Rethinking the Western Understanding of the Self
Rethinking the Western Understanding of the Self

Author: Ulrich Steinvorth

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-06-22

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 052176274X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book, Ulrich Steinvorth offers a fresh analysis and critique of rationality as a defining element in Western thinking. Steinvorth argues that Descartes' understanding of the self offers a more plausible and realistic alternative to the prevailing understanding of the self formed by the Lockean conception and utilitarianism. When freed from Cartesian dualism, such a conceptualization enables us to distinguish between self and subject. Moreover, it enables us to understand why individualism - one of the hallmarks of modernity in the West - became a universal ideal to be granted to every member of society; how acceptance of this notion could peak in the seventeenth century; and why it is now in decline, though not irreversibly so. Most importantly, the Cartesian concept of the self presents a way of saving modernity from the dangers that it now encounters.

Rethinking Rehabilitation
Rethinking Rehabilitation

Author: Kathryn McPherson

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2015-03-19

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1040072399

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book informs readers about how leading researchers are rethinking rehabilitation research and practice. It emphasizes discussion on the place of theory in advancing rehabilitation knowledge, unearthing important questions for policy and practice, underpinning research design, and prompting readers to question clinical assumptions. Each author proposes ways of thinking that are informed by theory, philosophy, and/or history as well as empirical research. Rigorous and provocative, it presents chapters that model ways readers might advance their own thinking, learning, practice, and research.

Ethics Embodied
Ethics Embodied

Author: Erin McCarthy

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2010-07-17

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 0739147862

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

While the body has been largely neglected in much of traditional Western philosophy, there is a rich tradition of Japanese philosophy in which this is not the case. Ethics Embodied explains how Japanese philosophy includes the body as an integral part of selfhood and ethics and shows how it provides an alternative and challenge to the traditional Western philosophical view of self and ethics. Through a comparative feminist approach, the book articulates the striking similarities that exist between certain strands of Japanese philosophy and feminist philosophy concerning selfhood, ethics and the body. Despite the similarities, McCarthy argues that there are significant differences between these philosophies and that each reveals important limitations of the other. Thus, the book urges a view of ethical embodied selfhood that goes beyond where each of these views leaves us when considered in isolation. With keen analysis and constructive comparison, this book will be accessible for students and scholars familiar with the Western philosophical tradition, while still adding a more global perspective.

Rethinking Western Approaches to Counterinsurgency
Rethinking Western Approaches to Counterinsurgency

Author: Russell W. Glenn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-22

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 131759276X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book critically examines the Western approach to counter-insurgency in the post-colonial era and offers a series of recommendations to address current shortfalls. The author argues that current approaches to countering insurgency rely too heavily on conflicts from the post-World War II years of waning colonialism. Campaigns conducted over half a century ago – Malaya, Aden, and Kenya among them – remain primary sources on which the United States, British, Australian, and other militaries build their guidance for dealing with insurgent threats, this though both the character of those threats and the conflict environment are significantly different than was the case in those earlier years. This book addresses the resulting inconsistencies by offering insights, analysis, and recommendations drawn from campaigns more applicable to counter-insurgency today. Eight post-colonial conflicts; to include Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Colombia and Iraq; provide the basis for analysis. All are examples in which counterinsurgents attained or continue to demonstrate considerable progress when taking on enterprises better known for disaster and disappointment. Recommendations resulting from these analyses challenge entrenched beliefs to serve as the impetus for essential change. Rethinking Western Approaches to Counterinsurgency will be of much interest to students of counter-insurgencies, military and strategic studies, security studies and IR in general.

Against Individualism
Against Individualism

Author: Henry Rosemont

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-03-25

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0739199811

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first part of Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion is devoted to showing how and why the vision of human beings as free, independent and autonomous individuals is and always was a mirage that has served liberatory functions in the past, but has now become pernicious for even thinking clearly about, much less achieving social and economic justice, maintaining democracy, or addressing the manifold environmental and other problems facing the world today. In the second and larger part of the book Rosemont proffers a different vision of being human gleaned from the texts of classical Confucianism, namely, that we are first and foremost interrelated and thus interdependent persons whose uniqueness lies in the multiplicity of roles we each live throughout our lives. This leads to an ethics based on those mutual roles in sharp contrast to individualist moralities, but which nevertheless reflect the facts of our everyday lives very well. The book concludes by exploring briefly a number of implications of this vision for thinking differently about politics, family life, justice, and the development of a human-centered authentic religiousness. This book will be of value to all students and scholars of philosophy, political theory, and Religious, Chinese, and Family Studies, as well as everyone interested in the intersection of morality with their everyday and public lives.

The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry
The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry

Author: Xiaojing Zhou

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2006-05

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1587296799

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Poetry by Asian American writers has had a significant impact on the landscape of contemporary American poetry, and a book-length critical treatment of Asian American poetry is long overdue. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaojing Zhou demonstrates how many Asian American poets transform the conventional “I” of lyric poetry—based on the traditional Western concept of the self and the Cartesian “I”—to enact a more ethical relationship between the “I” and its others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the ethics of alterity—which argues that an ethical relation to the other is one that acknowledges the irreducibility of otherness—Zhou offers a reconceptualization of both self and other. Taking difference as a source of creativity and turning it into a form of resistance and a critical intervention, Asian American poets engage with broader issues than the merely poetic. They confront social injustice against the other and call critical attention to a concept of otherness which differs fundamentally from that underlying racism, sexism, and colonialism. By locating the ethical and political questions of otherness in language, discourse, aesthetics, and everyday encounters, Asian American poets help advance critical studies in race, gender, and popular culture as well as in poetry. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity is not limited, however, to literary studies: it is an invaluable response to the questions raised by increasingly globalized encounters across many kinds of boundaries. The Poets Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Myung Mi Kim, Li Young Lee, Timothy Liu, David Mura, and John Yau

Rethinking the Enlightenment
Rethinking the Enlightenment

Author: Geoff Boucher

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-12-29

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1498558135

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

One of the most persistent, troubling, and divisive of the ideological divisions within modernity is the struggle over the Enlightenment and its legacy. Much of the difficulty is owed to a general failure among scholars to consider how history, philosophy, and politics work together. Rethinking the Enlightenment bridges these disciplinary divides. Recent work by historians has now called into question many of the clichés that still dominate scholarly understandings of the Enlightenment’s literary, philosophical, and political culture. Yet this work has so far had little impact on the reception of the Enlightenment, its key players, debates, and ideas in the disciplines that most rely on its legacy, namely, philosophy and political science. Edited by Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd, Rethinking the Enlightenment makes the case for connecting new work in intellectual history with fresh understandings of ‘Continental’ philosophy and political theory. In doing so, in this collection moves towards a critical self-understanding of the present.

The Oxford Handbook of the Self
The Oxford Handbook of the Self

Author: Shaun Gallagher

Publisher: OUP UK

Published: 2011-02-10

Total Pages: 759

ISBN-13: 0199548013

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Oxford Handbook of the Self explores a fascinating diversity of questions about our understanding of self from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, narrative, and postmodern theories.

Rethinking Japan Vol 2
Rethinking Japan Vol 2

Author: Adriana Boscaro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 1135880816

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

These papers explore the debate over new directions in Japanese studies.