Download or read book Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary written by Catherine Z. Elgin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic. Under the standard conception, unless answers to philosophical questions are absolute, they are arbitrary. Unless a philosophy is grounded in determinate, agent-neutral facts, it is right only relative to a perspective that cannot in the end be justified. Elgin charts a course between the two poles, showing how fact and value intertwine, where art and science intersect. Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary cuts a path through philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of art, disclosing common problems, resources, and solutions. Elgin highlights the ineliminability of values from the realm of facts, the dependence of facts on category schemes, and the ways human interests, practices, and goals affect the categories we contrive. Individually, the essays in this book contribute to ongoing debates in their respective fields. Collectively, they constitute a sustained critique of an entrenched conception of the resources available to philosophy, and argue for a constructive nominalist alternative. Once free of the conceptual stranglehold of traditional dualisms, Elgin argues, people can contrive a variety of frameworks, tailor-made to suit evolving interests and ends. The results are neither absolute nor arbitrary.
Download or read book The Wicked Ruler Or the Mischiefs of Absolute Arbitrary Power A Sermon on Prov Xxviii 15 Etc written by Gilbert KENNEDY and published by . This book was released on 1745 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies written by Bob Franklin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies offers an unprecedented collection of essays addressing the key issues and debates shaping the field of Digital Journalism Studies today. Across the last decade, journalism has undergone many changes, which have driven scholars to reassess its most fundamental questions, and in the face of digital change, to ask again: ‘Who is a journalist?’ and ‘What is journalism?’. This companion explores a developing scholarly agenda committed to understanding digital journalism and brings together the work of key scholars seeking to address key theoretical concerns and solve unique methodological riddles. Compiled of 58 original essays from distinguished academics across the globe, this Companion draws together the work of those making sense of this fundamental reconceptualization of journalism, and assesses its impacts on journalism’s products, its practices, resources, and its relationship with audiences. It also outlines the challenge presented by studying digital journalism and, more importantly, offers a first set of answers. This collection is the very first of its kind to attempt to distinguish this emerging field as a unique area of academic inquiry. Through identifying its core questions and presenting its fundamental debates, this Companion sets the agenda for years to come in defining this new field of study as Digital Journalism Studies, making it an essential point of reference for students and scholars of journalism.
Download or read book Re reading Saussure written by Paul J. Thibault and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saussure's theory of language is generally considered to be a formal theory of abstract sign-types and systems, separate from our individual and social practices of making meaning. In this challenging book, Thibault presents a different view of Saussure. Paying close attention to the original texts, including Cours de linguistique generale, he demonstrates that Saussure was centrally concerned with trying to formulate a theory of how meanings are made.
Download or read book True Enough written by Catherine Z. Elgin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of an epistemology that explains how science and art embody and convey understanding. Philosophy valorizes truth, holding that there can never be epistemically good reasons to accept a known falsehood, or to accept modes of justification that are not truth conducive. How can this stance account for the epistemic standing of science, which unabashedly relies on models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true? In True Enough, Catherine Elgin argues that we should not assume that the inaccuracy of models and idealizations constitutes an inadequacy. To the contrary, their divergence from truth or representational accuracy fosters their epistemic functioning. When effective, models and idealizations are, Elgin contends, felicitous falsehoods that exemplify features of the phenomena they bear on. Because works of art deploy the same sorts of felicitous falsehoods, she argues, they also advance understanding. Elgin develops a holistic epistemology that focuses on the understanding of broad ranges of phenomena rather than knowledge of individual facts. Epistemic acceptability, she maintains, is a matter not of truth-conduciveness, but of what would be reflectively endorsed by the members of an idealized epistemic community—a quasi-Kantian realm of epistemic ends.
Download or read book Arbitrary Power written by William Keach and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history.
Download or read book Considered Judgment written by Catherine Z. Elgin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-02-21 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she argues for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns. Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief.
Download or read book Arbitrary Rule written by Mary Nyquist and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.
Download or read book Mathematical Dictionary and Cyclopedia of Mathematical Science written by Charles Davies and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs written by Erica C. Garcia and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This detailed study challenges the claim that syntax is arbitrary and autonomous, as well as the assumption that Spanish clitic clusters constitute grammaticalized units. Diverse--apparently unrelated--restrictions on clitic clustering in both simplex VP's and Accusative cum Infinitive structures are shown to be cognitively motivated, given the meaning of the individual clitics, and the compositional/interpretative routines those meanings motivate. The analysis accounts, in coherent and principled fashion, for the absolute non-occurrence of some clusters, and the interpretation-dependent acceptability of all remaining clitic combinations: cluster acceptability depends on the ease with which the given clitic combination can be processed to yield a congruent message; there is no point in combining clitics whose meanings preclude speedy processing of the cluster. The monograph goes beyond previous work on Spanish clitics in its wealth of data, the range of syntactic phenomena discussed, and its analytic scope.
