Download or read book Obscurantism in power written by Brice Perrier and published by Max Milo. This book was released on 2024-08-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last ten years or so, it has become commonplace to hear talk of an obscurantist threat linked to a rise in irrationality, manifested mainly by a mistrust of vaccination and conventional medicine. But obscurantism can also be found where we pride ourselves on fighting it. In this case, it is no longer the work of marginal or anti-establishment groups, but of a dominant way of thinking that presents itself as that of science and rationality. The aim of this book is to lift the veil on this obscurantism in power. Through numerous examples, from impeded research into unexplained phenomena such as near-death experiences, to the vast field of medicine where the pharmaceutical industry has cornered the market on proving the usefulness of a treatment, Brice Perrier reveals how reason is transformed into dogmatism and hinders the advancement of knowledge. The aim of the book is not to say what is true or false, nor to settle scientific controversies, but to understand why these debates, which have always been legitimate and even necessary in science, may simply no longer be allowed.

Download or read book American Obscurantism written by Peter Lurie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or naïveté that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white-,bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the Coens, the book ends by linking Crane's famous optimism in The Bridge, one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and an optimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive visual culture as well as racial vision.

Download or read book American Obscurantism written by Peter Lurie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in US culture. Critiquing the impulse to see history in seminal works like Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the residual positivism of New Historicist methodology, the book challenges this shared visual epistemology . It traces meaningful exceptions to this pattern across canonical figures from US literature and film.

Download or read book Obscurantism in Modern Science written by Edward Clodd and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Northrop Frye the High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism written by Pauline Kogan and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Continental Philosophy A Very Short Introduction written by Simon Critchley and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-02-22 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Critchley's Very Short Introduction shows that Continental philosophy encompasses a distinct set of philosophical traditions and practices, with a compelling range of problems all too often ignored by the analytic tradition. He discusses the ideas and approaches of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida, and introduces key concepts such as existentialism, nihilism, and phenomenology by explaining their place in the Continental tradition. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book Learn to Write Badly written by Michael Billig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig's witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use - 'reification' or 'nominalization' rather than the corresponding verbs 'reify' or 'nominalize'. According to Billig, social scientists not only use their terminology to exaggerate and to conceal, but also to promote themselves and their work.

Download or read book Explaining Social Behavior written by Jon Elster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new edition of his critically acclaimed book, Jon Elster examines the nature of social behavior, proposing choice as the central concept of the social sciences. Extensively revised throughout, the book offers an overview of key explanatory mechanisms, drawing on many case studies and experiments to explore the nature of explanation in the social sciences; an analysis of the mental states - beliefs, desires, and emotions - that are precursors to action; a systematic comparison of rational-choice models of behavior with alternative accounts, and a review of mechanisms of social interaction ranging from strategic behavior to collective decision making. A wholly new chapter includes an exploration of classical moralists and Proust in charting mental mechanisms operating 'behind the back' of the agent, and a new conclusion points to the pitfalls and fallacies in current ways of doing social science, proposing guidelines for more modest and more robust procedures.

Download or read book How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty First Century written by Erik Olin Wright and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values—equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity—can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society. Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author’s close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.

Download or read book The American Journal of Theology written by University of Chicago. Divinity School and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. 2-6 include "Theological and Semitic literature for 1898- 1901, a bibliographical supplement to the American journal of theology and the American journal of Semitic languages and literatures. By W. Muss-Arnolt." (Separately paged)

