Download or read book The Persistence of the Human written by Matthew Escobar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-09-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent narrative fiction and film increasingly exploit, explore and thematize the embodied mind, revealing the tenacity of a certain brand of humanism. The presence of narratively based concepts of personal identity even in texts which explore posthuman possibilities is strong proof that our basic understanding of what it means to be human has, despite appearances, remained mostly unchanged. This is so even though our perception of time has been greatly modified by the same technology which both interrupts and allows for the rearrangement of our experience of time at a rate and a level of ease which, until recently, had never been possible. Basing his views on a long line of philosophers and literary theorists such as Paul Ricoeur, Daniel Dennett and Francisco Varela, Escobar maintains in The Persistence of the Human that narrative plays an essential role in the process of constituting and maintaining a sense of self. It is narrative’s effect on the embodied mind which gives it such force. Narrative projects us into possible spaces, shaping a temporary corporeality termed the “meta-body,” a hybrid shared by the lived body and an imagined corporeal sense. The meta-body is a secondary embodiment that we inhabit for however long our narrative immersion lasts – something which, in today’s world, may be a question of milliseconds or hours. The more agreeable the meta-body is, the less happy we are upon being abruptly removed from it, though the return is essential. We want to be able to slip back and forth between this secondary embodiment and that of our lived body; each move entails both forgetting and remembering different subject positions (loss and recuperation being salient themes in the works which highlight this process). The negotiation of the transfer between these states is shaped by culture and technology and this is something which is precisely in flux now as multiple, ephemeral narrative immersion experiences are created by the different screens we come into contact with.
Download or read book The Persistent Power of Human Rights written by Thomas Risse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a unique combination of quantitative and qualitative research arguing for the persistent power of human rights norms.
Download or read book The Taming of Evolution written by Davydd Greenwood and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of evolution has clearly altered our views of the biological world, but in the study of human beings, evolutionary and preevolutionary views continue to coexist in a state of perpetual tension. The Taming of Evolution addresses the questions of how and why this is so. Davydd Greenwood offers a sustained critique of the nature/nurture debate, revealing the complexity of the relationship between science and ideology. He maintains that popular contemporary theories, most notably E. O. Wilson’s human sociobiology and Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism, represent pre-Darwinian notions overlaid by elaborate evolutionary terminology. Greenwood first details the humoral-environmental and Great Chain of Being theories that dominated Western thinking before Darwin. He systematically compares these ideas with those later influenced by Darwin’s theories, illuminating the surprising continuities between them. Greenwood suggests that it would be neither difficult nor socially dangerous to develop a genuinely evolutionary understanding of human beings, so long as we realized that we could not derive political and moral standards from the study of biological processes.
Download or read book The Persistence of Persons written by Valerio Buonomo (Ed.) and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We ordinarily believe that the inhabitants of the world – including ourselves – persist over time. Such an idea, however, has puzzled philosophers for centuries. How can we change and still be the same? More specifically, is there any constitutive condition of our identity over time? And if so, does this condition involve mental aspects (such as memories, believes, experiences, etc.), physical aspects (such as the body, or the continuity of the organism), or something else? Or is rather personal identity primitive and unanalyzable, so that our persistence is nothing but a brute fact? This volume is a collection of new essays from leading figures in the field analyzing the persistence of persons and the criteria of personal identity over time. It presents an extensive discussion of the most relevant views on personal identity in contemporary metaphysics and provides new treatments of the constitutive conditions of personal persistence.
Download or read book On Human Persons written by Klaus Petrus and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no question: We are all persons. But what exactly are persons? Are we immaterial souls or Cartesian Egos which only contingently have bodies? Or are persons nothing over and above their bodies? Are they essentially or most fundamentally animals, evolved beings of a certain sort? Or are we something other or more than animals, namely constituted beings with a certain capacity that distinguishes persons from everything else? What is necessary, and what is sufficient, for an entity to be classified or (re-)identified as a person? What's the value of an analysis of such (biological or psychological) conditions? What does it contribute to our understanding of ourselves as free agents or as beings wanting to live their individual live? The essays collected in this anthology try to answer these questions. They are primarily concerned with the metaphysics of persons and the criteria of personal identity, but also touch on problems of the theory of action and of practical philosophy.
