Critical Difference

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism ate "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Bathes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism. In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one of more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambuquities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if "to differ" can also mean "to disagree," then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.

Annotation. "Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference takes look at sex, gender, ethnicity, and race as different ways of expressing an underlying human nature or essence. While the most influential theorists of oppression have argued that belief in some shared human essence is ultimately responsible for the injustices suffered by women, First Nations peoples, blacks, gays and lesbians, and colonized people, and have insisted that struggles against oppression must be mounted from the unique different perspectives of individual groups, Jeff Noonan argues instead that such differences must be seen to be anchored in a conception of human beings as self-creative. Unless freedom and self-determination are accepted as universal values, the moral force of arguments against exclusion and oppression is lost."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Critical Appraisal of Medical Literature provides a step-by-step approach to help the reader reach a good level of proficiency in systematic critical appraisal of medical information. To this end, the book covers all the elements that are necessary to develop these skills and is a comprehensive guide to the subject. The book is written in three parts. The first part focuses on the logical justification and the validity of medical information. Its chapters present basic working definitions and discussions on relevant basic topics of statistics and epidemiology. The second part focuses on the complementary aspects of critique, common study designs and articles whose main topics are treatment, diagnosis, prognosis, aetiology, reviews, medical guidelines, audit, and qualitative research. The third part presents some statistical techniques that are commonly used in published articles. Critical Appraisal of Medical Literature is intended for those interested in developing critical appraisal skills such as psychiatric trainees preparing for the Critical Review Paper of the MRCPsych Examination in the UK, other practitioners as part of their preparation for examinations, and medical professionals and students as part of their introduction to aspects of systematic critical appraisal of medical information.

Artificial intelligence is a constantly advancing field that requires models in order to accurately create functional systems. The use of natural acumen to create artificial intelligence creates a field of research in which the natural and the artificial meet in a new and innovative way. Critical Developments and Applications of Swarm Intelligence is a critical academic publication that examines developing research, technologies, and function regarding natural and artificial acumen specifically, in regards to self-organized systems. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as evolutionary algorithms, optimization techniques, and computational comparison, this book is geared toward academicians, students, researchers, and engineers seeking relevant and current research on the progressive research based on the implementation of swarm intelligence in self-organized systems.

In this stimulating and provocative book the editors have drawn together a diverse and international range of respected authors, each of whom has taken a critical approach to the contentious question of how you define and achieve quality early childhood services. It is a book designed to provoke and promote critical dialogue and discourse amongst practitioners and students through critical engagement with the position of the authors within the text. I believe anyone who reads this book will be inspired and motivated to challenge and extend their thinking and professional practice, adopting the critical stance which lies at the heart of quality services for children and families. Professor Chris Pascal, Director of Centre for Research in Early Childhood (CREC) Early childhood is a complex and important area of study where it is important to develop your critical thinking and reflect upon key issues. This book will help do both. It explores interrelated topics such as: Child development Play Safeguarding Professionalism Curriculum and Policy Each chapter will not only engage with what you need to know but help you develop your academic skills. The book also comes with lots of online resources which can be found at https://study.sagepub.com/reedandwalker and include: Podcasts from the authors of each chapter so you can better understand the key concepts PowerPoints to help you revise the essential information Journal articles related to each chapter provide further reading Michael Reed and Rosie Walker are both Senior Lecturers in Early Childhood at the Institute of Education, University of Worcester.

In the new knowledge economy, traditional modes of thinking are no longer effective. Compartmentalizing problems and solutions and assuming everything can be solved with the right formula can no longer keep pace with the radical changes occurring daily in the modern business world. It’s Not Complicated offers a paradigm shift for business professionals looking for simplified solutions to complex problems. In his straightforward and highly engaging style, Rick Nason introduces the principles of “complexity thinking” which empower managers to understand, correlate, and explain a diverse range of business phenomena. For example, why some new products go viral while others remain unnoticed, how office cliques develop despite collaborative work policies and spaces, how economic bubbles form, and how an unknown retiree foiled one of the most carefully planned product launches ever with a single letter to the editor of his local newspaper. Rather than consider complicated and complex as interchangeable terms, Rick Nason explains what complexity is, how it arises, and the errors in solving complex situations with complicated thinking. It’s Not Complicated provides managers with fresh, counterintuitive, and actionable models for dealing with challenging business problems.

Dialectic and Difference is the first systematic exploration of Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical philosophy and its implications for ethics and justice. That philosophy has three aims: a dialecticisation of original critical realism, a ‘critical realisation’ of dialectic, and a metacritique of western philosophy. In the first, real absence or negativity links structured being to dialectical becoming in a dynamic world. The second draws on Marx to locate the critical impulse in Hegel’s dialectic in a material, open and changing totality. The third identifies a central problem in western philosophy from the Greeks on, the failure to think real negativity as the essence of change (‘ontological monovalence’). Bhaskar’s ethics connect basic human ontology with universal principles of freedom and solidarity. He marries (‘constellates’) these with a grasp of how principles are historically shaped. His account of freedom moves from the infant’s ‘primal scream’ to the eudaimonic society, but thinks the limits to freedom under modern conditions. The morally real in ethics and justice is displaced and reconfigured as relations between ‘the ideal’ and ‘the actual’. Western philosophy systematically denies the real negativity that drives Bhaskar’s dialectic. Metacritique traces this to Parmenides and Plato’s account of non-being as difference. It enables a critique of the poststructural radicalisation of difference via Nietzsche and the doctrine of ‘Heraclitan flux’. Mobilised as ‘the other’ of Plato’s Forms, this remains a move on Platonic terrain. It too denies real negativity in structured being as the ground of historical change and moral praxis. This text is essential reading for all serious students of social theory, philosophy, and legal theory.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.