The Genealogy of Understanding
The Genealogy of Understanding

Author: Daniel M. Jaffe

Publisher: Lethe Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1590211804

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Is ancient Torah relevant to the social issues of today? In The Genealogy of Understanding, Matt Klein, a contemporary Jewish Scheherazade, questions whether Torah can illuminate and guide responses to religious conflict and prejudice, to such issues as intermarriage, infidelity, and prejudice that threaten to splinter families in the suburban New Jersey community of his upbringing. He first examines the private lives of his congregation's unfaithful rabbi, of a friend contemplating intermarriage, of a neighbor family that lost wife and mother to AIDS, of other friends raising a brain-damaged child who murders a toddler. Matt then confronts his own family's tensions, particularly his parents' dramatically conflicting approaches to religious observance, his father's struggle with his mother's Alzheimer's decline, and his own coming out as a gay Jewish man despite family and community resistance. Each of the fifty-three stories in this novel responds to a particular weekly Torah reading, resulting in a work of fiction that explores Jewish spirituality, ethics, and community values, as well as the nature of human heart, mind, and soul.

Genealogy as Critique
Genealogy as Critique

Author: Colin Koopman

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-02-12

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0253006236

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Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.

Genealogy and Knowledge in Muslim Societies
Genealogy and Knowledge in Muslim Societies

Author: Sarah Bowen Savant

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-04-08

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0748644989

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These case studies link genealogical knowledge to particular circumstances in which it was created, circulated and promoted. They stress the malleability of kinship and memory, and the interests this malleability serves. From the Prophet's family tree to the present, ideas about kinship and descent have shaped communal and national identities in Muslim societies. So an understanding of genealogy is vital to our understanding of Muslim societies, particularly with regard to the generation, preservation and manipulation of genealogical knowledge.

Understanding DNA Ancestry
Understanding DNA Ancestry

Author: Sheldon Krimsky

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-04

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1108841988

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An accessible introduction to how DNA ancestry tests work, what they can be used for, and the associated ethical issues.

How We Became Our Data
How We Became Our Data

Author: Colin Koopman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-06-19

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 022662658X

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We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational person” and the “informational power” we are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood—and how we can resist its erosion.

Power/Knowledge
Power/Knowledge

Author: Michel Foucault

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1980-11-12

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 039473954X

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Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

The Messiah, His Brothers, and the Nations
The Messiah, His Brothers, and the Nations

Author: Jason B. Hood

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-05-26

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0567356671

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Why does Matthew append 'and his brothers' to Judah and Jechoniah (1:2, 11)? Secondly, why does Matthew include the following four annotations: 'and Zerah by Tamar', 'by Rahab', 'by Ruth', and 'by the [wife] of Uriah' (1:3-6)? Jason B. Hood uses a composition critical approach in which he examines biblical genealogies and 'summaries of Israel's story' in order to shed light on these features of Matthew's gospel. Hood asserts that he addition of 'and his brothers' recalls Jesus' royal role. Judah and Jechoniah in Second Temple literature are both understood to have reversed their wickedness and earned royal status by self-sacrifice, perhaps pointing to the self-sacrifice of Jesus for his brothers before his full enthronement. A review of scholarly explanations of the significance of the 'four (five) women' in the genealogy, unearths an overlooked interpretation - Matthew does not name four women in 1:3-6 but four Gentiles (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Uriah) traditionally celebrated as righteous.

The Genealogical Adam and Eve
The Genealogical Adam and Eve

Author: S. Joshua Swamidass

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0830865055

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What if the biblical creation account is true, with the origins of Adam and Eve taking place alongside evolution? Building on well-established but overlooked science, S. Joshua Swamidass explains how it's possible for Adam and Eve to be rightly identified as the ancestors of everyone, opening up new possibilities for understanding Adam and Eve consistent both with current scientific consensus and with traditional readings of Scripture.

The Practical Origins of Ideas
The Practical Origins of Ideas

Author: Matthieu Queloz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0192639331

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas Matthieu Queloz presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, this book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.