shows how the freethought and feminist movements were ultimately suppressed--but not extinguished. Their legacy lives on in today's ongoing struggles over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.
Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the `evolution' of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently investigates the role of these internal differences in the opinions recorded, in voices and modes of discourse, in logical levels, in conceptions of writing and of reading, through a series of careful, lucid readings of selected passages from the Essais. The author tracks their operation in Montaigne's text and shows how Montaigne's writing constantly recontextualizes his own discourse (through his practice of interpolating new material in successive editions and adding new chapters) as well as that of other authors (through quotation, paraphrase, commentary). Rather than merely negative features, the author argues that such `differences' are essential to a practice of writing that both defines and challenges a notion of `unity', and can be seen as an uneasy and disturbing element related to a historical shift from earlier ways of controlling meaning, to one based on `the author function'. This careful and lucid book presents a fresh and significant interpretation of the Essais and shows how Montaigne's work might profitably and illuminatingly be read in a `different' way.
Apologists have often tried to play down Erik Satie's connection to the bohemian subculture of Montmartre. In this book Whiting argues that far from harming his reputation, this connection decisively shaped his aesthetic priorities and compositional strategies.
Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of 'seeming to speak where one is not', speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kind of questions which impel Steven Connor's wide-ranging, restlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. He tracks his subject from its first recorded beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the fulminations of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination, the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, during the Enlightenment. He retrieves the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the 'vocalic uncanny' of technologies like telephone, radio, film, and internet. Learned but lucid, brimming with anecdote and insight, this is much more than an archaeology of one of the most regularly derided but tenaciously enduring of popular arts. It is also a series of virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.
This controversial book offers a novel perspective on Tudor government and British state formation. It argues that traditional studies focusing on lowland England as 'the normal context of government' exaggerate the regime's successes by marginalizing the borderlands. Frontiers were normal in early-modern Europe, however, and central to the problem of state formation. England's peripheries were more extensive than the core and provide the real yardstick by which the effectiveness of government can be measured. Ellis demonstrates their importance by means of a detailed comparative study of two marches - Cumbria and Ireland - and their ruling magnates. He demonstrates the flaws in early Tudor policy, characterized by long periods of neglect, interspersed with sporadic attempts to adapt, at minimal cost, a centralized administrative system geared to lowland England for the government of outlying regions which had very different social structures. Ellis analyses the 1534 crisis in crown-magnate relations, reassesses the resulting policy of centralization and uniformity, and identifies the central role of these developments in establishing a British pattern of state formation.
Using contemporary sources, especially the chronicles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Steven Tibble studies the relationship between monarchy and nobility in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. He argues that the relative power of the seigneuries has been substantially overstated, and that the monarch exercised far more control over the baronage and feudal structure, particularly in the twelfth century, than has hitherto been recognized.
Rongorongo, Easter Island's enigmatic script and Oceania's only known pre-twentieth-century writing system, is here comprehensively documented for the first time. The author tells the full history of rongorongo's exciting discovery and the many attempts at a decipherment. Pre-missionary traditions surrounding rongorongo are described from previously unpublished material. Full transcriptions of all the 25 surviving rongorongo inscriptions are provided, along with detailed photographs of nearly every incised artefact. In over six years of full-time research that took the author from St Petersburg to Easter Island, a wholly new picture of the rongorongo phenomenon has emerged. This book is the definitive study of one of the world's most fascinating and eloquent graphic achievements.
Steven Nadler presents a collection of essays on the problem of causation in seventeenth-century philosophy. Occasionalism is the doctrine, held by a number of early modern Cartesian thinkers, that created substances are devoid of any true causal powers, and that God is the only real causal agent in the universe. All natural phenomena have God as their direct and immediate cause, with natural things and their states serving only as "occasions" for God to act. Rather than being merely an ad hoc, deus ex machina response to the mind-body problem bequeathed by Descartes to his followers, as it has often been portrayed in the past, occasionalism is in fact a full-blooded, complex and philosophically interesting account of causal relations. These essays examine the philosophical, scientific, theological and religious themes and arguments of occasionalism, as well as its roots in medieval views on God and causality.
