Cambridge University Press strana 16 z 64

Metaontology is the branch of philosophy that focuses on questions that naturally arise when doing ontology. This Element offers the reader (some of) the elements of metaontology by way of an opinionated overview of (some of) its central arguments and positions. The first section of this Element focuses on whether there are nonexistent objects. It discusses historical figures such as Suarez, Brentano, Twardowski, and Meinong, as well as contemporary figures such as Lewis, van Inwagen, Thomasson, and Zalta. The second section focuses on whether ontological questions are trivial to answer and whether ontological debates are merely verbal debates. Can there be different concepts of existence or different meanings of 'exists' or other ontological expressions? If ontological questions are nontrivial, are they nontrivial only if a substantive metaphysical view is true? Even if there aren't different senses of 'exist,' might there be different modes of being or ways to exist?

Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion. This book offers a new and generalizable cost-balancing theory to explain states' coercion decisions. It demonstrates that China does not coerce frequently and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting primarily to non-militarized tools. Leveraging rich empirical evidence, including primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, this book explains how contemporary rising powers translate their power into influence and offers a new framework for explaining states' coercion decisions in an era of economic interdependence, particularly how contemporary global economic interdependence affects rising powers' foreign security policies.

Knowledge of our emotional and bodily states helps us to further know our goals, values, interests, cares, and concerns. The authors first lay out a puzzle as to why bodily and emotional self-knowledge is strongly associated with good mental health and well-being. They solve this puzzle by mapping out connections between bodily states, emotional states, and our goals with an account of emotions as embodied appraisals. Emotions being embodied implies that self-knowledge of our bodily states aids in acquiring knowledge of our emotional states. Emotions as appraisals means that situations are appraised relative to our goals, such that self-knowledge of emotional states aids in acquiring knowledge of our goals, which are not always transparent to us. While emotional self-knowledge can be difficult to acquire, through skilled practice we can improve awareness and knowledge of our emotional and bodily states.

Philosophical hermeneutics has shed a good deal of light both upon the methodological underpinnings of the humanities and social sciences generally and in particular upon some fundamental issues in the philosophy of history and history proper. The aim in this Element is to analyze those of its arguments that bear directly upon the latter fields. The principal topics taken up are Dilthey's distinction between understanding and explanation, the accent on meaning and experience, and the sense in which we may be said to belong to history. Heidegger's account of historicity and being-in-the-world, Gadamer's conceptions of historical understanding and belonging, and Ricoeur's view of historians as storytellers also come in for analysis. Other themes include the sense in which we may speak of a dialogue with the past, the notion of historical truth, and the problem of constructivism.

In this book, Phillip Wiebe examines religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences, assessing how these experiences appear to implicate a spiritual order. Despite the current prevalence of naturalism and atheism, he argues that experiences purporting to have a religious or spiritual significance deserve close empirical investigation. Wiebe surveys the broad scope of religious experience and considers different types of evidence that might give rise to a belief in phenomena such as spirits, paranormal events, God, and an afterlife. He demonstrates that there are different explanations and interpretations of religious experiences, both because they are typically personal accounts, and they suggest a reality that is often unobservable. Wiebe also addresses how to evaluate evidence for theories that postulate unobservables in general, and a Theory of Spirits in particular. Calling for more rigorous investigation of these phenomena, Wiebe frames the study of religious experience among other accepted social sciences that seek to understand religion.

Although the first thing one learns about the 'Byzantine Empire' is that it was really the eastern Roman empire, scholars have preferred to call it 'Byzantine' in a repudiation of the self-conception and emic vocabulary of the inhabitants of that polity. The terminology of 'Byzantium' artificially severs the 'medieval' eastern Roman empire from its 'classical' roots allowing for the fundamentally Eurocentric schematization of history into 'ancient,' 'medieval,' and 'Renaissance' periods. 'Byzantine' is not a benign term of art but has served a variety of political and historiographical agendas including maintaining nationalist visions of ethnic continuity, creating precedents for communism, enabling politics of nostalgia for Orthodox dominion, and constructing visions of western European superiority and masculinity that justify colonialism. By exploring these intellectual legacies of 'Byzantium,' and the benefits of conceptualizing Roman history as an unsevered whole, this Element exhorts scholars to let go of the 'Byzantine' misnomer.

Attention is critical to our daily lives, from simple acts of reading or listening to a conversation to the more demanding situations of trying to concentrate in a noisy environment or driving on a busy roadway. This book offers a concise introduction to the science of attention, featuring real-world examples and fascinating studies of clinical disorders and brain injuries. It introduces cognitive neuroscience methods and covers the different types and core processes of attention. The links between attention, perception, and action are explained, along with exciting new insights into the brain mechanisms of attention revealed by cutting-edge research. Learning tools – including an extensive glossary, chapter reviews, and suggestions for further reading – highlight key points and provide a scaffolding for use in courses. This book is ideally suited for graduate or advanced undergraduate students as well as for anyone interested in the role attention plays in our lives.

We often explain our actions and those of others using a commonsense framework of perceptions, beliefs, desires, emotions, decisions, and intentions. In his thoughtful new book, Peter Carruthers scrutinizes this everyday explanation for our actions, while also examining the explanatory framework through the lens of cutting-edge cognitive science. He shows that the 'standard model' of belief–desire psychology (developed, in fact, with scant regard for science) is only partly valid; that there are more types of action and action-explanation than the model allows; and that both ordinary folk and armchair philosophers are importantly mistaken about the types of mental state that the human mind contains. His book will be of great value to all those who rely in their work on assumptions drawn from commonsense psychology, whether in philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology, ethics, or psychology itself. It will also be attractive to anyone with an interest in human motivation.

