Download or read book Contours of Agency written by Sarah Buss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide range of philosophical essays informed by the work of Harry Frankfurt, who offers a response to each essay.

Download or read book Talking to Our Selves written by John Michael Doris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do we know what we're doing, and why? Psychological research seems to suggest not: reflection and self-awareness are surprisingly uncommon and inaccurate. John M. Doris presents a new account of agency and responsibility, which reconciles our understanding of ourselves as moral agents with empirical work on the unconscious mind.

Download or read book Structures of Agency written by Michael E. Bratman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of published and unpublished essays by distinguished philosopher Michael E. Bratman of Stanford University. They revolve around his influential theory, know as the "planning theory of intention and agency." Bratman's primary concern is with what he calls "strong" forms of human agency--including forms of human agency that are the target of our talk about self-determination, self-government, and autonomy. These essays are unified and cohesive in theme, and will be of interest to philosophers in ethics and metaphysics.

Download or read book The Contours of Police Integrity written by Carl B. Klockars and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a comprehensive overview of the potential for police misconduct worldwide, leading criminal justice scholars have compiled survey and case data from 10 countries chronicling police integrity and misconduct.

Download or read book Agency and Embodiment written by Carrie Noland and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Agency and Embodiment, Carrie Noland examines the ways in which culture is both embodied and challenged through the corporeal performance of gestures. Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained. Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia—feeling the body move—encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory’s inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, André Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.

Download or read book Understanding Human Agency written by Erasmus Mayr and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our self-understanding as human agents includes a commitment to three crucial claims about human agency: that agents must be active, that actions are part of the natural order of the universe, and that intentional actions can be explained by the agent's reasons for acting. While all of these claims are indispensable elements of our view of ourselves as human agents, they are in continuous conflict and tension with one another, especially once one adopts the currently predominant view of what the natural order must be like. One of the central tasks of philosophy of action consists in showing how, despite appearances, these conflicts can be resolved and our self-understanding as agents be vindicated. The mainstream of contemporary philosophy of action holds that this task can only be fulfilled by an event-causal reductive view of human agency, paradigmatically embodied in the so-called 'standard model' developed by Donald Davidson. Erasmus Mayr, in contrast, develops a new agent-causal solution to these conflicts and shows why this solution is superior both to event-causalist accounts and to Von Wright's intentionalism about agency. He offers a comprehensive theory of substance-causation on the basis of a realist conception of powers, which allows one to see how the widespread rejection of agent-causation rests on an unfounded 'Humean' view of nature and of causal processes. At the same time, Mayr addresses the question of the nature of reasons for acting and complements its substance-causal account of activity with a non-causal account of acting for reasons in terms of following a standard of success.

Download or read book Aspiration written by Agnes Callard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming someone is a learning process; and what we learn is the new values around which, if we succeed, our lives will come to turn. Agents transform themselves in the process of, for example, becoming parents, embarking on careers, or acquiring a passion for music or politics. How can such activity be rational, if the reason for engaging in the relevant pursuit is only available to the person one will become? How is it psychologically possible to feel the attraction of a form of concern that is not yet one's own? How can the work done to arrive at the finish line be ascribed to one who doesn't (really) know what one is doing, or why one is doing it? In Aspiration, Agnes Callard asserts that these questions belong to the theory of aspiration. Aspirants are motivated by proleptic reasons, acknowledged defective versions of the reasons they expect to eventually grasp. The psychology of such a transformation is marked by intrinsic conflict between their old point of view on value and the one they are trying to acquire. They cannot adjudicate this conflict by deliberating or choosing or deciding-rather, they resolve it by working to see the world in a new way. This work has a teleological structure: by modeling oneself on the person he or she is trying to be, the aspirant brings that person into being. Because it is open to us to engage in an activity of self-creation, we are responsible for having become the kinds of people we are.

Download or read book Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 1030 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Changing Contours of Work written by Stephen Sweet and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Third Edition of Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy, Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins once again provide a rich analysis of the American workplace in the larger context of an integrated global economy. Through engaging vignettes and rich data, this text frames the development of jobs and employment opportunities in an international comparative perspective, revealing the historical transformations of work (the “old economy” and the “new economy”) and identifying the profound effects that these changes have had on lives, jobs, and life chances. The text examines the many complexities of race, class, and gender inequalities in the modern-day workplace, and details the consequences of job insecurity and work schedules mismatched to family needs. Throughout the text, strategic recommendations are offered to improve the new economy.

Download or read book Structure and Agency in Young People s Lives written by Magda Nico and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-12 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives brings together different takes on the possible combinations of agency and structure in the life course, thus rejecting the notion that young individuals are the single masters of their lives, but also the view that their social destinies are completely out of their hands. ‘How did I get here?’ This is a question young people have always asked themselves and is often asked by youth researchers. There is no easy and single answer. The lives that are told, on one hand, and their interpretation, on the other, may have the underlying idea of 'own doing' or the idea of 'social determinism' or, more accurately and frequently, a combination of the two. This collection constitutes a comprehensive map on how to make sense of youth’s biographies and trajectories, it questions and reshapes the discussion on the role and responsibility of youth studies in the understanding of how people juggle opportunities and constraints, and contributes to escaping what Furlong and Cartmel identified as the "epistemological fallacy of late modernity", in which young people find themselves responsible for collective failures or inevitabilities. It can thus interest students, researchers and professors, youth workers and all of those who work for and with young people.

Download or read book Monthly Catalogue United States Public Documents written by and published by . This book was released on 1989-03 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Philosophical Topics written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. for 1981- include the proceedings of the Southwestern Philosophical Society.

Download or read book Minding the Modern written by Thomas Pfau and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-02-15 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice. A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.

Download or read book Contours of Dignity written by Suzanne Killmister and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Contours of Dignity, Suzanne Killmister sets out an original and innovative approach to understanding dignity. She considers the relationship between dignity and respect, the ways in which shame and humiliation can constitute dignity violations, and the links between dignity and human rights. Departing from the dominant conception of dignity as an inherent feature of all human beings, Killmister instead ties dignity to personal and social standards. She argues for a tripartite theory--comprised of personal dignity, social dignity, and status dignity--in which dignity is to be understood in terms of the norms to which we hold ourselves and others. This revised understanding opens the door to a rich exploration of the moral significance of dignity, and the ways in which dignity can be violated, frustrated, or destroyed. These fresh insights can then help us understand the distinctively dignitarian harms that are inflicted on people when they are tortured, humiliated, or disrespected. Killmister concludes by offering a novel account of human rights, one that is built upon the idea that the 'human' in human rights should be interpreted as a socially constructed category.

Download or read book Vibrant Matter written by Jane Bennett and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

Download or read book Agency in Transnational Memory Politics written by Jenny Wüstenberg and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous disciplines, even as nascent, boundary-crossing theories on topics such as multi-vocal, traveling, or entangled remembrance suggest new ways of negotiating difficult political questions. This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency—the “who” and the “how” of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.

Download or read book Frameworks of Power written by Stewart Clegg and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1989-07-17 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook provides a coherent and comprehensive account of the different frameworks for understanding power which have been advanced within the social sciences. Though looking back to the classical literature on power with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Hobbes, the book concentrates on the modern analysis of power - from both British and American social and political theorists, and from German Critical Theory and French theorists such as Foucault - and develops upon its theory and its application. Not only does the book provide an overview of the various frameworks of power advanced by these and other influential thinkers, but it also develops a new synthesis based on important work in both the sociology of science