Download or read book Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold written by Tom Shachtman and published by HMH. This book was released on 2000-12-12 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lovely, fascinating book, which brings science to life.” —Alan Lightman Combining science, history, and adventure, Tom Shachtman “holds the reader’s attention with the skill of a novelist” as he chronicles the story of humans’ four-centuries-long quest to master the secrets of cold (Scientific American). “A disarming portrait of an exquisite, ferocious, world-ending extreme,” Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold demonstrates how temperature science produced astonishing scientific insights and applications that have revolutionized civilization (Kirkus Reviews). It also illustrates how scientific advancement, fueled by fortuitous discoveries and the efforts of determined individuals, has allowed people to adapt to—and change—the environments in which they live and work, shaping man’s very understanding of, and relationship, with the world. This “truly wonderful book” was adapted into an acclaimed documentary underwritten by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, directed by British Emmy Award winner David Dugan, and aired on the BBC and PBS’s Nova in 2008 (Library Journal). “An absorbing account to chill out with.” —Booklist
Download or read book Conceptualising Arbitrary Detention written by Carla Ferstman and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This book examines what happens when states and other authorities use detention to abuse their power, deter dissent and maintain social hierarchies. Written by an author with decades of practical experience in the human rights field, the book examines a variety of scenarios where individuals are unlawfully detained in violation of their most basic rights to personal liberty and exposes the many fallacies associated with arbitrary detention. Proposing solutions for future policy to scrutinise processes, this is a call for greater respect for the rule of law and human rights.
Download or read book On the Arbitrary Nature of Things written by Andrew Lee Bridges and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Arbitrary Nature of Things approaches Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit through a paradigm of agnosticism developed from Hegel’s own critique of systems of knowledge. This work traces Hegel’s descriptions of the movements of Spirit with equal measures of charity and skepticism. It provokes one to question the level of agnosticism that should be taken toward our various systems of human understanding, both in Hegel’s Phenomenology and in our contemporary world. With respect to our contemporary world, Bridges questions whether the nature of things is ultimately arbitrary and finds that phenomena such as the placebo effect and the use of sensoriums in phenomenological anthropology add credence to the position of agnosticism toward the arbitrary nature of things.
Download or read book Jefferson s Declaration of Independence written by Allen Jayne and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allen Jayne analyzes the ideology of the Declaration of Independence—and its implications—by going back to the sources of Jefferson's ideas: Bolingbroke, Kames, Reid, and Locke. He concludes that the Declaration must be read as an attack on two claims of absolute authority: that of government over its subjects and of religion over the minds of men. Today's world is more secular than Jefferson's, and the importance of philosophical theology in eighteenth-century critical thought must be recognized in order to understand fully and completely the Declaration's implications. Jayne addresses this need by putting religion back into the discussion.
Download or read book Understanding Business Research written by Bart L. Weathington and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the essential steps for data collection, reporting, and analysis in business research Understanding Business Research offers a comprehensive introduction to the entire process of designing, conducting, interpreting, and reporting findings in the business environment. With an emphasis on the human factor, the book presents a complete set of tools for tackling complex behavioral and social processes that are a part of data collection in industry settings. Utilizing numerous real-world examples throughout, the authors begin by presenting an overview of the research process, outlining key ideas relating to the business environment, ethics, and empirical methods. Quantitative techniques and considerations that are specific to business research, including sampling and the use of assessments, surveys, and objective measures are also introduced. Subsequent chapters outline both common and specialized research designs for business data, including: Correlational Research Single Variable Between-Subjects Research Correlated Groups Designs Qualitative and Mixed-Method Research Between-Subjects Designs Between-Subjects Factorial Designs Research with Categorical Data Each chapter is organized using an accessible, comprehensive pedagogy that ensures a fluid presentation. Case studies showcase the real-world applications of the discussed topics while critical thinking exercises and Knowledge Checks supply questions that allow readers to test their comprehension of the presented material. Numerous graphics illustrate the visual nature of the research, and chapter-end glossaries outline definitions of key terms. In addition, detailed appendices provide a review of basic concepts and the most commonly used statistical tables. Requiring only a basic understanding of statistics, Understanding Business Research is an excellent book for courses on business statistics as well as business and management science research methods at the graduate level. The book is also a valuable resource for practitioners in business, finance, and management science who utilize qualitative and quantitative research methods in their everyday work.
Download or read book A Companion to Locke written by Matthew Stuart and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 28 original essays examines the diverse scopeof John Locke’s contributions as a celebrated philosopher,empiricist, and father of modern political theory. Explores the impact of Locke’s thought and writing acrossa range of fields including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophyof science, political theory, education, religion, andeconomics Delves into the most important Lockean topics, such as innateideas, perception, natural kinds, free will, natural rights,religious toleration, and political liberalism Identifies the political, philosophical, and religious contextsin which Locke’s views developed, with perspectives fromtoday’s leading philosophers and scholars Offers an unprecedented reference of Locke’scontributions and his continued influence
Download or read book Arbitrary Lines written by M. Nolan Gray and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary--if not sufficient--condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life--where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up