Download or read book The Nature of Human Persons written by Jason T. Eberl and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a shared nature common to all human beings? What essential qualities might define this nature? These questions are among the most widely discussed topics in the history of philosophy and remain subjects of perennial interest and controversy. The Nature of Human Persons offers a metaphysical investigation of the composition of the human essence. For a human being to exist, does it require an immaterial mind, a physical body, a functioning brain, a soul? Jason Eberl also considers the criterion of identity for a developing human being—that is, what is required for a human being to continue existing as a person despite undergoing physical and psychological changes over time? Eberl's investigation presents and defends a theoretical perspective from the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. Advancing beyond descriptive historical analysis, this book places Aquinas’s account of human nature into direct comparison with several prominent contemporary theories: substance dualism, emergentism, animalism, constitutionalism, four-dimensionalism, and embodied mind theory. These theories inform various conclusions regarding when human beings first come into existence—at conception, during gestation, or after birth—and how we ought to define death for human beings. Finally, each of these viewpoints offers a distinctive rationale as to whether, and if so how, human beings may survive death. Ultimately, Eberl argues that the Thomistic account of human nature addresses the matters of human nature and survival in a much more holistic and desirable way than the other theories and offers a cohesive portrait of one’s continued existence from conception through life to death and beyond.
Download or read book The Better Business Book written by Authors Unite and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-09-14 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you're like me, you probably have 100+ business books on your shelf collecting dust. Some of them you've read, some of them you had hopes of reading, but life just got in the way. Each of those books probably followed a theme and had one important underlying message to share with you. Hundreds of pages, thousands of words, but only one golden nugget of underlying wisdom. All that reading for just one golden nugget. Imagine if you could have one book that gave you 100 golden nuggets. Less dust. Less clutter. Just one book to always have by your side and reference whenever you need to. Well, that's The Better Business Book. It's your one-stop shop for crystal-clear business advice that you can use to grow your business and live the life you've always wanted. The Better Business Book is better than your average business book. That's how we came up with the title. It consists of 100 people each sharing their most valuable business lesson. A real story from their business experience and the lesson they learned from it. Each time you read it, you will learn something new. Guaranteed. We hope you enjoy reading this book half as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.
Download or read book Why Does Patriarchy Persist written by Carol Gilligan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The election of an unabashedly patriarchal man as US President was a shock for many—despite decades of activism on gender inequalities and equal rights, how could it come to this? What is it about patriarchy that seems to make it so resilient and resistant to change? Undoubtedly it endures in part because some people benefit from the unequal advantages it confers. But is that enough to explain its stubborn persistence? In this highly original and persuasively argued book, Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider put forward a different view: they argue that patriarchy persists because it serves a psychological function. By requiring us to sacrifice love for the sake of hierarchy, patriarchy protects us from the vulnerability of loving and becomes a defense against loss. Uncovering the powerful psychological mechanisms that underpin patriarchy, the authors show how forces beyond our awareness may be driving a politics that otherwise seems inexplicable.
Download or read book The Human Advantage written by Suzana Herculano-Houzel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why our human brains are awesome, and how we left our cousins, the great apes, behind: a tale of neurons and calories, and cooking. Humans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we are evolutionary outliers. The human brain was not singled out to become amazing in its own exclusive way, and it never stopped being a primate brain. If we are not an exception to the rules of evolution, then what is the source of the human advantage? Herculano-Houzel shows that it is not the size of our brain that matters but the fact that we have more neurons in the cerebral cortex than any other animal, thanks to our ancestors' invention, some 1.5 million years ago, of a more efficient way to obtain calories: cooking. Because we are primates, ingesting more calories in less time made possible the rapid acquisition of a huge number of neurons in the still fairly small cerebral cortex—the part of the brain responsible for finding patterns, reasoning, developing technology, and passing it on through culture. Herculano-Houzel shows us how she came to these conclusions—making “brain soup” to determine the number of neurons in the brain, for example, and bringing animal brains in a suitcase through customs. The Human Advantage is an engaging and original look at how we became remarkable without ever being special.
