Search results for ""macat international limited""
Macat International Limited An Analysis of St. Augustine's The City of God Against the Pagans
The City of God against the Pagans is a central text in the Western intellectual tradition. Made up of twenty-two lengthy books, Augustine wrote his masterpiece over a thirteen-year period during which the Western Roman Empire began to unravel. The first ten books are a critique of pagan religion and philosophy, while books eleven to twenty-two treat the relationship between the City of God and the Earthly City. Throughout Augustine conveys his mature vision of what it means for a Christian to live in a world with evil. Its arguments and ideas have provoked debate for nearly 1600 years, and remains a central text in the disciplines of theology, historiography, and political theory.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Jacques Derrida's Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century. Delivered at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins, the lecture took aim at the critical and philosophical fashions of the time and radically proposing a world in which meaning cannot be pinned down or traced to an origin, but instead is continuously shifting, fleeting, and open to play. Hailed by many as a watershed in philosophy and literary theory, Derrida’s lecture has shaped both disciplines. At once dense, brilliant, and humorous, it is a crucial read for anyone interested in questioning our natural assumptions about meaning in the world.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins
Today we take it for granted that history is much more than the story of great men and the elites from which they spring. Other forms of history – the histories of gender, class, rebellion and nonconformity – add much-needed context and color to our understanding of the past. But this has not always been so. In CLR James’s The Black Jacobins, we have one of the earliest, and most defining, examples of how ‘history from below’ ought to be written. James's approach is based on his need to resolve two central problems: to understand why the Haitian slave revolt was the only example of a successful slave rebellion in history, and also to grasp the ways in which its history was intertwined with the history of the French Revolution. The book's originality, and its value, rests on its author's ability to ask and answer productive questions of this sort, and in the creativity with which he proved able to generate new hypotheses as a result. As any enduring work of history must be, The Black Jacobins is rooted in sound archival research – but its true greatness lies in the originality of James's approach.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Franz Boas's Race, Language and Culture
Franz Boas’s 1940 Race, Language and Culture is a monumentally important text in the history of its discipline, collecting the articles and essays that helped make Boas known as the ‘father of American anthropology.’ An encapsulation of a career dedicated to fighting against the false theories of so-called ‘scientific racism’ that abounded in the first half of the 20th-century, Race, Language and Culture is one of the most historically significant texts in its field – and central to its arguments and impact are Boas’s formidable interpretative skills. It could be said, indeed, that Race, Language and Culture is all about the centrality of interpretation in questioning our assumptions about the world. In critical thinking, interpretation is the ability to clarify and posit definitions for the terms and ideas that make up an argument. Boas’s work demonstrates the importance of another vital element: context. For Boas, who argued passionately for ‘cultural relativism,’ it was vital to interpret individual cultures by their own standards and context – not by ours. Only through comparing and contrasting the two can we reach, he suggested, a better understanding of humankind. Though our own questions might be smaller, it is always worth considering the crucial element Boas brought to interpretation: how does context change definition?
