State University of New York Press

Brings Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, contemplative practice, and contemporary environmental ethics together to present a novel way of approaching the pressing issues facing our more-than-human world. In Buddhist Environmental Ethics, Colin H. Simonds presents a compelling case for using a contemplative register to approach some of our most pressing issues surrounding climate change, ecological collapse, and the exploitation of nonhuman animals. Simonds develops an emerging theory of Buddhist ethics—moral phenomenology—by engaging it with the Tibetan framework of view, meditation, action and providing a practical means by which individuals can ethically develop through contemplative practice. He then applies this theory and practical framework to the ethical and material problems facing the more-than-human world to show how a Tibetan Buddhist response to these issues offers a cogent, adaptable way to address environmental problems. In doing so, Buddhist Environmental Ethics forwards the first book-length constructive argument for an eco-Buddhist ethic in over a decade, articulates the first environmental ethic based on Tibetan Buddhist sources, and offers a timely framework for how we can experience the more-than-human world anew through contemplative practice.

Reveals how mise-en-scene has shaped the fields of film and television studies. Visions in the Frame provides a detailed evaluation of the journey and status of mise-en-scene—the organization of the visual field within the frame—as a critical concept in film and television studies. The first part of the book looks at the persistence of mise-en-scene within film studies amid a series of fluctuations in theoretical, historical, cultural, philosophical, and critical approaches. The second part shifts focus to consider television studies and the extent to which mise-en-scene has remained an ambiguous element in the growth of the discipline. The third part engages in a series of close readings from a range of styles and genres of television shows, exploring the relationship between visual composition, meaning, and significance as a central critical focus. Across the three parts of the book, Visions in the Frame presents a rigorous and valuable context for understanding the contrasting position and influence of mise-en-scene within film and television studies, using this to offer guidance for its future role within both disciplines.

Elucidates the shared insight into the critique of tyrannical rule among Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle. Universal Tyranny offers the first comprehensive interpretation of the critique of tyranny in the thought of Socrates's greatest students: Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon. The Socratics are the only thinkers to confront the problem of tyranny on its own terms, as a permanent and plausibly attractive option in politics. They explore what people find attractive in tyrannical power and elucidate the core psychological features of tyrannical ambition: pleasure in violence toward enemies, hostility to the rule of law, a desire for love and admiration, and a rejection of any limit to the fulfillment of one's desires. In their view, these characteristics are not the result of anomalous sadism but of misguided and unhealthy versions of attributes that otherwise play an important role in human flourishing. Through a synthetic study of the early Socratic school, author Avery Williams argues that tyrannical rule debases not only the tyrant's subject but the tyrant himself, making true human excellence impossible. Tyranny thus fails at the fundamental aim of politics: It makes neither ruler nor ruled happy.

Challenges dominant approaches in screen studies by rethinking time not as a function of narrative or montage, but as something actively constructed through performance—through the expressions, gestures, and movements of bodies on screen. Plastic Time radically rethinks how we experience time in screen media—not through plot or montage but through performance. The book explores how actors shape time through the movements and manipulations of their bodies: a quick glance, a recurrent shrug, an awkward embrace. Drawing on examples ranging from Duck Soup to This Is America and from Father Knows Best to Friday Night Lights, it shows how bodily gestures and facial expressions sculpt history and contemporaneity, age, rhythm, and tense. Combining media theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Plastic Time argues that performance doesn't merely represent time—it actively figures it, stretching here and contracting there, now folding together, then tearing apart. Time in film, TV, and video is not fixed but elastic, not given but constantly made and remade, molded anew; it is as plastic as the actors' bodies that enact it.