Download or read book The Invention of the Underclass written by Loïc Wacquant and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-01-28 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At century’s close, American social scientists, policy analysts, philanthropists and politicians became obsessed with a fearsome and mysterious new group said to be ravaging the ghetto: the urban “underclass.” Soon the scarecrow category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe and agitated the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis. In this punchy book, Loïc Wacquant retraces the invention and metamorphoses of this racialized folk devil, from the structural conception of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to the behavioral notion of Washington think-tank experts to the neo-ecological formulation of sociologist William Julius Wilson. He uncovers the springs of the sudden irruption, accelerated circulation, and abrupt evaporation of the “underclass” from public debate, and reflects on the implications for the social epistemology of urban marginality. What accounts for the “lemming effect” that drew a generation of scholars of race and poverty over a scientific cliff? What are the conditions for the formation and bursting of “conceptual speculative bubbles”? What is the role of think tanks, journalism, and politics in imposing “turnkey problematics” upon social researchers? What are the special quandaries posed by the naming of dispossessed and dishonored populations in scientific discourse and how can we reformulate the explosive question of “race” to avoid these troubles? Answering these questions constitutes an exacting exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the tradition of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Bourdieu, and it issues in a clarion call for social scientists to defend their intellectual autonomy against the encroachments of outside powers, be they state officials, the media, think tanks, or philanthropic organizations. Compact, meticulous and forcefully argued, this study in the politics of social science knowledge will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, ethnic studies, geography, intellectual history, the philosophy of science and public policy.

Download or read book Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics written by James Hastings and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 938 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Religion and Scientific Naturalism written by David Ray Griffin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2000-05-11 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2000 Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize In this book, David Ray Griffin argues that the perceived conflict between science and religion is based upon a double mistake-the assumption that religion requires supernaturalism and that scientific naturalism requires atheism and materialism.

Download or read book The Logos of Heraclitus written by Eva Brann and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this extraordinary meditation, Eva Brann takes us to the fierce core of Heraclitus's vision and shows us the music of his language. The thought and beautiful prose in The Logos of Heraclitus are a delight.”—Barry Mazur, Harvard University “An engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world, inventor of the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism,” “teasingly obscure in reputation, but hard-hittingly clear in fact,” “now tersely mordant, now generously humane.” Thus Eva Brann introduces Heraclitus—in her view, the West’s first philosopher. The collected work of Heraclitus comprises 131 passages. Eva Brann sets out to understand Heraclitus as he is found in these passages and particularly in his key word, Logos, the order that is the cosmos. “Whoever is captivated by the revelatory riddlings and brilliant obscurities of what remains of Heraclitus has to begin anew—accepting help, to be sure, from previous readings—in a spirit of receptivity and reserve. But essentially everyone must pester the supposed obscurantist until he opens up. Heraclitus is no less and no more pregnantly dark than an oracle…The upshot is that no interpretation has prevailed; every question is wide open.”

Download or read book Demarcation and Demystification written by J. Moufawad-Paul and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marx once declared that philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Demarcation and Demystification examines the ways in which a radical practice of philosophy is possible under the aegis of Marx's 11th thesis, arguing that philosophy's radicality is discovered by understanding that it can only ever interpret the world; that social transformation lies beyond the sphere of its operations. 'Demarcation and Demystification is a major statement on the gulf between what philosophers actually do, and what they think they do.' Matthew R. McLennan, author of Philosophy and Vulnerability

Download or read book Albany Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Terms of Disservice written by Dipayan Ghosh and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designing a new digital social contract for our technological future High technology presents a paradox. In just a few decades, it has transformed the world, making almost limitless quantities of information instantly available to billions of people and reshaping businesses, institutions, and even entire economies. But it also has come to rule our lives, addicting many of us to the march of megapixels across electronic screens both large and small. Despite its undeniable value, technology is exacerbating deep social and political divisions in many societies. Elections influenced by fake news and unscrupulous hidden actors, the cyber-hacking of trusted national institutions, the vacuuming of private information by Silicon Valley behemoths, ongoing threats to vital infrastructure from terrorist groups and even foreign governments—all these concerns are now part of the daily news cycle and are certain to become increasingly serious into the future. In this new world of endless technology, how can individuals, institutions, and governments harness its positive contributions while protecting each of us, no matter who or where we are? In this book, a former Facebook public policy adviser who went on to assist President Obama in the White House offers practical ideas for using technology to create an open and accessible world that protects all consumers and civilians. As a computer scientist turned policymaker, Dipayan Ghosh answers the biggest questions about technology facing the world today. Proving clear and understandable explanations for complex issues, Terms of Disservice will guide industry leaders, policymakers, and the general public as we think about how we ensure that the Internet works for everyone, not just Silicon Valley.