Nothing In Particular Everything In General

"Nothing In Particular, Everything In General" is a lifetime collection of poems, prose, spiritual writings, gospel and country song lyrics that are peppered with addiction, alcoholism, depression, love, relationships, dedications, gratitude, and spirituality. Some of these writings have won Literary Awards. It is basically a book layered with writings about living life on life's terms, and how that has been accomplished amidst a numerous amount of highs and lows that the author has experienced throughout her life. She touches on the solution, which was given to her and is available to anyone; an answer to some of the problems she has faced with alcoholism, depression and the seemingly unending misery of these common maladies. CINDY DANIELS holds an Associates Degree in Commercial Advertising and Graphic Design. She currently resides In Smithfield, North Carolina, where she has lived for the past 25 years. She has two children. Several of her poems have won Literary Awards and have been published on the Internet. Cindy currently writes a weekly column called "Cooking wiht Cindy" for the Robeson Journal in Lumberton, North Carolina. She hand paints hand carved Mahogany items shipped in from Indonesia for a company that is located on the east side of I-95 between exits 14 and 17, in Lumberton, North Carolina. Her hobbies include cooking, gardening, ceramics and reading. You can visit her website, where her art work is available, at: www.cindywdaniels.com.

In this study of emotions and moods the author discusses both analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. He starts by examining critically the influential hybrid cognitive theory (in particular William Lyons's causal-evaluative theory), describing its merits but also elucidating a number of fundamental defects that exist in this account. He goes on to detail Martin Heidegger's description of mood in Being and Time as pre-cognitive and pre-moral, defending it from those who attempt to attribute a cognitive dimension to it. The book highlights the significance of connections or bonds in our affective lives, at the ontic as well as ontological levels, by examining three specific emotions; grief, guilt and objectless fear. One of the study's principal achievements is the demonstration that there is much to be gained from both the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy in furthering our understanding of emotion and mood analysis. In particular, it shows how our understanding of guilt and objectless fear can be deepened when assessed in Heideggerian terms.

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all. . . . His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books

There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?

An introduction to literary theory unlike any other, Ten Lessons in Theory engages its readers with three fundamental premises. The first premise is that a genuinely productive understanding of theory depends upon a considerably more sustained encounter with the foundational writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than any reader is likely to get from the introductions to theory that are currently available. The second premise involves what Fredric Jameson describes as "the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan's is the richest." Entertaining this conviction, the book pays more (and more careful) attention to the richness of Lacan's writing than does any other introduction to literary theory. The third and most distinctive premise of the book is that literary theory isn't simply theory "about" literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature, after all. Ten Lessons in Theory argues, and even demonstrates, that "theoretical writing" is nothing if not a specific genre of "creative writing," a particular way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble sentences that make, or desire to make, radical changes in the very fabric of social reality. As its title indicates, the book proceeds in the form of ten "lessons," each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canon of theoretical writing. Each lesson works by creatively unpacking its featured sentence and exploring the sentence's conditions of possibility and most radical implications. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these troubling sentences, the ten lessons work and play together to articulate the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences. Provided in each lesson is a working glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a footnote. But while each lesson constitutes a precise explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a "practice of creativity" (Foucault) in itself.

Although modernity's understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity. Our perception of nature may have changed, the author maintains, but environmentalism remains a thoroughly modernist project. It reproduces the cultural logic of modernity, a logic that finds meaning in unity and therefore strives to efface difference, and to reconfirm the position of the West as the source of all legitimate signification.

From Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead" to Camus' argument that suicide is the fundamental question of philosophy, the concept of death plays an important role in existential phenomenology, reaching from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Marcel. This book explores the phenomenology of death and offers a unique way into the phenomenological tradition. Paul Fairfield examines the following key topics: the modern denial of death Heidegger's important concept of 'being-toward-death' and its centrality in phenomenological ideas, such as authenticity and existence the philosophical significance of death rituals: what explains the imperative toward ritual around death, and what is its purpose and meaning? death in an age of secularism the philosophy and ethics of suicide death as a mystery rather than a philosophical problem to be solved the relationship between hope and death. Death: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for students of phenomenology and existentialism, and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as religion, anthropology and the medical humanities.