In the first half of the 1980s a succession of high profile and deeply controversial trials took place in Northern Ireland on the evidence of `supergrasses' from loyalist and republican paramilitary organisations prepared to betray large numbers of their former alleged confederates in return for immunity from prosecution or lenient sentences and new identities outside Northern Ireland. This, the first thoroughly-researched book-length study of this process, not only carefully documents the central trials - some of which were larger than any other criminal proceedings in the UK or Ireland - but also opens a rare window on the highly secret world of the terrorist groups concerned. The origins of the supergrass system are traced through the complex web of intelligence gathering and counter-terrorist policy in Northern Ireland, and the broader criminal justice and criminological issues are fully explored. The author also compares and contrasts the failure of the supergrass experiment in Northern Ireland with its much more successful counterparts in England, the United States, Italy and Germany, and considers why France and Spain chose not to go down the supergrass path. The publication of this book could hardly be more timely. Northern Ireland is once again at the top of the political agenda in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and the recent ceasefires have ensured that the Troubles are the focus of renewed international attention. The need for strong due process rights in the criminal justice system as part of an overall settlement of the Ulster conflict is firmly underlined, and the study adds further support to the case for more effective mechanisms of public accountability over policing and intelligence-gathering in liberal democracies generally.
Oxford Student Texts offer an accessible route into the study of texts for A Level including line-by-line notes, and detailed sections covering key themes, issues and contexts. This edition focuses on The Merchant's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Oxford Student Texts offer an accessible route into the study of texts for A Level including line-by-line notes, and detailed sections covering key themes, issues and contexts. This edition focuses on selected poems by Thomas Hardy.
Project X Hero Academy is a fully decodable and finely levelled reading series set in a school for superheroes, designed to captivate and motivate all young readers and turn them into reading superheroes. Power Swap is in Purple Book Band, Oxford Level 8, and supports Letters and Sounds Phase 6. In this story, Pip accidentally touches a confiscated gadget, causing the heroes to swap superpowers! Without their own superpowers, the heroes struggle to control their superpowers. Can Pip make everything right again? Each book can be used for independent reading, but also contains inside cover notes that include help on developing vocabulary and prompt questions that can be used for guided reading and one-to-one sessions. Full guided reading notes are provided in the corresponding handbook. There are also a range of follow-up activities to support reading for pleasure.
Project X Hero Academy is a fully decodable and finely levelled reading series set in a school for superheroes, designed to captivate and motivate all young readers and turn them into reading superheroes. Out of Control is in Purple Book Band, Oxford Level 8, and supports Letters and Sounds Phase 6. In this story, the heroes are outside doing PE (Power Exploration) with Mr Trainer. The student with the highest marks will receive a gold merit badge. Jin is keen to be top of the class but will he go too far? Each book can be used for independent reading, but also contains inside cover notes that include help on developing vocabulary and prompt questions that can be used for guided reading and one-to-one sessions. Full guided reading notes are provided in the corresponding handbook. There are also a range of follow-up activities to support reading for pleasure.
Project X Hero Academy is a fully decodable and finely levelled reading series set in a school for superheroes, designed to captivate and motivate all young readers and turn them into reading superheroes. Invasion of the Bunny-wunnies is in Orange Book Band, Oxford Level 6, and supports Letters and Sounds Phase 5. In this story, Ray Ranter, arch-enemy of Hero Academy, sends his robot bunnies to steal the recipe for power pancakes from the school. Can the heroes save the day? Each book can be used for independent reading, but also contains inside cover notes that include help on developing vocabulary and prompt questions that can be used for guided reading and one-to-one sessions. Full guided reading notes are provided in the corresponding handbook. There are also a range of follow-up activities to support reading for pleasure.
