Cambridge University Press strana 3 z 64

In Seeing Matters, Sarah Awad offers a psychological exploration of how images shape our actions, perceptions, and identities. She examines how we use images to symbolically and materially influence the world, others, and ourselves, while also revealing how the images around us shape our thoughts, emotions, and memories. Awad investigates the social and political dynamics of visual culture, questioning who is seen, how they are portrayed, and why these representations matter. By using clear language and real-world examples, she makes complex theories accessible to readers, offering diverse methodological approaches for analyzing a wide range of image genres – such as graffiti, digital memes, photojournalism, and caricatures. This comprehensive analysis addresses the politics of visual representation, making the book an essential guide for researchers across disciplines, while providing valuable insights into how images impact society and our everyday lives.

Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through Particularism sheds light on these questions and more by explaining how parties can use personal vote-seeking incentives in order to decrease intra-party dissent. Studying a unique electoral reform in Mexico, the book provides a detailed description of how institutional incentives can conflict. It draws on a variety of rich, original data sources on legislative behavior and organization in 20 Mexican states to develop a novel explanation of how electoral reforms can amplify competing institutional incentives. In settings where legislative rules and candidate selection procedures favor parties, legislators may lack the resources necessary to build voter support. If this is the case, party leaders can condition access to these resources on loyalty to the party's political agenda.

Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 celebrated the quadricentennial of Columbus's 'discovery” of the Americas by creating a fantastical white city composed of Roman triumphal arches and domes, Corinthian colonnades, and Egyptian obelisks. World's fairs were among the most important cultural, socio-economic, and political phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: millions visited hoping to understand the modernity and progress of these cities and the nascent superpower of the United States. But what they found was often a representation of the past. From 1893 to 1915, ancient Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture was deployed to create immersive environments at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco. The seemingly endless adaptations of ancient architecture at these five fairs demonstrated that ancient architecture can symbolize and transmit the complex-and often paradoxical or contradictory-ideas that defined the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and still endure today.

Progress is defined as change towards the better. This definition, comprising both a descriptive and a normative element, can be applied in the organic domain to the history of living organisms. If evolutionary biologists struggle to live with organic progress, they also seem unable to live without it. Are there any theoretical arguments for using the normative terms 'good' and 'better' within evolutionary theory? How do we clarify the idea that some 'change towards the better' is conceptually implied by evolutionary theory? The author argues that there are specific kinds of value, that is, organic value, that allow us to speak meaningfully about improvements in living beings. A large part of this Element is devoted to showing how this applies to the concept of adaptation at a local scale. The final section broadens the investigation to a global scale, tentatively suggesting evolvability as a promising candidate for global progress.

Situated on one of Europe's busiest sea-roads, Ireland has always been connected to other cultures. This accessible and engaging history explores these connections across 1,600 years, from the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century to the present day. While the Norman invasion in 1169 brought the English crown into Irish politics, the impulse to preserve the Irish language and early Irish history united many of the Gaelic-Irish and Anglo-Normans from the fourteenth century. The Irish nationhood that emerged later was based more on Catholicism, as Ireland became a minor theatre of bitter European conflicts of the early modern period. Political (and religious) loyalties which solidified at this point determined Irish politics for the next three centuries, through the Troubles and beyond. Alongside these major political events, Caitriona Clear examines the living and working conditions of ordinary men and women — what they traded and farmed, how they lived and loved, and how they were often affected, but not always overwhelmed, by the politics of their time.

