Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary
Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary

Author: Catherine Z. Elgin

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780801483998

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In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic. Under the standard conception, unless answers to philosophical questions are absolute, they are arbitrary. Unless a philosophy is grounded in determinate, agent-neutral facts, it is right only relative to a perspective that cannot in the end be justified. Elgin charts a course between the two poles, showing how fact and value intertwine, where art and science intersect. Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary cuts a path through philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of art, disclosing common problems, resources, and solutions. Elgin highlights the ineliminability of values from the realm of facts, the dependence of facts on category schemes, and the ways human interests, practices, and goals affect the categories we contrive. Individually, the essays in this book contribute to ongoing debates in their respective fields. Collectively, they constitute a sustained critique of an entrenched conception of the resources available to philosophy, and argue for a constructive nominalist alternative. Once free of the conceptual stranglehold of traditional dualisms, Elgin argues, people can contrive a variety of frameworks, tailor-made to suit evolving interests and ends. The results are neither absolute nor arbitrary.

Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold
Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold

Author: Tom Shachtman

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2000-12-12

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0547525958

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“A lovely, fascinating book, which brings science to life.” —Alan Lightman Combining science, history, and adventure, Tom Shachtman “holds the reader’s attention with the skill of a novelist” as he chronicles the story of humans’ four-centuries-long quest to master the secrets of cold (Scientific American). “A disarming portrait of an exquisite, ferocious, world-ending extreme,” Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold demonstrates how temperature science produced astonishing scientific insights and applications that have revolutionized civilization (Kirkus Reviews). It also illustrates how scientific advancement, fueled by fortuitous discoveries and the efforts of determined individuals, has allowed people to adapt to—and change—the environments in which they live and work, shaping man’s very understanding of, and relationship, with the world. This “truly wonderful book” was adapted into an acclaimed documentary underwritten by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, directed by British Emmy Award winner David Dugan, and aired on the BBC and PBS’s Nova in 2008 (Library Journal). “An absorbing account to chill out with.” —Booklist

Arbitrary Rule
Arbitrary Rule

Author: Mary Nyquist

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 022627179X

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Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

Re-reading Saussure
Re-reading Saussure

Author: Paul J. Thibault

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780415104111

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Saussure's theory of language is generally considered to be a formal theory of abstract sign-types and systems, separate from our individual and social practices of making meaning. In this challenging book, Thibault presents a different view of Saussure. Paying close attention to the original texts, including Cours de linguistique generale, he demonstrates that Saussure was centrally concerned with trying to formulate a theory of how meanings are made.

Arbitrary Power
Arbitrary Power

Author: William Keach

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 140087324X

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This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history.

Considered Judgment
Considered Judgment

Author: Catherine Z. Elgin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1999-02-21

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0691005230

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Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she argues for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns. Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief.

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government
John Locke's Two Treatises of Government

Author: Edward J. Harpham

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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The past thirty years have witnessed a renaissance in Lockean scholarship. New work and new thinking has now recast our most basic comprehension of John Locke (1623-1704) as a political theorist, and of Locke's Two Treatises of Government as a historical document. This collection of essays investigates the implications of the new scholarship for our understanding of Locke's political thought and its impact upon the liberal tradition. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government has long been recognized as one of the great works of political philosophy. Three centuries after it was written, students and scholars continue to study it for insights into the intellectual origins of the modern world and for a better understanding of such fundamental concepts as natural rights, social contract, limited government, and the rule of law. The seven essays in this volume explore various dimensions of Locke's Two Treatises. The introductory essay places the new scholarship in a historical context. The next four essays show how this recent literature has affected our view of particular aspects of the Two Treatises: its theory of politics, its religious underpinnings, its theory of rationality, and its conception of the relationship between politics and economics. The final two essays discuss how the new scholarship has changed our understanding of the impact of the Two Treatises upon political thought in the eighteenth and late-twentieth centuries. Included at the end of the text is an extended secondary bibliography on John Locke's Two Treaties. These essays do not seek closure. Nor do they set forth a single "correct" interpretation. Instead they offer readers a deeper appreciation of how our view of Locke's Two Treatises has changed over the last three decades and the importance of those changes in understanding of the liberal tradition. "A solid contribution to the literature, bringing together some of the best new scholarship on Locke and reflecting the diversity, breadth, and depth of the current debate on both Locke and early liberalism. The editor's selection clearly demonstrates there is no single orthodox reading of Locke and conveys the intellectually lively debate that pervades the field today."—Ronald J. Terchek, author of Locke, Smith, Mill and the Liberal Concept of Agency.

The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs
The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs

Author: Erica C. Garcia

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 9027215707

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This detailed study challenges the claim that syntax is arbitrary and autonomous, as well as the assumption that Spanish clitic clusters constitute grammaticalized units. Diverse--apparently unrelated--restrictions on clitic clustering in both simplex VP's and Accusative cum Infinitive structures are shown to be cognitively motivated, given the meaning of the individual clitics, and the compositional/interpretative routines those meanings motivate. The analysis accounts, in coherent and principled fashion, for the absolute non-occurrence of some clusters, and the interpretation-dependent acceptability of all remaining clitic combinations: cluster acceptability depends on the ease with which the given clitic combination can be processed to yield a congruent message; there is no point in combining clitics whose meanings preclude speedy processing of the cluster. The monograph goes beyond previous work on Spanish clitics in its wealth of data, the range of syntactic phenomena discussed, and its analytic scope.

Understanding Business Research
Understanding Business Research

Author: Bart L. Weathington

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-08-28

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1118134265

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Explore the essential steps for data collection, reporting, and analysis in business research Understanding Business Research offers a comprehensive introduction to the entire process of designing, conducting, interpreting, and reporting findings in the business environment. With an emphasis on the human factor, the book presents a complete set of tools for tackling complex behavioral and social processes that are a part of data collection in industry settings. Utilizing numerous real-world examples throughout, the authors begin by presenting an overview of the research process, outlining key ideas relating to the business environment, ethics, and empirical methods. Quantitative techniques and considerations that are specific to business research, including sampling and the use of assessments, surveys, and objective measures are also introduced. Subsequent chapters outline both common and specialized research designs for business data, including: Correlational Research Single Variable Between-Subjects Research Correlated Groups Designs Qualitative and Mixed-Method Research Between-Subjects Designs Between-Subjects Factorial Designs Research with Categorical Data Each chapter is organized using an accessible, comprehensive pedagogy that ensures a fluid presentation. Case studies showcase the real-world applications of the discussed topics while critical thinking exercises and Knowledge Checks supply questions that allow readers to test their comprehension of the presented material. Numerous graphics illustrate the visual nature of the research, and chapter-end glossaries outline definitions of key terms. In addition, detailed appendices provide a review of basic concepts and the most commonly used statistical tables. Requiring only a basic understanding of statistics, Understanding Business Research is an excellent book for courses on business statistics as well as business and management science research methods at the graduate level. The book is also a valuable resource for practitioners in business, finance, and management science who utilize qualitative and quantitative research methods in their everyday work.