Explores in both theory and practice the deconstructive demand to never let traces die. At a time when technological advancements, especially LLMs, have all of us wondering about the future of reading and writing, Derrida and Prosthetic Usage; or, How to Return to Cinder studies deconstruction as an ethical injunction to read and write on every technological surface one can find or create. To study this general theory of deconstruction, and Derrida's powerful demand that we "never let the dead bury the dead," this book works in tandem with the website Return to Cinder, an enormous concordance of notes on Derrida taken by author Jake Reeder. Less media studies and more a reading of philosophy and thought in general, Reeder claims that all thought, speech, and writing are forms of re-marking, and that imbedded in the condensation of every re-mark is the demand to create new technological formats. Thus, returning to cinder is both a call for more technological innovation in the humanities and a call to leave more traces.

The first English-language study of Chinese scholars' perspectives on China's quest for democracy. History teaches us that profound transformations are not shaped by ideas alone but are impossible without great ideas. China is known to have a long history during which scholars played a central role in society while their ideas about politics prevailed. Democracy Through the Lens of Chinese Scholars explores six leading schools of thought—including liberalism, New Leftism, neo-Confucianism, democratic socialism, neo-authoritarianism, and good governance—on how to turn China into a democracy. Based on a wealth of primary sources and interview data, author He Li examines the Chinese theoretical debates on democracy from both historical and comparative perspectives. He demonstrates that the crux to understanding China's long march toward democracy lies in appreciating the interrelatedness and interplay of major strands of thought and brings rigor and insight to our understanding of China's leading school of political thought, shedding new light on non-Western political thought in general and comparative democratic theory in particular. Last but not least, the arguments here are a part of global efforts to rethink capitalism and democracy while focusing on liberty, justice, and the rule of law.

An original interpretation of Aristotle's political thought focusing on war and peace. With the post–Cold War international order under stress, Stephen P. Sims reconsiders the relationship between war, peace, and politics by returning to the thought of Aristotle. The City Among Cities offers new ways of thinking about Aristotle, connecting his themes of inequality—such as slavery or aristocracy—to his observations on war and hegemonic politics. By contrasting Aristotle's approach with the foundational theories of international relations, Sims argues that hierarchy and coercion are permanent features of political life that democratic nations ignore at their own peril.

Two important texts in the Sufi tradition made available together in English for the first time. Inscriptions of Wisdom brings together, for the first time in English, two pivotal Sufi texts that illuminate Ibn al-?Arabi's (d. 1240) celebrated work F? ? al-?ikam. The first, Naqsh al-F? ? (the Inscription of the F? ?), is Ibn al-?Arabi's own distillation of F? ? al-?ikam, presenting a concise yet profound articulation of its core teachings. The second, Naqd al-n? ? fi shar? Naqsh al-F? ? (texts commenting on Naqsh al-F? ?), by ?Abd al-R? an Jami, is an anthology of carefully selected passages from the earliest and most authoritative interpreters of F? ? al-?ikam, enriched with Jami's own insights. Together, these works explore the quintessential knowledge and divine principles embodied by each of the twenty-seven major prophetic figures of the Islamic tradition, from Adam to Muhammad. If F? ? al-?ikam represents the culmination of Ibn al-?Arabi's thought, then Naqsh al-F? ? distills its very essence and inner mystery. Mukhtar H. Ali's meticulous presentation of the F? ? al-?ikam commentarial tradition—featuring the first complete English translation of Jami's Naqd al-n? ?, chapter-by-chapter analysis, and extensive notes on key Sufi terms and concepts—establishes this volume as a landmark study in Islamic metaphysics and Sufi thought.

Offers an expansion of Desmond's explorations in the philosophy of the between by considering in a fresh way the distinctive features of Irish thought, with reference to religion, culture, and poetry. In Wayward and Homebound, William Desmond explores the philosophy of the between in connection with traditions of Irish thought and culture, especially poetry, drawing upon the metaxological philosophy developed most systematically in the award-winning Being and the Between, Ethics and the Between, and God and the Between. It begins with a broad overview of this notion in connection with Irish thinking and culture by contrast with French, German, and Greek variations of the notion. It touches on figures like John Scotus Eriugena, John Toland, George Berkeley, and Edmund Burke as well as major poets and writers like Swift, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. The paradoxical twinning of being at home and not being at home and the relation of thought and exile, in an Irish as well as more cosmopolitan setting, are explored. Desmond presents a synopsis of metaxological philosophy and how it contributes to aesthetics, ethics, religion, and metaphysics. In an extended exploration of Irish betweenings, reflections are offered that move from nature to culture, with four sequences of reflections on islanding, naturing, homing, and wording. Additional concerns come to light such as insular thinking, the ecology of land and sea, religion, postcolonialsm, and the dialogue of poet and philosopher.

