Philosophy Books - Page 2

The Way of the Small: Why Less Is More

Michael Gellert

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A practical and spiritual guide to making everyday living sacred.

The Way of the Small: Why Less is Truly More explores the principals of a sound, wholesome exisistence for both the individual and society. Addressing the search for finding true happiness, meaning and success, The Way of the Small gives us new perspectives based on old wisdom on what makes for a truly lived life. A practical and spiritual guide to fulfillment, it illustrates that happiness is found in "the small"-in ways to celebrate the precious small gifts of ordinary life and experiencing the sacred in all aspects of life. We are reminded that "Less Is More, Simpler Is Better."

The Way of the Small teaches ways to embrace even life's more difficult passages such as aging, failure, illness, or the loss of a loved one, making even our pain a path to the sacred that helps us find meaning in life as it happens.

* Offers 22 key principles to activate the way of the small--simplify and discover true happiness.
* Especially relevant for mid-lifers, helping the process of sifting through life experience and finding what is of true essence, personally, spiritually and worldly.
* Relates the how "smallness" is part of established major religions and spiritual teachings. * A practical and spiritual guide to help us navigate a way of living in our complex times that leads to a happier and more meaningful and balanced life.

Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look

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Introduction to the Philosophies of Research and Criticism in Education and the Social Sciences

James Paul

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Intellectually challenging, yet perfectly clear 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Paul's book is excellent for making clear to readers the essential differences between philosophies of research, largely through the second part of the book, in which research questions are developed by alternative methodologies. While the book is structured as a text, it will be of interest to anyone who is a critical consumer of research reports. Not only will I use this with my research students, but I will also use it as a refresher for course design.

Editorial Review:

This rigorous volume focuses on the underlying perspectives justifying the major approaches currently being used in educational research. Introductory chapters lay the foundation for exploring varying research perspectives. Nine specific perspectives on research—post positivism, pragmatism, constructivism, ethics and deliberate democracy, criticism, interpretivism, race/ethnicity/gender, arts-based research, and post structuralism—are examined, through discussions written by senior scholars known for their expertise in the perspective. And, a “guided tour” of criticism is given, in which these same scholars demonstrate the use of the “critical method” by critiquing six studies selected as exemplars of different research approaches. For education students who aspire to become researchers, and for those who simply need to read and understand research literature.

Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Suny Series in Philosophy of the Social Sciences)

Donald E. Polkinghorne

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Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions

Pauline Rosenau

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Editorial Review:

Post-modernism offers a revolutionary approach to the study of society: in questioning the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge, this movement discards history, rejects humanism, and resists any truth claims. In this comprehensive assessment of post-modernism, Pauline Rosenau traces its origins in the humanities and describes how its key concepts are today being applied to, and are restructuring, the social sciences. Serving as neither an opponent nor an apologist for the movement, she cuts through post-modernism's often incomprehensible jargon in order to offer all readers a lucid exposition of its propositions. Rosenau shows how the post-modern challenge to reason and rational organization radiates across academic fields. For example, in psychology it questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject; in public administration it encourages a retreat from central planning and from reliance on specialists; in political science it calls into question the authority of hierarchical, bureaucratic decision-making structures that function in carefully defined spheres; in anthropology it inspires the protection of local, primitive cultures from First World attempts to reorganize them. In all of the social sciences, she argues, post-modernism repudiates representative democracy and plays havoc with the very meaning of "left-wing" and "right-wing." Rosenau also highlights how post-modernism has inspired a new generation of social movements, ranging from New Age sensitivities to Third World fundamentalism. In weighing its strengths and weaknesses, the author examines two major tendencies within post-modernism, the largely European, skeptical form and the predominantly Anglo-North-American form, which suggests alternative political, social, and cultural projects. She draws examples from anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, law, planning, political science, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and women's studies, and provides a glossary of post-modern terms to assist the uninitiated reader with special meanings not found in standard dictionaries.

The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Freshman to Grad School 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book was assigned to me as a textbook in an undergraduate lit theory course. I'm in grad school now and still use it quite often. Although it has fewer entries than most literary reference books, the definitions are sharp and contain plenty of cross-referencing and important names. This guide is an excellent starting point for term-paper research, and I will probably use it in my own classroom someday.

lucid and succinct descriptions 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Childers and Hentzi offers lucid and succinct descriptions of the most common ideas and terms you are likely to encounter in literary theory. Typically, each is covered in only a page. Enough for a quick refresher for students facing an exam. Plus, the explanations often involve pointers to related ideas elsewhere in the book.

