Minerva's Message

Minerva's Message
Author: Martin S. Staum
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 359
Release: 1996-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773566244

In theory the CMPS was set up to enshrine the human and social studies that were at the heart of Enlightenment culture. Staum illustrates, however, that the Institute helped transform key ideas of the Enlightenment in order to maintain civil rights while upholding social stability, and that the social and political assumptions on which it was based affected notions of social science. He traces the careers of individual members and the factions within the Institute, arguing that the discord within the CMPS reflects the unravelling of Enlightenment culture. Minerva's Message presents a valuable overview of the intellectual life of the period and brings together new evidence about the social sciences in their nascent period.

Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind
Author: Arthur McCalla
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2023-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228016606

The French Revolution swept away the Old Regime along with many of its ideas about epistemology, history, society, and politics. In the intellectual ferment that followed, debates about religion figured prominently as diverse thinkers grappled with the philosophical and civil status of religion in a post-revolutionary age. Arthur McCalla demonstrates the central place of religion in the intellectual life of post-revolutionary France in Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind. Certain questions – What is the nature of religion? Does society rest on religious foundations? What ought to be the place of religion in society? – drew sustained attention from across the political spectrum. Idéologues viewed religion as error and sought to eradicate it through the promotion of secular values. Catholic Traditionalists understood religion as a body of revealed truths of supernatural origin that ought to be authoritative in all aspects of life. Liberals sought to replace Christian orthodoxy with a new public faith consonant with liberal values. But these blocs were not monolithic, and McCalla reveals the complexities of each one, as well as the dialogues and rivalries among them. The categories established by the concepts of religion these thinkers constructed continue to shape debates over liberationist critiques, liberal pluralism, laïcité, and political theology. The place of religion in civil society is again a matter of urgent debate. Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind provides essential historical context for thinking about the status of religion in the contemporary world.

International Handbook of Semiotics

International Handbook of Semiotics
Author: Peter Pericles Trifonas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 1282
Release: 2015-05-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401794049

This book provides an extensive overview and analysis of current work on semiotics that is being pursued globally in the areas of literature, the visual arts, cultural studies, media, the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. Semiotics—also known as structuralism—is one of the major theoretical movements of the 20th century and its influence as a way to conduct analyses of cultural products and human practices has been immense. This is a comprehensive volume that brings together many otherwise fragmented academic disciplines and currents, uniting them in the framework of semiotics. Addressing a longstanding need, it provides a global perspective on recent and ongoing semiotic research across a broad range of disciplines. The handbook is intended for all researchers interested in applying semiotics as a critical lens for inquiry across diverse disciplines.

To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth

To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth
Author: Martti Koskenniemi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1127
Release: 2021-08-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521768594

A critical history of European sovereignty and property rights as the foundation of the international order in 1300-1870.

Structures of Epic Poetry

Structures of Epic Poetry
Author: Christiane Reitz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 3199
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110491672

This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.

Enlightenment Biopolitics

Enlightenment Biopolitics
Author: William Max Nelson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2024-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226825574

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath. In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals. In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.

The Rise of the Global Imaginary

The Rise of the Global Imaginary
Author: Manfred B. Steger
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2008-07-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191558249

Neoliberalism. Neoconservatism. Postmarxism. Postmodernism. Is there really something genuinely new about today's isms? Have we moved past our traditional ideological landscape? Combining political history, philosophical interpretation, and good old-fashioned story-telling, Manfred Steger traces ideology's remarkable journey from Count Destutt de Tracy's Enlightenment "science of ideas" to President George W. Bush's "imperial globalism." Rejecting futile attempts to "update" modern political belief systems by adorning them with prefixes, the author offers instead a highly original explanation for their novelty-their increasing ability to articulate deep-seated understandings of community in global rather than national terms. This growing awareness of globality fuels the visions of social elites who reside in the privileged spaces of our global cities. It erupts in the hopes and demands of migrants who traverse national boundaries in search of their piece of the global promise. Stoked by cross-cultural encounters, technological change, and scientific innovation, the rising global imaginary has destabilized the grand political ideologies codified during the national age. The national is slowly losing its grip on people's minds, but the global has not yet ascended to the commanding heights once occupied by its predecessor. Still, the first rays of the rising global imaginary have provided enough light to capture the contours of a profoundly altered ideological landscape. Pointing in this direction, the book ends with a timely interpretation of the apparent convergence of ideology and religion in the dawning global age-a broad phenomenon that extends beyond the obvious cases of Christian fundamentalism and Islamic jihadism.

Minerva's Night Out

Minerva's Night Out
Author:
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2013-10-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1405193891

Minerva’s Night Out presents series of essays by noted philosopher and motion picture and media theorist Noël Carroll that explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, motion pictures, and popular culture. Presents a wide-ranging series of essays that reflect on philosophical issues relating to modern film and popular culture Authored by one of the best known philosophers dealing with film and popular culture Written in an accessible manner to appeal to students and scholars Coverage ranges from the philosophy of Halloween to Vertigo and the pathologies of romantic love

In the Time of the Butterflies

In the Time of the Butterflies
Author: Julia Alvarez
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2010-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616200995

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times) Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now! It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression. "Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review "This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." —Popsugar.com "A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." —People "Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." —Los Angeles Times "A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time.” —St. Petersburg Times "Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."—Cosmopolitan.com