Redefining Reason

Throughout the twentieth century, Western thinkers engaged in a politically charged, often highly personal and acrimonious debate over the mental and rational capacity of people from traditional nonliterate societies. The issue was a question of whether or not humanity was, at bottom, psychologically and rationally unified and equal as a species. Redefining Reason offers the first in-depth, critical history of that debate and its repercussions in modern Western thought and society. Divided into three sections, this book first sets the twentieth-century “primitive” mentality debate within its historical context so that it may be better understood. It then focuses on some of the highlights of the debate. The next section suggests that this debate was, in reality, a chapter itself in (or in an aspect of) a much larger story: the story of what may be appropriately referred to as the hyperrationalization of human society. To conclude, this book follows the debate into the twenty-first century and offers the clarification and resolutions developed in earlier chapters to contemporary students, scholars, and educated lay readers.

This text investigates continuity and change in contemporary French politics, society and culture. It draws on contributions that reflect a variety of methodological approaches, ranging from theoretical speculations and modelling to the interpretation of fieldwork data.

The supplemented edition of this important reader includes a substantive new introduction by the author on the changing nature of feminist methodology. It takes into account the implications of a major new study included for this first time in this book on poverty and gender (in)equality, and it includes an article discussing the ways in which this study was conducted using the research methods put forward by the first edition. This article begins by explaining why a new and better poverty metric is needed and why developing such a metric requires an alternative methodological approach inspired by feminism. Feminist research is a growing tradition of inquiry that aims to produce knowledge not biased by inequitable assumptions about gender and related categories such as class, race, religion, sexuality, and nationality."Just Methods" is designed for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in a range of disciplines. Rather than being concerned with particular techniques of inquiry, the interdisciplinary readings in this book address broad questions of research methodology. They are designed to help researchers think critically and constructively about the epistemological and ethical implications of various approaches to research selection and research design, evidence-gathering techniques, and publication of results.A key theme running through the readings is the complex interrelationship between social power and inequality on the one hand and the production of knowledge on the other. A second and related theme is the inseparability of research projects and methodologies from ethical and political values."

This book asserts that teacher development should remain the primary medium for school improvement. It aims to reinvigorate research into teacher development by focusing attention on theoretical areas that have been implied but not fully developed.

While Flannery O'Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O'Connor as a philosopher as well. In Return to Good and Evil, Henry T. Edmondson introduces us to a remarkable thinker who uses fiction to confront and provoke us with the most troubling moral questions of modern existence. 'Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul, ' O'Connor once said, in response to the nihilistic tendencies she saw in the world around her. Nihilism--Nietzche's idea that 'God is dead'--preoccupied O'Connor, and she used her fiction to draw a tableau of human civilization on the brink of a catastrophic moral, philosophical, and religious crisis. Again and again, O'Connor suggests that the only way back from this precipice is to recognize the human need for grace, redemption, and God. She argues brilliantly and persuasively through her novels and short stories that the Nietzschean challenge to the notions of good and evil is an ill-conceived effort that will result only in disaster. With rare access to O'Connor's correspondence, prose drafts, and other personal writings, Edmondson investigates O'Connor's deepest motivations through more than just her fiction and illuminates the philosophical and theological influences on her life and work. Edmondson argues that O'Connor's artistic brilliance and philosophical genius reveal the only possible response to the nihilistic despair of the modern world: a return to good and evil through humility and grace.

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.

The academic discipline of linguistics is at a critical stage of development. Whatever consensus there may have been fifteen or even ten years ago is fast disappearing. A process of redefinition is underway, and it is the aim of this volume to contribute to that process, explain why a redefinition is needed, and how it should proceed. In the case of linguistics the subject is also the subject matter. Many linguists have ignored the problem of definition, simply regarding linguistics as the ‘science of language itself’. What, though, is ‘language itself’? Is it a language, ie English, Swahili? Or, language in a more general sense? The primary goal of a redefinition of linguistics should be to demonstrate that language is not an objective matter. Linguistics is, and should be, the study of whatever is linguistically pertinent. A linguistics redefined would look at how we interpret and construct our day-to-day communication acts, what views of language are shared by and opposed by societies, and the source and roles that these views play in our living and learning experience. These papers argue the case for such a redefinition more explicitly than has ever been done before in modern linguistic theory. Such a redefined perspective, precisely because it is a perspective, subject to ‘outside’ influence, and in constant dialogue with the perspective of the other human sciences, must be endlessly redefined.

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