The book is probably more suited for the undergrad. A grad student in the field should already be well familiar with the terminology.

Editorial Review:

More than 450 succinct entries from A to Z help readers make sense of the interdisciplinary knowledge of cultural criticism that includes film, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, poststructuralist, and postmodernist theory as well as philosophy, media studies, linguistics.

The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Axel Honneth

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Editorial Review:

This is a most remarkable book. The exposition and critical discussion are conducted with exemplary clarity. It may change intellectual lives; it will certainly attract a great deal of attention for many years to come." -- William Outhwaite, University of Sussex "Honneth's book casts a flood of light on what has been an area of darkness, the place where the philosophical tradition and modern politics meet and interweave. Since neither is really comprehensible without the other, this work is essential reading for those who would understand either. It is a pathbreaking study, which ought to be at the center of the debate for many years to come." -- Charles Taylor, McGill University

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

The City of Man

Pierre Manent

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Editorial Review:

The "City of God" or the "City of Man"? This is the choice St. Augustine offered 1500 years ago--and according to Pierre Manent the modern West has decisively and irreversibly chosen the latter. In this subtle and wide- ranging book on the Western intellectual and political condition, Manent argues that the West has rejected the laws of God and of nature in a quest for human autonomy. But in declaring ourselves free and autonomous, he contends, we have, paradoxically, lost a sense of what it means to be human. In the first part of the book, Manent explores the development of the social sciences since the seventeenth century, portraying their growth as a sign of increasing human "self-consciousness." But as social scientists have sought to free us from the intellectual confines of the ancient world, he writes, they have embraced modes of analysis--economic, sociological, and historical--that treat only narrow aspects of the human condition and portray individuals as helpless victims of impersonal forces. As a result, we have lost all sense of human agency and of the unified human subject at the center of intellectual study. Politics and culture have come to be seen as mere foam on the tides of historical and social necessity. In the second half of the book, titled "Self-Affirmation," Manent examines how the West, having discovered freedom, then discovered arbitrary will and its dangers. With no shared touchstones or conceptions of virtue, for example, we have found it increasingly hard to communicate with each other. This is a striking contrast to the past, he writes, when even traditions as different as the Classical and the Christian held many of these conceptions in common. The result of these discoveries, according to Manent, is the disturbing rootlessness that characterizes our time. By gaining autonomy from external authority, we have lost a sense of what we are. In "giving birth" to ourselves, we have abandoned that which alone can nurture and sustain us. With penetrating insight and remarkable erudition, Manent offers a profound analysis of the confusions and contradictions at the heart of the modern condition.

Readings on Human Nature

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Editorial Review:

This anthology brings together 45 selections by a wide range of philosophers and other thinkers, and provides a representative sampling of the approaches to the study of human nature that have been taken within the western tradition.

The selections range in time from the ancient Greeks to the 1990s, and in political orientation from the conservative individualism of Ayn Rand to the liberalism of John Rawls. Classic writings from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries are here (Descartes, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and so on), but so are a wide range of twentieth-century writings, including a number of feminist voices, the biological theory of Edward O. Wilson, and the cultural materialist theory of Marvin Harris. A substantial selection of Christian views of human nature is a central part of the anthology.

The anthology is as notable for its depth as it is for its breadth; an important editorial principle has been to include a variety of substantial selections, thus allowing the reader to engage more readily with some of the complexities of each approach.

Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences: Foundations and Applications

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Editorial Review:

Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences: Foundations and Applications offers the most recent thinking in applying the chaos paradigm to the social sciences. The book explores the methodological techniques--and their difficulties--for determining whether chaotic processes may in fact exist in a particular instance and examines implications of chaos theory when applied specifically to political science, economics, and sociology. The contributors to the book show that no single technique can be used to diagnose and describe all chaotic processes and identify the strengths and limitations of a variety of approaches.
The essays in this volume consider the application of chaos theory to such diverse phenomena as public opinion, the behavior of states in the international arena, the development of rational economic expectations, and long waves.
Contributors include Brian J. L. Berry, Thad Brown, Kenyon B. DeGreene, Dimitrios Dendrinos, Euel Elliott, David Harvey, L. Ted Jaditz, Douglas Kiel, Heja Kim, Michael McBurnett, Michael Reed, Diana Richards, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., and Alvin M. Saperstein.
L. Douglas Kiel and Euel W. Elliott are both Associate Professors of Government, Politics, and Political Economy, University of Texas at Dallas.