This book explains the image of nakedness (gymnos) taken by Paul in the Corinthian correspondence to refer to the state of human being during death. Through an academic approach, but simple language, the author explains the biblical monist understanding of human being. He takes the biblical experience of death and resurrection to point out his arguments. This book uncovers the ancient problem of the continuation of personal identity from life prior to death, on to resurrection. It also provides a fresh biblical approach from an anthropological and biblical perspective to the problem of what being human really is. Those who enjoy traveling through the Bible with an open mind and warm heart will find in this book a good experience.
Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay, by Amos Hawley, presents for the first time a unified theory of human ecology by a scholar whose name is virtually synonymous with the discipline. Focused on the interaction between society and environment, human ecology is an attempt to deal holistically with the phenomenon of human organization. Beginning in the first quarter of the century, sociologists such as Park, Burgess, and McKenzie developed the study of human ecology to account for the dynamics of change in American cities. Over time, theorists have reached beyond the boundaries of sociology, drawing on the findings of economics, political science, anthropology, and bioecology, to understand the relationship of human beings to their environment. Hawley has successfully integrated the scattered theses of this wide-ranging discipline into a schematic whole. The early human ecologists seized on the analogy of plant communities as a way of understanding urban communities. Hawley here maintains that the most important contribution to human ecology of the lexicons of plant and animal ecologies is the perspective of collective life as an adaptive process consisting in an interaction of environment, population, and organization. From the adaptive profess, he argues, emerges the ecosystem, a concept that serves as a common denominator for bioecology and human ecology. Hawley has codified the theory of human ecology by a set of deductive hypotheses that establish its claims to coherence and comprehensiveness. His model charts a synthesis of ecological concepts ranging from adaptation and equilibrium through growth in temporal and spatial dimensions to convergence and openness. The essay underscores the critical importance of transportation and communication technology to the shaping of the human ecological system. Human Ecology brings concision and elegance to this holistic perspective and will serve as a point of reference and orientation for anyone interested in the powers and scope of the ecological approach.
In this book, Jacob Dahl Rendtorff investigates moral blindness in business and public administration based on Hannah Arendt’s concept of banality of evil in her famous report on the Nazi-criminal Adolf Eichmann trail in Jerusalem in 1961. Moral blindness and evil in management is instrumental wrongdoing inflicted upon human beings as a violation of their dignity and humanity. Organizational evil in business, bureaucracies and public administration is analysed with focus on obedience to authority and systemic role conformity of managers and administrators. This includes the critical question about how concepts of banality of evil and moral blindness can explain ethical insensibility and lack of moral understanding in business and administration. Rendtorff proposes a humanistic vision of management and ethical leadership. Moral thinking, responsibility and moral judgment is essential in management and governance in business and administration. This book is a must-read for academics and practitioners studying and working in philosophy of management, business ethics, political philosophy, administration ethics and corporate social responsibility.
When confronting twentieth-century political oppression and violence, writers and artists in Portugal and South America have often emphasized the complex relationship between freedom and tyranny. In Seeing Politics Otherwise, Patricia Vieira uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the interrelation of politics and representations of vision and blindness in Latin American and Iberian literature, film, and art. Vieira's discussion focuses on three literary works: Graciliano Ramos's Memoirs of Prison, Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, and José Saramago's Blindness, with supplemental analyses of sculpture and film by Ana Maria Pacheco, Bruno Barreto, and Marco Bechis. These artists use metaphors of blindness to denounce the totalizing gaze of dictatorial regimes. Rather than equating blindness with deprivation, Vieira argues that shadows, blindfolds, and blindness are necessary elements for re-imagining the political world and re-acquiring a political voice. Seeing Politics Otherwise offers a compelling analysis of vision and its forcible deprivation in the context of art and political protest.
Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven systematically investigates heaven, or paradise, as conceived within theistic religious traditions such as Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It considers a variety of topics concerning what life in paradise would, could, or will be like for human persons. The collection offers novel approaches to questions about heaven of perennial philosophical interest, and breaks new ground by expanding the range of questions about heaven that philosophers have considered. The contributors wrestle with questions about human life in paradise that span the spectrum of the major subfields of philosophical enquiry. By employing both historical and contemporary philosophical resources, the volume makes a pioneering contribution toward answering pressing questions about human life in paradise. It will serve as a platform for future research, reinvigorating philosophical investigation into these neglected topics within philosophy of religion.
The image is an ontological paradox; it is made of dead matter, yet appears to be alive. For millennia, artists have created images of the living world - images that are static and yet possess the power to bring to life a frozen moment in time. While this tension has constituted a fundamental challenge for as long as theories on the nature of images have existed, recent scholarship has rekindled interest in the question of what images 'do to us'. Despite the rational discourse of Modernity, we must acknowledge that we view images as half-living entities. This book addresses the perpetual relevance of images' enigmatic life-likeness through studies that engage with a variety of visual material by asking the same question: what qualifies animation? Covering a wide range of image practices, such as early paleolithic stone engravings, medieval tomb sculpture, renaissance death masks and baroque painting to modern fashion, park design, early cinema and BioArt, the twelve chapters, written by scholars of art history and visual culture, demonstrate that the ontological paradox of the image is not limited to a specific historical period or certain types of images, but can be seen throughout the history of images across different cultures.
As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas—it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity. Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing the ways in which the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals the ways in which religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin—or even simply the word “naked”—to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses. From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, A Brief History of Nakedness surveys the touching, sometimes tragic and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” In today’s world, with our growing technological power and the knowledge about its impact, we are considered to be responsible for many instances that not long ago would have been deemed a matter of fate. At the same time, the looming options of, e.g., genome editing or neuroprosthetics, threaten traditional notions of responsibility if no longer the person but the technology involved is deemed to be responsible for a specific behaviour. The growing ethical debate on the expansion of human responsibility, e.g. when it comes to human-machine-interaction, ambient intelligence, or reproductive technologies, thus intertwines with the challenge to formulate an appropriate understanding of the concept of personal responsibility and our respective anthropological self-understanding in today’s technological world. The volume brings together both perspectives and aims at illuminating crucial dimensions of responsibility in light of technological innovation and our self-understanding as responsible beings.
While scholars have long recognized Kierkegaard's important contributions to fields such as ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophical psychology, and hermeneutics, it was usually thought that he had nothing meaningful to say about society or politics. Kierkegaard has been traditionally characterized as a Christian writer who placed supreme importance on the inward religious life of each individual believer. His radical view seemed to many to undermine any meaningful conception of the community, society or the state. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to correct this image of Kierkegaard as an apolitical thinker. The present volume attempts to document the use of Kierkegaard by later thinkers in the context of social-political thought. It shows how his ideas have been employed by very different kinds of writers and activists with very different political goals and agendas. Many of the articles show that, although Kierkegaard has been criticized for his reactionary views on some social and political questions, he has been appropriated as a source of insight and inspiration by a number of later thinkers with very progressive, indeed, visionary political views.