Configuring Psychology offers a vibrant, multimodal sociological analysis of clinical psychology as a profession and practice in the UK. Starting from the widely-accepted principle and goal of enhancing access to care, it examines how political, economic, legal, and social dynamics intertwine with clinical norms and expertise. These interactions configure broader healthcare contexts, defining not only entry into therapy but also exclusion from it. Through close attention to policy developments, professional strategies, and psychologists' experiences, Martyn Pickersgill reveals how access reforms shape clinical knowledge, therapeutic practice, and understandings of psychology itself. He shows how expanding access has become both a moral imperative and a managerial project, with clinical psychologists balancing competing bureaucratic, ethical, and emotional demands in an increasingly strained NHS. As such, Configuring Psychology provides essential insights for social scientists as well as clinicians and policymakers navigating reform. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Is God a necessary being? Infinite yet simple? Creator of a world that seems equally able to explain itself? In this volume, prize-winning philosopher Lenn Goodman probes key religious questions against the backdrop of sacred texts and philosophical classics. In dialogue with a range of philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Philo, Maimonides, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant, he examines the relationship between truth and the idea of God. Exploring the nexus between theism and logic, he probes ontological and design arguments, the anthropic principle, the problem of evil, the nature of justice and fairness, and the purpose and meaning of art. Goodman provocatively asks what science would look like if scientists allowed themselves to voice religious responses to their discoveries, as Einstein did. Finally, he probes the insights and examples of the morally virtuous, such as Moses, Albert Schweitzer, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Many people read the Crito primarily as a companion piece to the Apology and as one of Plato's statements on the nature of politics and the citizen's relationship to the state. This book challenges both of those assumptions and shows, by close analysis of the characters, the argument and the dramatic features of the dialogue, that it is best read as an exploration of the nature and significance of Socratic moral reasoning. It shows that there is a single argument throughout the dialogue and that the 'Laws of Athens' are best understood as supporting Socrates' attempt to convince Crito that a commitment to the currently best rational argument justifies his submission to the death penalty, despite the injustice of his sentence. The importance of the Crito for later political and legal theory is great, but the reception of the dialogue should not blind us to its original intention and significance.

From barometers to the famous BBC shipping forecast, we have – over the centuries – developed the means to predict, harness, and shield ourselves from what is happening in the atmosphere. Attitudes about the planet's weather, as well as about human identity, have thereby taken on new meanings. In an era of climatic anxiety, what weather is and how weather behaves have taken on additional currency. Benjamin Hale weaves together philosophy and anecdote into a many-faceted exploration of this powerful force that shapes who we are and how we think about our place in the world. He argues that in our drive to 'scientize' weather, with all the technological advances in managing, anticipating, and understanding it, we also risk distancing ourselves from weather and losing a complete sense of what it is. This entertaining book reminds us that the weather is and always will be in some sense outside our control, and that consequently we are and forever will be learning to live alongside it.

Why are legislatures in some authoritarian regimes more powerful than others? Why does influence on policies and politics vary across dictatorships? To answer these questions, Lawmaking under Authoritarianism extends the power-sharing theory of authoritarian government to argue that autocracies with balanced factional politics have more influential legislatures than regimes with unbalanced or unstable factional politics. Where factional politics is balanced, autocracies have reviser legislatures that amend and reject significant shares of executive initiatives and are able to block or reverse policies preferred by dictators. When factional politics is unbalanced, notary legislatures may amend executive bills but rarely reject them, and regimes with unstable factional politics oscillate between these two extremes. Lawmaking under Authoritarianism employs novel datasets based on extensive archival research to support these findings, including strong qualitative case studies for past dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, and Spain.

Since the 1970s, historians have claimed that an insatiable 'will to know' has powered the growing concern with male homosexuality across Europe and the West, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards. Unwilling To Know challenges this dominant narrative by demonstrating how, unlike in neighbouring France, Germany, and Britain, a mixture of silence and code surrounded homosexuality in Belgium until well after the Second World War. Whereas over a thousand scientific monographs on homosexuality were published in wider Europe between 1898 and 1908, the lack of publishing in Belgium was combined with a marked lack of interest from the police, psychiatrists and wider society. Through internationally comparative analyses, and with particular reference to the importance of religion, Wannes Dupont complicates overly monolithic views of European developments based on a handful of familiar cases. In doing so, this study lays bare the many national, cultural, institutional, legal and religious differences that have shaped the scrutiny of homosexuality in diverging ways.

