ALBERT

Description: acques Derrida’s extensive early writings devoted considerable attention to “being as presence,” the reality underlying the history of metaphysics. In Derrida on Being as Presence: Questions and Quests, David A. White develops the intricate conceptual structure of this notion by close exegetical readings drawn from these writings. White discusses cardinal concepts in Derrida’s revamping of theoretical considerations pertaining to language–signification, context, negation, iterability–as these considerations depend on the structure of being as presence and also as they ground “deconstructive” reading. White’s appraisal raises questions invoking a range of problems. He deploys these questions in conjunction with thematically related quests that arise given Derrida’s conviction that the history of metaphysics, as variations on being as presence, has concealed and skewed vital elements of reality. White inflects this critical apparatus concerning being as presence with texts drawn from that history–e.g., by Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Hume, Kant, Whitehead. The essay concludes with a speculative ensemble of provisional categories, or zones of specificity. Implementing these categories will ground the possibility that philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular can be pursued in ways which acknowledge the relevance of Derrida’s thought when integrated with the philosophical enterprise as traditionally understood.

Description: Fragments of music manuscripts are some of the commonest finds inside bindings of later volumes, or unlabeled boxes tucked away in libraries and archives. Their surviving radically shaped our modern understanding of early European music. This volume looks at ‘disiecta membra’ not as relics of a lost whole, but as principal objects of study, illuminating societal, material, and cultural contexts, and requiring specific approaches and methodologies.

Description: This work is largely a social history of Tertullian, a Christian from Carthage (c.160� CE), and his ancient African context, which is viewed through a postcolonial lens.Theories from the discipline of social/cultural anthropology, e.g. kinship, class and ethnicity, are applied to selections of Tertullian`s writings.Some of the issues addressed include identity politics, Roman/African relations, martyrdom and the so-called Montanist heresy.

Description: The book is concerned with the linguistic worldview broadly understood, but it focuses on one particular variant of the idea, its sources, extensions, its critical assessment, and inspirations for related research. This approach is the ethnolinguistic linguistic worldview (LWV) program pursued in Lublin, Poland, and initiated and headed by Jerzy Bartmiński. In its basic design, the volume emerged from the theme of the conference held in Lublin in October 2011: “The linguistic worldview or linguistic views of worlds?” If the latter is the case, then what worlds? Is it a case of one language/one worldview? Are there literary or poetic worldviews? Are there auctorial worldviews? Many of the chapters are based on presentations from that conference, and others have been written especially for the volume. Generally, there are four kinds of contributions: (i) a presentation and exemplification of the “Lublin style” LWV approach; (ii) studies inspired by this approach but not following it in detail; (iii) independent but related and compatible research; and (iv) a critical reappraisal of some specific ideas proposed by Jerzy Bartmiński and his collaborators.

Description: This book fills a gap in the historiographical and theoretical fields of race, gender, and war. In brief, Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare (RGMWW) offers an introduction into how cultural constructions of identity are transformed by war and how they in turn influence the nature of military institutions and conflicts. Focusing on the modern West, this project begins by introducing the contours of race and gender theories as they have evolved and how they are employed by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars. The project then mixes chronological narrative with analysis and historiography as it takes the reader through a series of case studies, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the Global War of Terror. The purpose throughout is not merely to create a list of so-called "great moments" in race and gender, but to create a meta-landscape in which readers can learn to identify for themselves the disjunctures, flaws, and critical synergies in the traditional memory and history of a largely monochrome and male-exclusive military experience. The final chapter considers the current challenges that Western societies, particularly the United States, face in imposing social diversity and tolerance on statist military structures in a climates of sometimes vitriolic public debate. RGMWW represents our effort to blend race, gender, and military war, to problematize these intersections, and then provide some answers to those problems.

Description: What does order mean - what orders meaning? These are at once elementary and complex questions for the theoretical and praxeological self-definition of the textual and visual sciences. The collected essays in this volume seek answers from a wide variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives in relation to both ancient and modern objects. They engage in a dialogue between the notions of “classical” philology and “modern” literary theory.

Description: We cannot explain why people kill themselves. There are no necessary or sufficient causes for suicide, so rather than explaining suicide (looking for causes), perhaps we can understand suicide, at least in one individual, a phenomenological approach. This book begins by examining the diaries from eight individuals who killed themselves. Using qualitative analyses, supplemented in some cases by quantitative analyses, Lester seeks to uncover the unique thoughts and feelings that led these individuals to take their own lives. Lester has also studied suicide notes, the poems of those who died by suicide (both famous poets and unpublished poets), the letters written by suicides, blogs and twitter feeds, and one tape recording of a young man who killed himself just an hour or so after he recorded the tape. This book will give you insights into the “I” of the storm, the suicidal mind. David Lester has PhD’s from Cambridge University (UK) and Brandeis University (USA). He is a former President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention and a leading scholar on suicide, murder, the fear of death and other topics and thanatology.

Description: When people seek psychological support, formulation is the theory-driven methodology used by many practitioners to guide identification of the processes, mechanisms, and patterns of behaviour that appear to be contributing to the presenting difficulties. However, the process of formulating – or applying psychological theory to practice – can often seem unclear. In this volume, we present multiple demonstrations of formulation in action – written by applied psychologists embedded in clinical training, research, and practice. The volume covers a range of contemporary approaches to formulation and therapy that have not been considered in extant works, and includes unique sections offering critical counter-perspectives and commentaries on each approach (and its application) by authors working from alternative theoretical positions.