Investigates permutations of the terror to examine the complex political and intellectual transformation of literary theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot between 1933 and 1949. Between 1933 and 1949 Maurice Blanchot's writings underwent a rather infamous political and critical transformation. Its overarching trope is the terror, which features prominently in his work in 1936, 1941, and 1947. The terror is a reflexive discourse about whether language is bound to reality, and so forceful, or merely a series of empty signs. Marty Hiatt provides an in-depth study of Blanchot's political and critical writings from this period, elaborating his various reckonings with the terror so as to demonstrate the categorical nature of his intellectual shift. Blanchot first calls for an insurrection that would violently expurgate the foreign and execute a Jewish prime minister in order to save France. After the Fall of France, he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric dialectically constitute literature as world construction and world destruction. In his first postwar encounter with Hegel, he links this conception back to history by arguing that it corresponds to revolution. He also doubles the dialectical account of revolutionary history through an account of poetic language that makes contact with an unknowable substrate of existence, resulting in a kind of absolute ambiguity, and seeks to explore and inhabit a form of negativity beyond revolution.

A translation of the 1843 novella by Edgar Bauer, a significant if overlooked work of German literary history that casts new light on the Young Hegelian movement and, possibly, Karl Marx. In early 1843, the Young Hegelian philosopher and activist Edgar Bauer published a comic novella titled Es leben feste Grundsätze! or A Life of Solid Principles! It told the story of an idealistic young journalist named, significantly enough, Karl. While the work was more or less ignored for one and a half centuries, recent scholarship has suggested that it may contain a fictionalized and deeply critical portrait of Karl Marx. That on its own makes it fascinating and valuable. But it is also an important piece of literary history in its own right. And it offers a powerful way into the life and career of its author—a figure who, despite an enormous amount of interest in the intellectual history of the German Vormärz in recent years, has remained conspicuously overlooked in the literature. This volume combines an original translation of Es leben feste Grundsätze! with a long essay outlining Edgar Bauer’s revolutionary political thought. Along the way, it shows how the Young Hegelian movement constituted a crucial inflection point in the history of the relationship between radical political theory, on one side, and concrete political institutions, on the other.

Traces the intellectual history of cinema's aspiration to create a universal language, examining how this vision has been articulated in both writings and films. Celluloid Babel offers a transnational intellectual history of cinema's quest for universal language, unfolding through both writings and films. Today, algorithms and data-collection systems play a significant role in predicting the viewer's preferences and suggesting content specifically tailored to their particular interests. However, this promise of on-demand personalized media is markedly different from the promise outlined in cinema's initial promotional discourse, which celebrated the medium’s ability to appeal to a universal audience. Instead of targeting fragmented audiences, cinema was supposed to captivate and engage everyone all at once, regardless of social station, educational level, or national affiliation. The aspiration for a universal language left an indelible mark on film history, yet despite its significance, the history and theory behind it remain largely unexplored. Celluloid Babel illuminates a pivotal chapter in early film theory and establishes it as the inaugural paradigm of thought on cinema’s nature. By exploring this pursuit, the book reveals the forgotten utopian potential of mass media and uncovers complex correlations among political ideals, aesthetic preferences, material conditions, modes of spectatorship, and governance.

