Critical Humanity:

Critical Humanity:

Author: Peter T. Keo

Publisher: Nova Science Publishers

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9781536195231

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"Critical Humanity: Embodying Actionable Leadership in an Age of Compassion and Empathy is scientifically grounded and empirically rich. In this book, Dr. Peter T. Keo argues that critical humanity is compassion and empathy in action to improve the lives of the world's suffering. However, leaders must close the gap between what they say and the actions they take. Critical humanity has four key components. First, it favors action over passivity. Second, it favors collectivism over individualism alone. Third, critical humanity requires living in the space / tension between compassion and empathy. Fourth, it requires leaders to close the gap between what they say / believe and their actions, i.e., their espoused values and their action items, respectively. Dr. Keo refers to this gap throughout the book as the "values gap," because it is a constant tension between the "what I say / believe" and the "what I am actually doing" to truly impact the communities served. Public servants and public service leaders - for whom this book was primarily written - can have a deeper and more meaningful impact by embracing all four components in their service to humanity. While the contents of this book are empirical in nature, at baseline, it is an expression of Dr. Keo's personal truth, an epistemology that shares, in equal measures, the joy and pain of a life that is both hopeful and skeptical in humanity. It is an expression that recognizes the tremendous shortcomings and opportunities, again in equal measures, of leaders to properly and authentically serve historically marginalized populations. Dr. Keo had arrived at this realization after decades of embodying the life of a child of Cambodian genocide, war, systemic racism, and poverty. He has experienced life in disenfranchisement in two separate but related occasions, which have shaped his epistemology. The stories that have formed the impetus for and, indeed, triggered the curiosity undergirding this book, is this: the entanglement of misery and joy is the very essence of life. It is the curiosity of this entanglement - and the need to drastically untangle them to improve the lives of the world's suffering - that compelled Dr. Keo to write this book, and to develop this new idea: critical humanity"--


Critical Humanities from India

Critical Humanities from India

Author: D. Venkat Rao

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-03-09

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1351234927

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The field of humanities generates a discourse that traditionally addressed the questions of what is proper to man, rights of man, crimes against humanity, human creativity and action, human reflection and performance, human utterance and artefact. The university as a philosophical-political institution transmits this humanist account. This European humanistic legacy, which is little more than Christian anthropology, barely received any questioning from cultures that faced colonialism. In such a context, this volume attempts to unravel the ‘barely secularized heritage’ of Europe (Derrida’s phrase) and its fatal consequences in other cultures. The task of Critical Humanities is to explore the ways in which the question of being human (along with non-human others) today from heterogeneous cultural ‘backgrounds’ can be undertaken. The future of the humanities teaching and research is contingent upon the risky task of configuring cultural difference from non-European locations. Such a task is inescapable and urgently needed when tectonic cultural upheavals have begun to show devastating effect on planetary coexistence today. It is precisely in such a context that this collection of essays on critical humanities affirms, ‘without alibi’, the urgency of collective reflection and innovative research across the traditional disciplinary and institutional borders and communication systems on the one hand and Asian, African and European cultural formations on the other. Critical Humanities are at one level little more than communities on the verge (critical) but whose centuries long survival and resilient creations of cultural (and /as natural) habitats are of deeply enduring significance to affirm the biocultural diversities of living that compose the planet. Topical and timely, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and teachers of cultural theory, literary studies, philosophy, cultural geography, legal studies, sociology, history, performance studies, environmental studies, caste and communalism studies, postcolonial theory, India studies, and education.


Humanity's Last Stand

Humanity's Last Stand

Author: Mark Schuller

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2021-01-15

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1978820879

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Foreword / by Cynthia McKinney -- Introduction: Careening toward extinction -- We're all in this together -- Dismantling white supremacy -- Climate justice versus the anthropocene -- Humanity on the move : justice and migration -- Dismantling the ivory tower.


Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity

Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity

Author: Drucilla Cornell

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780823232505

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It has become commonplace to write about the vociferous appetite of colonialism and its insatiable devouring of modern life. In this book the authors expand on those ideas, showing how there has been a colonization of critical theory itself, fitted with prejudices that would limit knowledge to analytic reductions commensurate with so-called Western metaphysics. Against such a monolithic force, the authors posit the work of the oft-neglected German Idealist Ernst Cassirer in careful textual precision to unearth his contribution to critical theory via an in-depth understanding of symbolic forms in all of their richness and complexity. Such a maneuver allows an ethical humanism to emerge that grants equal importance and standing both to the intellectual heritage of Afro-Caribbean historicism and poeticism and to the long-ignored significance of black philosophies of existence. Each of these traditions provide searing indictments against imperialist domination of the so-called Third World and return such questions of domination to the realm of critical theory against some who would deny that we are still in an age of imperialism. The focus of this book is an exposition on the human condition that is then expanded upon to raise, and at times answer, some of the most important questions of what is to be doneabout the global racism, sexism, and poverty that have asymmetrically infected the livelihoods and ways of life for so many people who have been rendered beneath the register of humanity.


