This book provides a timely, compelling, multidisciplinary critique of the largely tacit set of assumptions funding Modernity in the West. A partnership between Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor's thought promises to cast the errors of the past in a new light, to graciously show how these errors can be amended, and to provide a specific cartography of how we can responsibly and meaningfully explore new possibilities for ethics, political society, and religion in a post-modern modernity.
Using a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach, this book looks at how accountability can provide solutions to our current environmental and global political problems. When a social system has external elements imposed upon it, or presented to it, political problems are likely to emerge. This book demonstrates that what is needed are connecting social elements with a natural affinity to bring people together despite their differences. This book is different from others in the field. It provides new insights by critiquing the extant understandings of accountability and expands the possibilities by building on Charles Taylor’s philosophies. Central to the argument of the book are perspectives on authenticity and expressivism which are found to provide a radical reworking of our understanding of being in the world, and a starting point for rethinking the way individuals and communities ought to be dealing politically with accountability and ecological crises. The argument builds to an accountability perspective that utilises work from interpretivism, liberalism, and postmodern theory. The book will be of interest to researchers in environmental philosophy, critical perspectives on accounting, corporate governance, corporate social reporting, and environmental accounting.
This edited book on South Asia is part of the book series “Managing the Post-colony.” This series is co-edited by Nimruji Jammulamadaka and Gavin Jack and is focused on managing and organising within the historical and contemporary structures of colonization and imperialism within and across nation-states and social domains especially the economic and the cultural domain. This edited book on South Asia is committed to a presentation of indigenous understandings and knowledge around the organizing, religion, language and cultural production through the lens of anti, post and de-colonial thought. This book forces the reader to consider not just what we know but how and where we know and can be instrumental in identifying and challenging dominant modes of management knowledge production. The decolonial movement is closely associated with scholars like Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano and others who expose how Western rationality and science, emanating from the enlightenment project, are being used by colonial powers to consolidate their imperial projects. The authors in this book argue that a potent form of colonization is epistemic in nature. This book series seeks to present cutting-edge, critical, interdisciplinary, and geographically and culturally diverse perspectives on the contemporary nature, experience and theorization of managing and organizing in post-colonial location under conditions of coloniality. These conditions subsume ongoing and new forms of colonisation/imperialism, and complex resistances to them, and lives lived outside them, and may be drawn out and investigated in regard to a multiplicity of different business- and management-related topics. The power of domination is its ability to silence other ways of knowing, being and doing. Focus on South Asia: Ways of Managing, Organising and Living delivers a profound critique of Western management theory and its universalistic claims. But, it goes much further to advance other managements and ways of organising from the peoples and communities of South Asia. Stella M. Nkomo, University of Pretoria, South Africa I like very much the orientation and the composition of the volume...you have a) the meaning of management in the West changed after the Industrial revolution and by 1900 became a political issue domestically in the US and before that colonial, as you show in the colonial context of South Asia; b) so the constitution of the settler management as you show with McCaulay, destituted all existing local form of organizing their praxis of living; c) the task now is the reconstitution of the destituted, the pluriversal human (and animals too) self-organization subjected to Western regulations to their own benefit, while materializing their rhetoric of racial destitution (incapable of organizing like us, impossible for them to be like, us we have to teach them civilization, etc.). Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, USA Very Impressive and Much Needed Pushkala Prasad, Zankel Chair Professor, Skidmore College.
The authors in this volume explore a wide variety of the contemporary approaches to mystical and religious experience to elucidate what religious experience is, in its own terms, and how its practitioners understand it. This anthology features contributions that point out that contemporary studies of consciousness, sociology, hermeneutics, neuroscience, medicine, and other fields, are revealing that there is much more to be said for the inner life of a human’s consciousness than reductionists and behaviorists will allow. This book is one of very few that primarily takes the stance of academic practitioners, explaining their own experience, rather than that of academics trying to explain the phenomena away, as really politics, or sociology, or delusion, or psychological pathology, or literary flights of fancy, or an aberration of any of the other academic fields. Most of the authors in this volume embrace the task of explaining and analyzing religious experience, mysticism, and the healing power of silence and presence, using the resources of all of the academic disciplines, as appropriate. The essays contained analyze religious, and non-religious, mystical and profoundly personal experiences across several world religions, and in areas such as art and music, as well as in solving personal crises such as family disruption and patriarchal oppression. The authors address the subject matter through analyses of the frequent and destructive failures of language, or just noise, to capture or express the nuances of the inner life of a person. It is this very ineffability of self that renders the spiritual, emotional and interior life of individuals beyond cognition and perception, of the straightforward sorts embraced by most cognitive disciplines. The contributors come from a variety of cross-disciplinary fields to bring forth the possibilities for an intuitive and creative, rich and growing inner life for a human. This text appeals to students, researchers, and practitioners.
