Being And Ambiguity

Being and Ambiguity is a brilliant work of philosophy, filled with insights, jokes, and topical examples. Professor Ziporyn draws on the works of such Western thinkers as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Hegel, but develops his main argument from Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism. This important work introduces Tiantai Buddhism to the reader and demonstrates its relevance to profound philosophical issues. Ziporyn argues that we can make both of the claims below simultaneously: This book is about everything. It contains the answers to all philosophical problems which ever shall exist. This book is all claptrap. It is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind. These claims are not contradictory. Rather, they state the same thing in two different ways. To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vise versa. All interchanges of any kind - conversations, daydreams, sensations - are not only about something but also about everything. Thus, this book concerns itself with no less than the nature of what is and what it means for something to be what it is. It provides a new approach to the basic Western philosophical and psychological issues of identity, determinacy, being, desire, boredom, addiction, love and truth.

A thought-provoking guide to help you lean in to the discomfort of the unknown to turn creative opportunities into intentional design, from Stanford University's world-renowned d.school. “Navigating Ambiguity reminds us not to run from uncertainty but rather see it as a defining moment of opportunity.”—Yves Béhar, Founder and CEO, fuseproject A design process presents a series of steps, but in real life, it rarely plays out this neatly. Navigating Ambiguity underscores how the creative process isn’t formulaic. This book shows you how to surrender control by being adaptable, curious, and unbiased as well as resourceful, tenacious, and courageous. Designers and educators Andrea Small and Kelly Schmutte use humor and clear steps to help you embrace uncertainty as you approach a creative project. First, they explain how the brain works and why it defaults to certainty. Then they show you how to let go of the need for control and instead employ a flexible strategy that relies on the balance between acting and adapting, and the give-and-take between opposing approaches to make your way to your goal. Beautiful cut-paper artwork illustrations offer ways to rethink creative work without hitting the usual roadblocks. The result is a more open and satisfying journey from assignment or idea to finished product.

Being and Ambiguity is a brilliant work of philosophy, filled with insights, jokes, and topical examples. Professor Ziporyn draws on the works of such Western thinkers as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Hegel, but develops his main argument from Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism. This important work introduces Tiantai Buddhism to the reader and demonstrates its relevance to profound philosophical issues. Ziporyn argues that we can make both of the claims below simultaneously: This book is about everything. It contains the answers to all philosophical problems which ever shall exist. This book is all claptrap. It is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind. These claims are not contradictory. Rather, they state the same thing in two different ways. To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vise versa. All interchanges of any kind - conversations, daydreams, sensations - are not only about something but also about everything. Thus, this book concerns itself with no less than the nature of what is and what it means for something to be what it is. It provides a new approach to the basic Western philosophical and psychological issues of identity, determinacy, being, desire, boredom, addiction, love and truth.

Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare. Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.

From the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex comes a radical argument for ethical responsibility and freedom. In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of “ways of being” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.

From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most? When Margaret's fiancée, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence. Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family. With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives. "Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization"-Wall Street Journal "Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone , Haslett has reached another level."-New York Times Book Review

Examines seven types of ambiguity, providing examples of it in the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.

Ellsberg elaborates on "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms" and mounts a powerful challenge to the dominant theory of rational decision in this book.