Cultivating Humanity

Cultivating Humanity

Author: Martha C. Nussbaum

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998-10-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0674735463

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How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such “citizens of the world” in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Her vigorous defense of “the new education” is rooted in Seneca’s ideal of the citizen who scrutinizes tradition critically and who respects the ability to reason wherever it is found—in rich or poor, native or foreigner, female or male. Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education: critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship. For Nussbaum, liberal education is alive and well on American campuses in the late twentieth century. It is not only viable, promising, and constructive, but it is essential to a democratic society. Taking up the challenge of conservative critics of academe, she argues persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education today.


Life

Life

Author: Davide Tarizzo

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1452955875

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The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates in his reconstruction of the genealogy of the concept of life, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Focusing on the histories of philosophy, science, and biopolitics, he contends that biological life is a metaphysical concept, not a scientific one, and that this notion has gradually permeated both European and Anglophone traditions of thought over the past two centuries. Building on the work undertaken by Foucault in the 1960s and ‘70s, Tarizzo analyzes the slow transformation of eighteenth-century naturalism into a nineteenth-century science of life, exploring the philosophical landscape that engendered biology and precipitated the work of such foundational figures as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. Tarizzo tracks three interrelated themes: first, that the metaphysics of biological life is an extension of the Kantian concept of human will in the field of philosophy; second, that biology and philosophy share the same metaphysical assumptions about life originally advanced by F. W. J. Schelling and adopted by Darwin and his intellectual heirs; and third, that modern biopolitics is dependent on this particularly totalizing view of biological life. Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, this book instead envisions and promotes a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.


AI and Humanity

AI and Humanity

Author: Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0262358166

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An examination of the implications for society of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence systems, combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis; includes exercises and discussion questions. AI and Humanity provides an analytical framing and a common language for understanding the effects of technological advances in artificial intelligence on society. Coauthored by a computer scientist and a scholar of literature and cultural studies, it is unique in combining a humanities perspective with technical analysis, using the tools of literary explication to examine the societal impact of AI systems. It explores the historical development of these technologies, moving from the apparently benign Roomba to the considerably more sinister semi-autonomous weapon system Harpy. The book is driven by an exploration of the cultural and etymological roots of a series of keywords relevant to both AI and society. Works examined range from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, given a close reading for its themes of literacy and agency, to Simon Head's critique of the effects of surveillance and automation on the Amazon labor force in Mindless. Originally developed as a textbook for an interdisciplinary humanities-science course at Carnegie Mellon, AI & Humanity offers discussion questions, exercises (including journal writing and concept mapping), and reading lists. A companion website provides updated resources and a portal to a video archive of interviews with AI scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, and others.


Diffractive Reading

Diffractive Reading

Author: Kai Merten

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-05-27

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1786613972

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Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different ‘agential cuts’ in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading’s intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.


Riches for the Poor

Riches for the Poor

Author: Earl Shorris

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780393320664

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In this groundbreaking work, Shorris examines the nature of poverty in America today--addressing such issues as why people are poor and why they stay poor--and offers a unique solution to the problem. Print features.


Systems Science for Engineers and Scholars

Systems Science for Engineers and Scholars

Author: Avner Engel

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2024-02-29

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 139421166X

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Systems Science for Engineers and Scholars Brings a powerful toolkit to bear on engineering and scientific endeavors. This book describes the fundamental principles of systems science so engineers and other scholars can put them into practical use at work and in their personal lives. Systems science aims to determine systemic similarities among different disciplines and to develop applicable solutions in many fields of inquiry. Systems Science for Engineers and Scholars readers will discover: Ten systems science principles that open engineers’ and scholars’ horizons to practical insights related to their areas of interest A methodology for designing holistic systems that exhibit resilient behavior to overcome systems’ context uncertainties The most critical current dilemma of humankind—the global environment and energy crises, as well as a systemic, no-nonsense action plan to deal with these issues Independent articles describing how engineers and scholars can utilize systems science creatively in (1) engineering and systemic psychology; (2) delivering value and resolving conflicts; (3) multi-objective, multi-agent decision-making; (4) systems engineering using category theory; (5) holistic risk management using systems of systems failures methodology; and (6) systemic accident and mishap analysis Systems Science for Engineers and Scholars contains a broad spectrum of insights as well as an extensive set of examples and graphics that make it ideal for professionals and students interested in a holistic, systems-oriented approach.