Cultural Realism

Cultural Realism is an in-depth study of premodern Chinese strategic thought that has important implications for contemporary international relations theory. In applying a Western theoretical debate to China, Iain Johnston advances rigorous procedures for testing for the existence and influence of "strategic culture." Johnston sets out to answer two empirical questions. Is there a substantively consistent and temporally persistent Chinese strategic culture? If so, to what extent has it influenced China's approaches to security? The focus of his study is the Ming dynasty's grand strategy against the Mongols (1368-1644). First Johnston examines ancient military texts as sources of Chinese strategic culture, using cognitive mapping, symbolic analysis and congruence tests to determine whether there is a consistent grand strategic preference ranking across texts that constitutes a single strategic culture. Then he applies similar techniques to determine the effect of the strategic culture on the strategic preferences of the Ming decision makers. Finally, he assesses the effect of these preferences on Ming policies towards the Mongol "threat." The findings of this book challenge dominant interpretations of traditional Chinese strategic thought. They suggest also that the roots of realpolitik are ideational and not predominantly structural. The results lead to the surprising conclusion that there may be, in fact, fewer cross-national differences in strategic culture than proponents of the "strategic culture" approach think.

Extending his well-known investigations into the nature and logic of art and history in the cultural world, Joseph Margolis here offers a sustained account of how selves and the cultural phenomena they generate (language, history, action, art) can be viewed as just as "real" as the physical nature from which they are emergent, while not being reducible to it. The book starts off with a review of prominent philosophies of art over the past half-century, focusing especially on Beardsley, Goodman, and Danto, so as to highlight the need for carefully distinguishing between the metaphysical and epistemological features of physical nature and human culture. The second part of the book builds on the first part's analyses of artworks to propose a theory of selves as "self-interpreting texts." Selves and Other Texts aims to develop new ways of understanding the conceptual inseparability of our analysis of physical nature and our analysis of ourselves.

The book proposes a new Cultural Realism and Virtualism design model for cultural and creative products based on Laozi’s philosophy and analysis of symbolism, metaphysics, three-layered culture, reverse-triangular cultural space and Zen aesthetics. It studies peoples that speak Austronesian languages and offers a detailed comparison of their homogeneous and heterogeneous cultures of color, clothing, housing, boats, birds, symbols, dance and ancestry, and provides insights into the cultural features of deconstruction and construction of color, style, form, shape and function, to compose cultural and creative products using complex, variable, fuzzy evaluation; and structural variation and color evaluation methods. It then uses case studies to show that the products created with the new model not only fulfilled their purpose, but also successfully entered the markets. This book helps qualify decision-making processes, improve accuracy of design scheme evaluation and enhance efficiency in product development, and as such appeals to those in the cultural and creative industry, researchers, designers and those who are interested in product design.

Burdens of Freedom presents a new and radical interpretation of America and its challenges. The United States is an individualist society where most people seek to realize personal goals and values out in the world. This unusual, inner-driven culture was the chief reason why first Europe, then Britain, and finally America came to lead the world. But today, our deepest problems derive from groups and nations that reflect the more passive, deferential temperament of the non-West. The long-term poor and many immigrants have difficulties assimilating in America mainly because they are less inner-driven than the norm. Abroad, the United States faces challenges from Asia, which is collective-minded, and also from many poorly-governed countries in the developing world. The chief threat to American leadership is no longer foreign rivals like China but the decay of individualism within our own society. The great divide is between the individualist West, for which life is a project, and the rest of the world, in which most people seek to survive rather than achieve. This difference, although clear in research on world cultures, has been ignored in virtually all previous scholarship on American power and public policy, both at home and abroad. Burdens of Freedom is the first book to recognize that difference. It casts new light on America's greatest struggles. It re-evaluates the entire Western tradition, which took individualism for granted. How to respond to cultural difference is the greatest test of our times.

Critical Realist Activity Theory provides an exciting new contribution to the New Studies in Critical Realism and Education series by showing how the nature of learning is tantamount to the critical realist notion of the dialectic. The science of learning is too important to leave solely to the sciences; it needs philosophy as well. The task of this book is to take a further step and clear the conceptual field for an ontologically grounded view of the science of learning through critical realism, making use of dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of meta-Reality, as well as basic critical realism. The objective of the book is neither to accommodate the nature of learning to strategies and techniques, nor to adjust to the demands of institutions and authorities. Its key goal is to explain how the very nature of learning constitutes itself; that is, its aim is to explain how a stratum of learning emerges out of the need to absent something that has been left out in human reality. In this precise sense, the book does much more than simply reveal the aspects of reality that have been omitted from the conceptualization of learning, it helps to reformulate a proper understanding of the nature of learning. An implication of this understanding of learning is that it begins to advance the fundamental question of what it means to be a human being. This book will be of great interest to academics and students interested in Vygotsky, Luria, Activity Theory and Critical Realism more generally across both Europe and the US.

In this book distinguished theorist and author Shelby D. Hunt analyzes the major controversies in the "philosophy debates" raging throughout the field of marketing. Using an historical approach, Hunt argues against relativism and for scientific realism as a philosophy for guiding marketing research and theory. He also shows how the pursuit of truth and objectivity in marketing research are both possible and desirable. Specific controversies analyzed in the book include: Does positivism dominate marketing research? Does positivism imply quantitive methods? Is relativism an appropriate foundation for marketing research? Does relativism imply pluralism, tolerance, and openness? Should marketing pursue the goal of objective research? An ideal companion to Hunt's classic text, Foundations of Marketing Theory, this volume will be equally useful on its own in any graduate level course on marketing theory.

This is the third volume of Hilary Putnam's philosophical papers, published in paperback for the first time. The volume contains his major essays from 1975 to 1982, which reveal a large shift in emphasis in the 'realist' position developed in his earlier work. While not renouncing those views, Professor Putnam has continued to explore their epistemological consequences and conceptual history. He now, crucially, sees theories of truth and of meaning that derive from a firm notion of reference as inadequate.

A definitive history of the pioneering efforts of Television Northern Canada and APTN.