This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume—including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs—do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences. The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place that thinker in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history.
This volume offers insights into contemporary trends and perspectives in psychobiographical research. It applys new theoretical and methodological frameworks and presents discourses on psychobiography from transdisciplinary backgrounds and various socio-cultural contexts, displaying the new state-of-the-art, new trends and themes in psychobiography. The book outlines psychobiography’s outstanding contribution to psychology from 36 internationally reputable authors. It also presents the ideas of five outstanding psychobiographers through interview excerpts. This book is a must for researchers, lecturers and practitioners in the field of psychology and social sciences interested in the use of new psychological theories and methodologies in life-span research.
Humor and cruelty can be the best of friends. Many cruel domains have facilitated hilarity of all kinds, whether experienced directly or vicariously, stretching from the torture chamber to the living room—or wherever else a screen is to be found. Conversely, many jests have provided the vehicle with which to dispense cruelty, whether callously or gleefully, in myriad settings, from public events to intimate family dinners. Combining the sources and resources of the humanities and social sciences, this book investigates the mutually supportive liaisons of humor and cruelty. We unearth the brutal, aggressive, and/or sadomasochistic roots of mockery and self-mockery, sarcasm and satire, whilst addressing contemporary debates in humor studies focusing on the thorny ethics and existential challenges arising from the acceptance of the much-appreciated yet seldom innocent channel for human interaction called "humor."
The discoveries of general relativity and quantum mechanics in the 20th century provide the perfect opportunity for Hegel’s thought to become more topical than it has ever been. By bringing speculative philosophy into conversation with quantum cosmology, this book develops Hegel’s metaphysics of true infinitude and Hawking’s theory on the origins of spacetime in tandem, providing a compelling rationale for the idea that the universe is a self-generating, self-organizing, self-enclosed whole. Ever sensitive to the complex relationship of scientific, philosophical, and theological issues in theoretical cosmology, the study brings a fresh perspective to the unique brand of metaphysical theology underlying speculative philosophy and offers a new way of conducting transdisciplinary work involving Hegelian thought. This is essential reading for Hegel scholars, Hawking scholars, those interested in philosophical cosmology, the ontology of the quantum void, the realism vs. idealism debate, infinitude, “imaginary” time, and dialectical materialism, and those compelled by post-classical approaches to theology.
The discussion of how science and Christianity relate to each other is a truly global one. Christianity around the world encompasses diverse sets of perspectives, ideas, and challenges. Similarly, the practice and perception of science can vary significantly from one region to another. When brought together in their global contexts we find a richness in the engagement between science and Christianity that leads to diverse questions and distinctive answers. Global Perspectives on Science and Christianity brings together scholars from six continents, hailing from disciplines of natural and social sciences, theology, history, and philosophy, to provide a unique collection of perspectives on how science and Christianity relate around the world. Tackling some issues that are seldom addressed as well as providing fresh perspectives on perennial topics, this is an important, relevant and genuinely global contribution to the discussion.
Predicaments of Knowledge explores the difficult questions South African universities face after apartheid: Is there a difference between Africanising a university and decolonising a university? What about differences between deracialising and decolonising the curricula taught at universities across disciplines? Through a range of reflections on race, language, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge projects from Africa and Latin America, this book explores the pitfalls and possibilities that face a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge. The distinctions between Africanisation, decolonisation and deracialisation are often conflated in the political demands put to universities. Suren Pillay emphasises all three as important but distinct imperatives. If an intervention is undertaken with the aim of decolonising the university while actually addressing deracialisation, it can undermine the effort to decolonise. Similarly, if an initiative to Africanise the university does not address decolonisation, both processes can be undermined. Drawing on more than two and a half decades of the author’s participation in these debates, these essays aim to intervene in and elucidate questions and predicaments, rather than offering blue prints; they are dialogical in spirit even when polemical in tone. In conversation with existing continental African and Latin American experiences, they offer incisive reflections on current South African debates.