Since the 1970s, historians have claimed that an insatiable 'will to know' has powered the growing concern with male homosexuality across Europe and the West, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards. Unwilling To Know challenges this dominant narrative by demonstrating how, unlike in neighbouring France, Germany, and Britain, a mixture of silence and code surrounded homosexuality in Belgium until well after the Second World War. Whereas over a thousand scientific monographs on homosexuality were published in wider Europe between 1898 and 1908, the lack of publishing in Belgium was combined with a marked lack of interest from the police, psychiatrists and wider society. Through internationally comparative analyses, and with particular reference to the importance of religion, Wannes Dupont complicates overly monolithic views of European developments based on a handful of familiar cases. In doing so, this study lays bare the many national, cultural, institutional, legal and religious differences that have shaped the scrutiny of homosexuality in diverging ways.

At the core of nationalism, the nation has always been defined and celebrated as a fundamentally cultural community. This pioneering cultural history shows how artists and intellectuals since the days of Napoleon have celebrated and taken inspiration from an idealized nationality, and how this in turn has informed and influenced social and political nationalism. The book brings together tell-tale examples from across the entire European continent, from Dublin and Barcelona to Istanbul and Helsinki, and from cultural fields that include literature, painting, music, sports, world fairs and cinema as well as intellectual history. Charismatic Nations offers unique insights into how the unobtrusive soft power of nationally-inspired culture interacts with nationalism as a hard-edged political agenda. It demonstrates how, thanks to its pervasive cultural and 'unpolitical' presence, nationalism can shape-shift between romantic insurgency and nativist populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

International law shapes nearly every aspect of our lives. Yet it is often considered the exclusive domain of professionals with years of legal training. This second edition text uses clear, accessible writing and contemporary examples to explain where international law comes from, how actors decide whether to follow it, and how it is upheld using legal and political tools. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, this book is accessible to a wide audience and is written for anyone who wants to understand how global rules shape and transform international politics. Each chapter is framed by a case study that examines a current political issue, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or the Israel/Gaza war, encouraging students to draw connections between theoretical concepts and real-world situations. The chapters are modular and are paired with multiple Supplemental Cases: edited and annotated judicial opinions. Accompanied by ready-to-use PowerPoint slides and a test bank for instructors.

Stereotypes in Black is a sharp examination of the representations and self-representations of Afro-descendants in Buenos Aires through the nineteenth century. Originally published in Spanish, this English language translation spotlights various forms of representation, focusing on the stereotypical images and visual culture constructed and repeated, and the important role they played in highlighting the need for a culturally and racially homogeneous nation in social discourse. María de Lourdes Ghidoli provides a detailed account of one of the most serious cases of social exclusion in Latin American and Argentine history, examining strategies adopted by some of the most recognized members of the Afro-Porteno community, and assessing whether they refuted the negative stereotypes or reinforced them. The book will aid in the revisualization of Afro-descendent Argentines, while highlighting how the repeated use of stereotypes exacerbated the invisibilization suffered by the Afro-descendant population in the Argentine Republic.

Analytic philosophy of religion is a vibrant area of inquiry, but it has generally focused on generic forms of theism or on Christianity. David Shatz here offers a new and fresh approach to the field in a wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the analytic philosophy of religion from the perspective of Judaism.  Exploring classical Jewish texts about philosophical topics in light of the concepts and arguments at the heart of analytic philosophy, he demonstrates how each tradition illuminates the other, yielding a deeper understanding of both Jewish sources and general philosophical issues. Shatz also advances growing efforts to imagine Jewish philosophy not only as an engrossing, invaluable part of Jewish intellectual history, but also as a creative, constructive enterprise that mines the methods and literature of contemporary philosophy. His book offers new pathways to think deeply about God, evil, morality, freedom, ethics, and religious diversity, among other topics.