This book offers a deeper insight into what mathematics is, tapping every child's intuitive ideas of logic and natural enjoyment of games. Simple-looking games and puzzles quickly lead to deeper insights, which will eventually connect with significant formal mathematical ideas as the child grows. This book is addressed to leaders of math circles or enrichment programs, but its activities can fit into regular math classes, homeschooling venues, or situations in which students are learning mathematics on their own. The mathematics contained in the activities can be enjoyed on many levels.
We live in an ever-fragmenting society, in which distinctions between culture and nature, biology and politics, law and transgression, mobility and immobility, reality and representation, seem to be disappearing. This book demonstrates the hidden logic beneath this process, which is also the logic of 'the camp'. Social theory has traditionally interpreted the camp as an anomaly, as an exceptional site situated on the margins of society, aiming to neutralize its 'failed citizens' and 'enemies'. However, in contemporary society, 'the camp' has now become the rule and consequently a new interrogation of its logic is necessary. In this exceptional volume, the authors explore the paradox of the camp, as representing both an old fear of enclosure and a new dream of belonging. They illustrate their arguments by drawing on contemporary sites of exemption - such as refugee camps, rape camps and favelas - as well as sites of self-exemption including gated communities, party tourism and celebrity cultures.
Is logic a good tool for making decisions? Can it make us better listeners and help us find coherence in views that we disagree with? Is Sherlock Holmes actually good at logic? Patrick Girard addresses these and other questions by presenting logic as the guardian of coherence. Logic, Girard argues, finds coherence in the patterns of reasoning across science, religion, and everyday decision making. It helps communities engage safely by replacing contentious debates with shared, constructive reasoning – logic provides neutral ground for the healthy pursuit of common goals and interests. Logic in the Wild employs common sense language, eschewing technical jargon, symbols, and equations. Girard’s attention focuses on logic’s power to find what unites the complex and the simple, the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical. In treating logic not as a passive subject to learn but as an active discipline to engage with, Logic in the Wild teaches us to identify patterns in our own reasoning, which inevitably helps us better confront questions central to everyday life.
With the weakening moral authority of the Catholic Church, the boom ushered in by the Celtic Tiger, and the slow but steady diminishment of the Troubles in the North, Ireland has finally stepped out from the shadows of colonial oppression onto the world stage as a major cosmopolitan country. Taking its title from a veiled reference to Roger Casement-the humanitarian and Irish patriot hanged for treason-in James Joyce's Ulysses, The Poor Bugger's Tool demonstrates how the affective labor of Irish queer culture might contribute to a progressive new national image for the Republic and Northern Ireland.Looking back to the first wave of Irish modernism in the works of Wilde, Synge, Casement, and Joyce, Patrick Mullen reveals how these authors deployed queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation as well as to sharpen anti-imperialist critiques. In its second half, the monograph turns its attention to Ireland's postmodernist boom in the works of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O'Neill. With readings of The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto, and At Swim Two Boys, Mullen shows that queer sensibilities and style remain key cultural resources for negotiating the political and economic realities of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century.Buttressed by writings of theorists like Marx, Foucault, and Antonio Negri, The Poor Bugger's Tool brings Irish literature into a fruitful dialog with queer theory, postcolonial studies, the history of sexuality, and modernist aesthetics.
Sacred Playgrounds explores the wisdom of camping ministry for Christian education and faith formation, examining its rich history and fundamental characteristics with compelling stories, groundbreaking research, and theological grounding. Christian summer camp is an integral part of the ecology of faith formation in North America, though it has received surprisingly little attention in the scholarly community until now. Camping ministry is often dismissed as simple fun and games or a brief spiritual high that does not last. However, camp experiences often serve as deeply relational and immersive faith experiences that have lasting impacts on participants. Five fundamental characteristics combine dynamically in the effective camp experience: participatory, faith-centered, safe space, relational, and unplugged from home. Together, they open the space for participants to consider new understandings of God, to have time for deep self-reflection, and to build intentional Christian community. These camp experiences are essential components in a larger ecology of faith formation, including the home and congregation. The insight and evidence presented in this book demonstrate that the contributions of camping ministry must be taken seriously among scholars, Christian educators, and ministry professionals.
Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the ‘concentrationary universe’ which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais’s benchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.
Logical pluralism is the view that different logics are equally appropriate, or equally correct. Logical relativism is a pluralism according to which validity and logical consequence are relative to something. In Varieties of Logic, Stewart Shapiro develops several ways in which one can be a pluralist or relativist about logic. One of these is an extended argument that words and phrases like "valid" and "logical consequence" are polysemous or, perhaps better, are cluster concepts. The notions can be sharpened in various ways. This explains away the "debates" in the literature between inferentialists and advocates of a truth-conditional, model-theoretic approach, and between those who advocate higher-order logic and those who insist that logic is first-order. A significant kind of pluralism flows from an orientation toward mathematics that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century, and continues to dominate the field today. The theme is that consistency is the only legitimate criterion for a theory. Logical pluralism arises when one considers a number of interesting and important mathematical theories that invoke a non-classical logic, and are rendered inconsistent, and trivial, if classical logic is imposed. So validity is relative to a theory or structure. The perspective raises a host of important questions about meaning. The most significant of these concern the semantic content of logical terminology, words like 'or', 'not', and 'for all', as they occur in rigorous mathematical deduction. Does the intuitionistic 'not', for example, have the same meaning as its classical counterpart? Shapiro examines the major arguments on the issue, on both sides, and finds them all wanting. He then articulates and defends a thesis that the question of meaning-shift is itself context-sensitive and, indeed, interest-relative. He relates the issue to some prominent considerations concerning open texture, vagueness, and verbal disputes. Logic is ubiquitous. Whenever there is deductive reasoning, there is logic. So there are questions about logical pluralism that are analogous to standard questions about global relativism. The most pressing of these concerns foundational studies, wherein one compares theories, sometimes with different logics, and where one figures out what follows from what in a given logic. Shapiro shows that the issues are not problematic, and that is usually easy to keep track of the logic being used and the one mentioned.
In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.
For ten-year-old Gabe, the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment is all that he dreamed it would be, but he must work hard to write about the fun in letters to Zach, his cool future stepbrother, without revealing that it is a camp for "nerds."
Concentration camps are a relatively new invention, a recurring feature of twentieth century warfare, and one that is important to the modern global consciousness and identity. Although the most famous concentration camps are those under the Nazis, the use of concentration camps originated several decades before the Third Reich, in the Philippines and in the Boer War, and they have been used again in numerous locations, not least during the genocide in Bosnia. They have become defining symbols of humankind's lowest point and basest acts. In this book, Dan Stone gives a global history of concentration camps, and shows that it is not only "mad dictators " who have set up camps, but instead all varieties of states, including liberal democracies, that have made use of them. Setting concentration camps against the longer history of incarceration, he explains how the ability of the modern state to control populations led to the creation of this extreme institution. Looking at their emergence and spread around the world, Stone argues that concentration camps serve the purpose, from the point of view of the state in crisis, of removing a section of the population that is perceived to be threatening, traitorous, or diseased. Drawing on contemporary accounts of camps, as well as the philosophical literature surrounding them, Stone considers the story camps tell us about the nature of the modern world as well as about specific regimes.