In The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World, Patricia Eunji Kim examines the visual and material cultures of Hellenistic queens, the royal and dynastic women who served as subjects and patrons of art. Exploring evidence in the interconnected eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE, Kim argues that the arts of queenship were central to expressions of dynastic (and sometimes even imperial) consolidation, continuity, and legitimacy. From gems, coins, and vessels to monuments and sculpture, the visual and material cultures of queenship appeared in a range of sacred settings, public spaces, royal courts, and domestic domains. Encompassing several dynasties, including the Hecatomnids, Argeads, Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Attalids, Kim inaugurates new methods for comparing and interpreting visual articulations of queenship and ideal femininity from distinct yet culturally entangled contexts, thus illuminating the ways that women had an impact art and politics in the ancient world.

Drawing from extensive developmental research, this book highlights the significance of meaning in shaping individual worldviews within relationships, from infancy onwards. By focusing on behavior and experience, it reshapes our understanding of pertinent psychological phenomena, tracing the emergence of self, self-regulation, causality comprehension, peer relationships, adolescent experiences, and lifelong adaptation. Using developmental psychology and compelling clinical cases, the authors emphasize the central role of 'meaning' as a unifying theme, addressing diverse topics such as resilience, intergenerational behavior patterns, trauma impacts, and existential meaning. Ideal for students and professionals in psychology, counselling, and social work, as well as researchers and clinicians in related fields, this book integrates existing theories and empirical evidence to illuminate various aspects of human development and adaptation.

During the First World War, over 300,000 Italian emigrants returned to Italy from around the world to perform their conscripted military service, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. But what happened to these men following their arrival and once the war had ended? Selena Daly reconstructs the lives of these emigrant soldiers before, during and after the First World War, considering their motivations, combat experiences, demobilisation, and lives under Fascism and in the Second World War. Adopting a micro-historical approach, Emigrant Soldiers explores the diverse fates of four men who returned from the United States, Brazil, France, and Britain, interwoven with accounts of other emigrants from across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Through letters, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and diplomatic reports, Daly focuses on the experiences and voices of the emigrant soldiers, providing a new global account of Italians during the First World War.

Thomas Aquinas''s famous five arguments for God''s existence, or ''Five Ways,'' in Summa theologiae Ia q.2 a.3 are a cornerstone of thought and discussion about God and are still much debated today. In this book Peter Weigel provides the philosophical background, particularly surrounding Aquinas''s metaphysics and theory of causation, needed to understand the Five Ways and examines the thinking behind the premises of these often difficult arguments. Weigel also considers larger issues surrounding arguing for God''s existence beyond Aquinas''s views, including more recent philosophical and scientific developments. He introduces readers to a wide array of thinkers and positions on the issues surrounding arguments for God, considers objections and other views from numerous historical and contemporary sources, and contemplates how Aquinas might respond to them. Written in clear prose with full explanations of technical concepts, his book will benefit a wide range of readers from undergraduates to advanced scholars.

What do nineteenth-century fiction, early twentieth-century popular music, 1930s soccer, 1950s film comedy, 1960s experimental art and 1970s soap operas have in common with one another? Each reveal the deep patterns structuring social and cultural life in Rio de Janeiro. Bringing a fresh perspective to one of the most visited cities in South America, Bryan McCann explores each manifestation in turn, mining their depths and drawing connections between artistic movements and political and economic transitions. The book explores the centrality of slavery to every aspect of life in nineteenth century Rio and its long legacy through to the current day, illuminating both the city''s grinding inequality and violence, as well as its triumphant cultural expressions. Rio de Janeiro is a unique and fascinating city, and through ten pivotal moments, McCann reveals its boundless creativity and contradictions, and shows how it has been continually remade by newcomers, strivers, and tricksters.

Using novel data from eleven parliamentary democracies between 1980 and 2020, this Element asks how gender conditions the candidacy, selection, and survival of party leaders. It examines the party leadership careers of 276 leaders and focuses on three categories of variables to explain women''s experiences as party leaders: performance indicators, (s)election details, and political culture. It complements existing research on glass ceilings and glass cliffs that certain conditions should make it more likely that women run as leadership candidates and are selected as party leaders. The Element also offers an original argument that, for women, leadership is akin to being caught in quicksand. Several factors agitate the quicksand and make them sink faster. The authors show support for the glass ceiling theory and their quicksand theory. Yet, they only found mixed support for the glass-cliff theory. The Element offers unique insights into women''s experience with party leadership.

The CEOs of Britain''s largest companies wield immense power, but we know very little about them. How did they get to the top? Why do they have so much power? Are they really worth that exorbitant salary? Michael Aldous and John Turner provide the answers by telling the story of the British CEO over the past century. From gentleman amateurs to professional managers, entrepreneurs, frauds, and fat cats, they reveal the characters who have made it to the top of the corporate ladder, how they got there, and what their rise tells us about British society. They show how the quality of their leadership influences productivity, innovation, economic development and, ultimately, Britain''s place in the world. More recently, issues have arisen regarding high CEO pay, poor performance, and a lack of professionalisation and diversity. Are there lessons from history for those who would seek to reform Britain''s flagging corporate economy?

This Element aims to make good an imbalance in scholarly work on the thought of Karl Popper. Towards the end of his life he developed a dualistic view of the self, and connected to it, a model of reality consisting of three worlds: first the inorganic world; a second level domain of consciousness; and a third world of ideas, institutions and concepts. This third world develops beyond the ideas and understanding of its human inventors. The implications of these later developments has not been fully considered, nor has his idea that his critical rationalism rests on an irrational faith. These are considered against the context of his more famous work on science and the open society. Popper saw his late work in quasi-Platonic terms, and the similarities and differences here are explored. Does Popper's work as a whole tend in an unfulfiled Platonic direction or need a religious foundation?