A comprehensive exploration of how labor unions, broadly conceived, shape party loyalties in the American mass public. How and why do labor unions matter for American mass party loyalties, specifically party identification and vote choice? Labor Unions and American Mass Politics marshals a wide range of survey data to test two different ways through which labor unions can shape mass party loyalties. The first is via people's personal affiliation with organized labor, such as a current/former member or household resident, while the second is via people's attitudes toward organized labor, such as whether they favor vs. disfavor unions in general. Overall, author David Macdonald shows that both are capable of shaping mass support for the Democratic Party and its various political candidates and that such relationships are also conditioned by whether people perceive labor unions and Democrats to be political allies, a connection that is lacking among a sizeable minority of Americans. Overall, Macdonald provides not only a timely analysis of mass labor politics in the early twenty-first-century United States but also shows that labor unions are politically consequential, even after decades of decline.

Draws on the work of the Renaissance theologian and mystic Nicolas of Cusa to offer an alternative to Cartesian subjectivity. The normative history of modernity begins with the Renaissance and the invention of linear perspective, which places man, instead of God, at the center of the world. The vanishing point of linear perspective portrays the world from the perspective of the single right eye of a singular subject, and it is this perspective that inspired Descartes's optics and his isolated cogito as the prime example of modern subjectivity. This book returns to the invention of linear perspective to seek another interpretation, offering an alternative to the Cartesian subject. Using the work of Renaissance theologian and mystic Nicolas of Cusa, Arianne Conty traces an alternative genealogy of the modern subject, one that allows the world, and the painting, to return our gaze. In elucidating the critique of the Cartesian subject by twentieth-century philosophers Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Marion, she asks how modernity could be reconceived if philosophers were to take into account the geometric vision of Nicolas of Cusa and how his alternative vision might enable us to escape narcissism and share our world with the absolute other.

Unfolds the central importance of broken hospitality in the director's work. Hitchcock and Hospitality argues that the violation of hospitality is a driving force behind Alfred Hitchcock's work. From his television hosting to his cameo appearances to the premises of his stories, the Master of Suspense stages a crisis of authority over access to physical and virtual space. Using the familiarity of his work to make a larger contribution to both film and critical theory, this book engages the French tradition of theorizing hospitality with a keen eye for its feminist implications. But the House of Hitchcock unsettles the scene of hospitality further, down to its hold on the organization of social space. Reading for hospitality not just in grand estates and humble cottages but in cars and trains, motels and apartments, and other mobile and transient spaces—including the virtual space of film itself—Hitchcock and Hospitality tracks the drama of modern social exchange and unfolds the central importance of broken hospitality in the director's work. Films considered intensively include the familiar (Rebecca, Rope, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Birds, and Marnie) as well as those that have received less critical attention (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Saboteur, Lifeboat, and Dial M for Murder). The book also touches on many other Hitchcock films and on key episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Examines the presidential elections from 1832 to 2020 and reveals that the unequal representation of popular vote among states and wasted votes received by popular vote winners are major causes of the split between the popular vote result and Electoral College result. During the 2020 presidential election, it was possible, if unlikely, for a candidate to win the election by winning only 21 percent of the popular vote in the nation. Inversely, it was possible for a candidate to win 79 percent of popular vote and still lose the election. Examining presidential elections from 1832 to 2020, Manabu Saeki reveals that the unequal representation of popular vote among states and wasted votes received by popular vote winners are major causes of the split between the popular vote result and Electoral College result. An average voter in the most overrepresented state holds Electoral College votes that are approximately twice as many as those of the average voter nationwide and four times larger than those of the most underrepresented state. Republican candidates today tend to win a significantly larger number of overrepresented states, thereby winning a larger number of Electoral College votes relative to the number of popular votes they win. However, Republican candidates also suffer more wasted votes than Democratic candidates. Further, Saeki analyzes the vote decision by individual voters. Voters with strong racist and/or authoritarian inclinations tended to vote for a Republican candidate prior to, as well as after, the 2016 election. There is no indication that Donald Trump mobilized the voters with racist or authoritarian predispositions.