Download or read book The Art of Persistence written by Charlotte Eubanks and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of Persistence examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu’s lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the transwar proletarian movement. More broadly, it outlines an ethical position known as persistence, which occupies the grey area between complicity and resistance: Like resilience, persistence signals a commitment to not disappearing—a fierce act of taking up space but often from a position of privilege, among the classes and people in power. Akamatsu grew up in a settler-colonial family in rural Hokkaido before attending arts college in Tokyo and becoming one of the first women to receive formal training as an oil painter in Japan. She later worked as a governess in the home of a Moscow diplomat and traveled to the Japanese Mandate in Micronesia before returning home to write and illustrate children’s books set in the Pacific. She married the surrealist poet and painter Maruki Iri (1901–1995), and together in 1948—and in defiance of Occupation censorship—they began creating and exhibiting the Nuclear Series, some of the most influential and powerful artwork depicting the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. For the next forty or more years, the couple toured the world to protest war and nuclear proliferation and were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. With abundant excerpts and drawings from Akamatsu’s journals and sketchbooks, The Art of Persistence offers a bridge between scholarship on imperial Japan and postwar memory cultures, arguing for the importance of each individual’s historical agency. While uncovering the longue durée of Japan’s visual cultures of war, it charts the development of the national(ist) “literature for little citizens” movement and Japan’s postwar reorientation toward global multiculturalism. Finally, the work proposes ways to enlist artwork generally, and the museum specifically, as a site of ethical engagement.
Download or read book The Secret of Our Success written by Joseph Henrich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
Download or read book New Essays on the Rationalists written by Rocco J. Gennaro and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents some of the most vital and original recent writings on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, the three greatest rationalists of the early modern period. Their work offered brilliant and distinct integrations of science, morals, metaphysics, and religion, which today remain at the center of philosophical discussion. The essays written especially for this volume explore how these three philosophical systems treated matter, substance, human freedom, natural necessity, knowledge, mind, and consciousness. The contributors include some of the most prominent writers in the field, including Jonathan Bennett, Michael Della Rocca, Jan A. Cover, Catherine Wilson, Stephen Voss, Edwin Curley, Don Garrett, and Margaret D. Wilson.
Download or read book Persistence written by Ivan Coyote and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lambda Literary Award finalist American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme." Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come. Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992. Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system. Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.
Download or read book Persistence of the Negative written by Benjamin Noys and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative.
Download or read book Death and Persistence written by Rebekah L. H. Rice and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that physical death may not mark the end of an individual's existence has long been a source of fascination. It is perhaps unsurprising that we are apt to wonder what it is that happens to us when we die. Is death the end of me and all the experiences that count as mine? Or might I exist, and indeed have experiences, beyond the time of my death? And yet, deep metaphysical puzzles arise at the very suggestion that persons might continue to exist following physical death. Indeed, whether, and how, one can exist post-mortem will depend in no small part on what sorts of things we are and on what it takes for things like us to persist across temporal durations and other changes. These topics and their application to the growing collection of materialist accounts of resurrection are the focus of this Element.
Download or read book The Homiletic Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Human Herpesviruses written by Ann Arvin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-16 with total page 1325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive account of the human herpesviruses provides an encyclopedic overview of their basic virology and clinical manifestations. This group of viruses includes human simplex type 1 and 2, Epstein–Barr virus, Kaposi's Sarcoma-associated herpesvirus, cytomegalovirus, HHV6A, 6B and 7, and varicella-zoster virus. The viral diseases and cancers they cause are significant and often recurrent. Their prevalence in the developed world accounts for a major burden of disease, and as a result there is a great deal of research into the pathophysiology of infection and immunobiology. Another important area covered within this volume concerns antiviral therapy and the development of vaccines. All these aspects are covered in depth, both scientifically and in terms of clinical guidelines for patient care. The text is illustrated generously throughout and is fully referenced to the latest research and developments.