Description: Why is it that human rights are considered inviolable norms of justice at local and global scales although the number of their violations has steadily increased in modern history? On the surface, this paradox seems to be reducible to a straightforward discrepancy between idealism and reality in humanitarian affairs, but Imagining Human Rights complicates the picture by offering interdisciplinary perspectives on the imaginary status of human rights. By that the contributors mean not merely subject to imagination, open to interpretation or far too abstract, but also formative of a social imaginary with emphatic identifications and shared values. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, they explore critical ways of engaging in rigorous interdisciplinary conversations about the origin and language of human rights, personal dignity, redistributive justice, and international solidarity. Together, they show how and why a careful examination of the intersection between disciplinary investigations is essential for imagining human rights at large. Examples range from the legitimacy of land ownership rights and the inadequacy of human faculty to make sense of mass violence in visual representation to the stewardship of human rights promoters and the genealogy of human rights.

Description: The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from 1600 to the present. The incest discussion for each period is complemented with a presentation of dominant kinship structures and changes, without arguing for causal relations. Part I deals with the legacy of ecclesiastical marriage prohibitions of the Middle Ages: Historians dealing with the Reformation have wondered about the political and social implications of theological debates about the incest rules, the Enlightenment opted for sociological considerations of the household and a new anthropology based on the passions, Baroque discourse focused upon sexual relations among kin by marriage , while Enlightenment and Romantic discussions worried the intimacy of siblings. The first section of Part II deals with the six decades around 1900, during which European and American cultures obsessed about the sexuality of women. Almost everyone concurred in the idea that mother made the family what it was; that she configured the household, kept the lines of kinship vibrant, and stood at the threshold as stern gatekeeper, and many thought that she managed these tasks through her sexuality and an eroticized relationship with sons. Another story line, taken up in the section "Intermezzo," this one about the physical and mental consequences of inbreeding, appeared after 1850. To what extent do close-kin marriages pose risks for progeny? At its center, lay the incest problematic, now restated: Is avoidance of kin genetically programmed? Do all cultures know about risks of consanguinity? As for the twenty-first century, evolutionary and genetic assumptions are challenged by a living world population containing roughly one billion offspring of cousin marriages. Part III deals with one of the perhaps most remarkable reconfigurations of Western kinship in the aftermath of World War I: The shift from an endogamous to an exogamous alliance system centered on the "nuclear family." An historical anomaly, this family form began to dissolve almost as soon as it came together and, in the process, shifted the focus of incest concerns to a new pairing: father and daughter. By the 1970s, when the father/daughter problematic swept all other considerations of incest aside, that relationship had come to be modeled, for the most part, around power and its abusive potential. As for "incest," its representations in the last three decades of the twentieth century no longer focused on biologically damaged progeny but rather on power abuses in the nuclear family: sexual "abuse." By the mid-1990s, Western culture at least partly redirected its gaze away from father and daughter towards siblings, especially towards brothers and sisters and the sexual boundaries and erotics of their relationships. Correspondingly, siblings became a "model organism" for psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, and the science of genetics. ; The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from 1600 to the present. The incest discussion for each period is complemented with a presentation of dominant kinship structures and changes, without arguing for causal relations. Part I deals with the legacy of ecclesiastical marriage prohibitions of the Middle Ages: Historians dealing with the Reformation have wondered about the political and social implications of theological debates about the incest rules, the Enlightenment opted for sociological considerations of the household and a new anthropology based on the passions, Baroque discourse focused upon sexual relations among kin by marriage , while Enlightenment and Romantic discussions worried the intimacy of siblings. The first section of Part II deals with the six decades around 1900, during which European and American cultures obsessed about the sexuality of women. Almost everyone concurred in the idea that mother made the family what it was; that she configured the household, kept the lines of kinship vibrant, and stood at the threshold as stern gatekeeper, and many thought that she managed these tasks through her sexuality and an eroticized relationship with sons. Another story line, taken up in the section "Intermezzo," this one about the physical and mental consequences of inbreeding, appeared after 1850. To what extent do close-kin marriages pose risks for progeny? At its center, lay the incest problematic, now restated: Is avoidance of kin genetically programmed? Do all cultures know about risks of consanguinity? As for the twenty-first century, evolutionary and genetic assumptions are challenged by a living world population containing roughly one billion offspring of cousin marriages. Part III deals with one of the perhaps most remarkable reconfigurations of Western kinship in the aftermath of World War I: The shift from an endogamous to an exogamous alliance system centered on the "nuclear family." An historical anomaly, this family form began to dissolve almost as soon as it came together and, in the process, shifted the focus of incest concerns to a new pairing: father and daughter. By the 1970s, when the father/daughter problematic swept all other considerations of incest aside, that relationship had come to be modeled, for the most part, around power and its abusive potential. As for "incest," its representations in the last three decades of the twentieth century no longer focused on biologically damaged progeny but rather on power abuses in the nuclear family: sexual "abuse." By the mid-1990s, Western culture at least partly redirected its gaze away from father and daughter towards siblings, especially towards brothers and sisters and the sexual boundaries and erotics of their relationships. Correspondingly, siblings became a "model organism" for psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, and the science of genetics.