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein's Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
When it was published in 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness quickly became one of the most influential books in modern economics and politics. Within a short time, it had inspired whole government departments in the US and UK, and others as far afield as Singapore. One of the keys to Nudge’s success is Thaler and Sunstein’s ability to create a detailed and persuasive case for their take on economic decision-making. Nudge is not a book packed with original findings or data; instead it is a careful and systematic synthesis of decades of research into behavioral economics. The discipline challenges much conventional economic thought – which works on the basis that, overall, humans make rational decisions – by focusing instead on the ‘irrational’ cognitive biases that affect our decision making. These seemingly in-built biases mean that certain kinds of economic decision-making are predictably irrational. Thaler and Sunstein prove themselves experts at creating persuasive arguments and dealing effectively with counter-arguments. They conclude that if governments understand these cognitive biases, they can ‘nudge’ us into making better decisions for ourselves. Entertaining as well as smart, Nudge shows the full range of reasoning skills that go into making a persuasive argument.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt’s 1958 The Human Condition was an impassioned philosophical reconsideration of the goals of being human. In its arguments about the kind of lives we should lead and the political engagement we should strive for, Arendt’s interpretative skills come to the fore, in a brilliant display of what high-level interpretation can achieve for critical thinking. Good interpretative thinkers are characterised by their ability to clarify meanings, question accepted definitions and posit good, clear definitions that allow their other critical thinking skills to take arguments deeper and further than most. In many ways, The Human Condition is all about definitions. Arendt’s aim is to lay out an argument for political engagement and active participation in society as the highest goals of human life; and to this end she sets about defining a hierarchy of ways of living a “vita activa,” or active life. The book sets about distinguishing between our different activities under the categories of “labor”, “work”, and “action” – each of which Arendt carefully redefines as a different level of active engagement with the world. Following her clear and careful laying out of each word’s meaning, it becomes hard to deny her argument for the life of “action” as the highest human goal.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal – to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it – as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book – more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and psychological pressure?Ordinary Men is a microhistory, the detailed study of a single unit in the Nazi killing machine. Browning evaluates a wide range of evidence to seek to explain the actions of the "ordinary men" who made up reserve Police Battalion 101, taking advantage of the wide range of resources prepared in the early 1960s for a proposed war crimes trial. He concludes that his subjects were not "evil;" rather, their actions are best explained by a desire to be part of a team, not to shirk responsibility that would otherwise fall on the shoulders of comrades, and a willingness to obey authority. Browning's ability to explore the strengths and weaknesses of arguments – both the survivors' and other historians' – is what sets his work apart from other studies that have attempted to get to the root of the motivations for the Holocaust, and it is also what marks Ordinary Men as one of the most important works of its generation.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age Of Revolution: 1789-1848
The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hobsbawm's vision is important – he was a lifelong Marxist whose view of history was shaped by a fascination with social and economic history, yet who privileged evidence over political theory – but the real power of these works, and especially The Age of Revolution, emanates from the wide range of the author's reading and his mastery of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. It is this skill that allows Hobsbawm to combine insights drawn from decades of reading into an original thesis that sees the crucial "long 19th century" as a period shaped by "dual revolution" – the twin impacts of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the French Revolution on the continent. Hobsbawm supplemented his evaluative excellence with a firm grasp of reasoning, crafting a volume that contains brilliant, clearly-structured arguments which explain complicated ideas via well-chosen examples in ways that make his work accessible to intelligent general readers and scholars alike.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism
To the dismay of many commentators – who had hoped the world was evolving into a more tolerant and multicultural community of nations united under the umbrellas of supranational movements like the European Union – the nationalism that was such a potent force in the history of the 20th-century has made a comeback in recent years. Now, more than ever, it seems important to understand what it is, how it works, and why it is so attractive to so many people. A fine place to start any such exploration is with Ernest Gellner's seminal Nations and Nationalism, a ground-breaking study that was the first to flesh out the counter-intuitive – but enormously influential – thesis that modern nationalism has little if anything in common with old-fashioned patriotism or loyalty to one's homeland. Gellner's intensely creative thesis is that the nationalism we know today is actually the product of the 19th-century industrial revolution, which radically reshaped ancient communities, encouraging emigration to cities at the same time as it improved literacy rates and introduced mass education. Gellner connected these three elements in an entirely new way, contrasting developments to the structures of pre-industrial agrarian economies to show why the new nationalism could not have been born in such communities. He was also successful in generating a typology of nationalisms in an attempt to explain why some forms flourished while others fizzled out. His remarkable ability to produce novel explanations for existing evidence marks out Nations and Nationalism as one of the most radical, stimulating – and enduringly influential – works of its day.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Aristotle's Metaphysics
Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics, almost certainly never put together by Aristotle himself. This helps to explain why the material covers such a very wide range of material, from meaning to mathematics, from logical sequences to religion. It includes very useful treatments of the nature of axioms (or primary truths) such as the law of non-contradiction and the laws of logic. In looking at these, Aristotle provides sustained guides to clear thinking as would be evidenced in analysis and evaluation of arguments and the production of good reasoning. He also provides some valuable discussion of interpretation by looking at homonyms (as in ‘this knife is sharp’ and ‘this note is sharp’) and what he calls ‘paronyms,’ which lie between homonyms and synonyms: an example is the word ‘healthy’. Metaphysics is also useful to study for its frequent examples of hypothetical reasoning, including their use in mathematics (‘if x, then y…’) and science (‘if a moves b, then b moves c...’, so what moves a?). In addition, we find Aristotle analysing Plato’s arguments and subjecting them to sustained (critical) evaluation. While Metaphysics shows Aristotle in many well-developed critical thinking modes, it is first and foremost a work of exquisite reasoning, creating strong arguments that continue to be debated and deployed today, nearly 2500 years after they were written.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract
Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of the most striking works of autobiography ever written. Like many creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel and innovative angles. His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does exactly that. Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about the divine right of kings and queens to rule. In France, the book was banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau’s native Geneva, it was both banned and burned. But history soon pushed Rousseau’s ideas into the mainstream of political theory, with the French and American revolutions paving the way for democratic government to gain ground across the Western world. Though it was precisely what got Rousseau’s book banned at the time, the novel idea that all legitimate government rests on the will of the people is now recognised as the core principle of democratic freedom and represents, for many people, the highest of ideals.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith’s 1776 Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations – more often known simply as The Wealth of Nations – is one of the most important books in modern intellectual history.Considered one of the fundamental works of classical economics, it is also a prime example of the enduring power of good reasoning, and the ability of reasoning to drive critical thinking forward. Adam Smith was attempting to answer two complex questions: where does a nation’s wealth come from, and what can governments do to increase it most efficiently? At the time, perhaps the most widely accepted theory, mercantilism, argued that a nation’s wealth was literally the amount of gold and silver it held in reserve. Smith, meanwhile, weighed the evidence and came to a different conclusion: a nation’s wealth, he argued, lay in its ability to encourage economic activity, largely without government interference. Underlying this radical redefinition was the revolutionary concept that powered Smith’s reasoning and which continues to exert a vast influence on economic thought: the idea that markets are self-regulating. Pitting his arguments against those of his predecessors, Smith carefully and persuasively reasoned out a strong case for free markets that reshaped government economic policies in the 19th-century and continues to shape global prosperity today.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue
Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 After Virtue was a ground-breaking contribution to modern moral philosophy. Dissatisfied with the major trends in the moral philosophy of his time, MacIntyre argued that modern moral discourse had no real rational basis. Instead, he suggested, if one wanted to build a rational theory for morality and moral actions, one would have to go all the way back to Aristotle. To build his arguments – which are widely acknowledged to be as important as they are complex – MacIntyre relies on two critical thinking skills above all others: evaluation and interpretation.The primary goal of evaluation is to judge the strength or weakness of arguments, asking how acceptable a given line of reasoning is, and how adequate it is to the situation. In After Virtue, MacIntyre applies incisive evaluation skills to major positions and figures in moral philosophy one after the other – showing how and why Aristotle’s template remains a stronger way of considering moral questions. Throughout this process, MacIntyre also relies on his interpretative skills. As MacIntyre knows, clarifying meanings, questioning definitions, and laying down definitions of his key terms is as vital to advancing his arguments as it is to evaluating those of other philosophers.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees's Our Ecological Footprint
Our Ecological Footprint presents a powerful model for measuring humanity’s impact on the Earth to reduce the harm we are causing the planet before it’s too late. While some people believe we can find a middle ground between environmental conservation and economic development, or that future technological discoveries will solve the problem, the authors warn that our planet’s limited resources simply can’t support an economic system based on unlimited growth. Our Ecological Footprint offers a valuable tool to help us live more sustainably and safeguard our natural resources for generations to come.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God
Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God is the first volume of his acclaimed series ‘Christian Origins and the Question of God’ comprehensively addressing the historical and theological questions surrounding the origins of Christianity. The text outlines Wright's hermeneutical theory and discusses the history of the Jews stressing the close connection with Judaism and developing this to examine the treatment of early Christians. Wright’s work has played a significant role in challenging prevailing assumptions relating to the religious thought of first-century Jews. On a more technical level, Wright provides a reappraisal of literary and historical readings of the New Testament.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metaphor of the cyborg to champion socialist, postmodern, and anti-identitarian politics. Until Haraway’s work, few feminists had turned to theorizing science and technology and thus her work quite literally changed the terms of the debate. This article continues to be seen as hugely influential in the field of feminism, particularly postmodern, materialist, and scientific strands. It is also a precursor to cyberfeminism and posthumanism and perhaps anticipates the development of digital humanities.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens
In The Rights of Others, Benhabib argues that the transnational movement of people across the globe has brought to the fore fundamental dilemmas facing liberal democracies: tension between a state’s commitment to universal human rights, and to its sovereign self-determination and its claims to regulate its national borders on the other. Re-conceptualises the boundaries of political membership in liberal democracies instead proposing ‘porous’ borders rather than open ones and a right to ‘just membership,’ advocating cosmopolitan federalism in the tradition of Kant. Banhabib’s work goes to the heart of key issues faced in a world of forced displacement, Brexit, and increased protectionism.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Elizabeth F. Loftus's Eyewitness Testimony
Understanding evidence is critical in a court of law – and it is just as important for critical thinking. Elizabeth Loftus, a pioneering psychologist, made a landmark contribution to both these areas in Eyewitness Testimony, a trail-blazing work that undermines much of the decision-making made by judges and juries by pointing out how flawed eyewitness testimony actually is. Reporting the results of an eye-opening series of experiments and trials, Loftus explores the ways in which – unbeknownst to the witnesses themselves – memory can be distorted and become highly unreliable. Much of Loftus’s work is based on expert use of the critical thinking skill of interpretation. Her work not only highlights multiple problems of definition with regard to courtroom testimony, but also focuses throughout on how best we can understand the meaning of the available evidence. Eyewitness Testimony is arguably the best place in the Macat library to begin any investigation of how to use and understand interpretation.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Philippe Aries's Centuries of Childhood
A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood, in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large. Aries's core idea is that ‘childhood,’ as we understand it today – a special time that requires special efforts and resources – is an invention of the 19th century, and that before that date children were in effect thought of as small adults. This led him to a re-evaluation of sources that suggested a second, crucial, conclusion: the idea that these competing visions of childhood were the products of two very different conceptions of human society.An earlier, essentially communal, social ideal, Aries wrote, had been supplanted by a society far more family-centric and hence inward-facing. In his view, moreover, this increased focus on childhood posed a direct challenge to a well-entrenched social order. ‘One is tempted to conclude,’ he wrote, ‘that sociability and the concept of the family were incompatible, and could develop only at each other's expense.’This revolutionary thesis, which has inspired and infuriated other historians in roughly equal measure, was made possible by Aries's determination to understand the meaning of the evidence available to him and highlight problems of definition that others had simply glossed over, making Centuries of Childhood an important example of the critical thinking skill of interpretation.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
Few works of history have succeeded so completely in forcing their readers to take a fresh look at the evidence as Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down – and that achievement is rooted firmly in Hill's exceptional problem-solving skills. Traditional interpretations of the English Civil War concentrated heavily on a top-down analysis of the doings of king and parliament. Hill looked at ‘history from below,’ focusing instead on the ways in which the people of Britain saw the society they lived in and nurtured hopes for a better future. Failing to understand these factors – and the impact they had on the origins and outcomes of the wars of the 1640s – means failing to understand the historical period. In this sense, Hill's influential work is a great example of the problem-solving skills of asking productive questions and generating alternative possibilities. It forced a generation of historians to re-evaluate the things they thought they knew about a key pivot point in British history – and went on to influence the generations that came after them.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq
How do you solve a problem like understanding Iraq? For Hanna Batatu, the solution to this conundrum lay in generating alternative possibilities that effectively side-stepped the conventional wisdom of the time. Historians had long held that Iraq – like other artificial creations of ex-colonial European powers, who drew lines onto the world map that ignored longstanding tribal, ethnic and religious ties – was best understood by delving into its political and religious history. Batatu used the problem solving skills of asking productive questions and generating alternative possibilities to argue that Iraq’s history was better understood through the lens of a Marxist analysis focused on socio-economic history.The Old Social Classes concludes that the divisions present in Iraq – and exposed by the revolutionary movements of the 1950s – are those characterized by the struggle for control over property and the means of production. Additionally, Batatu sought to establish that the most important political movements of the time, notably the nationalist Ba'athists and the pan-Arab Free Officers Movement, had their origins in a homegrown communist ideology inspired by local conditions and local inequality. By posing new questions – and by undertaking a vast amount of research in primary sources, a rarity in the history of this region – Batatu was able to produce a strong, new solution to a longstanding historiographical puzzle.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Mahbub ul Haq's Reflections on Human Development
What is the ultimate goal of any human society? There have been many answers to this question. But by producing a series of notably well-structured arguments, economist Mahbub ul Haq’s Reflections on Human Development persuaded readers that the goal should be defined quite simply as the requirement that each society improve the lives of its citizens. If this is the agreed aim, Haq continues, then economic development should be designed to support human development. His well-structured reasoning helped development economists recalibrate much of what had previously been regarded as self-evident; that economic productivity was the main barometer of social well being. The work had a profound effect, and Haq’s thinking helped produce a new understanding of what ‘development’ actually meant. Haq conscientiously mapped out arguments and counter-arguments to persuade readers that development did not simply mean an increase in productivity, but rather an increase in human development – the capability of people to live the lives they want to. By bringing the abstract back to the concrete, Haq reevaluated the neoliberal reasoning that suggested economic development necessarily benefitted everybody. And, by virtue of his strong command of reasoning, Haq showed how economic development provided no guarantees that rich people would spend money on improving health, education or other human development outcomes for the poor.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823
How was it possible for opponents of slavery to be so vocal in opposing the practice, when they were so accepting of the economic exploitation of workers in western factories – many of which were owned by prominent abolitionists? David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, uses the critical thinking skill of analysis to break down the various arguments that were used to condemn one set of controversial practices, and examine those that were used to defend another. His study allows us to see clear differences in reasoning and to test the assumptions made by each argument in turn. The result is an eye-opening explanation that makes it clear exactly how contemporaries resolved this apparent dichotomy – one that allows us to judge whether the opponents of slavery were clear-eyed idealists, or simply deployers of arguments that pandered to their own base economic interests.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
Tony Judt decided to write Postwar in 1989, the year the collapse of the Soviet Union provided European history with a rare example of a clearly-signposted ‘end of an era’. It's scarcely surprising, then, that the great virtue of Judt's book is the clarity and the breadth of its account of postwar Europe. His book coalesces around one central theme: the idea that the whole of the history of this period can be explained as an unravelling of the consequences of World War II. A bold claim, but Judt’s exceptional ability to create strong, well-structured, inclusive arguments allows him to pull it off convincingly. Judt’s work is also a fine example of creative thinking, in that he excels in connecting things together in new and interesting ways. This virtue extends from his unusual ability to combine the best elements of the Anglo-American and the French historiographical traditions – the latter informing his strong interest in the importance of cultural history – to his unwillingness to allow himself to be constrained by historical category and ultimately to his linguistic abilities. Postwar is, above all, a triumph of integration, something that is only made possible by its author's flair for creating strong, persuasive arguments.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
Elaine Tyler May’s 1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era is a ground-breaking piece of historical and cultural analysis that uses its findings to build a strong argument for its author’s view of the course of modern US history. The aim of May’s study is to trace the links between Cold War politics and the domestic lives of everyday American families at the time. Historians have long noted the unique domestic trends of 1950s America, with its increased focus on the nuclear family, neatly divided traditional gender roles and aspirational, suburban consumer lifestyles. May’s contribution was to analyse the interplay between the domestic scene and the political ideologies of American government, and then to build a carefully-constructed argument that draws attention to the ways in which these seemingly disparate forces are in fact related. May’s key achievement was to use her analytical skills to understand the relationships between these different factors. She traced ways in which domestic life and US foreign policy mirrored one another, showing that the structures and processes they aimed for, while different in scale, were essentially the same. She then carefully brought together different types of historical data, organizing her study to produce a carefully reasoned argument that the American suburban home was in certain direct ways the product of the ‘containment’ policies that ruled American foreign policy at the time.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
How was the Soviet Union like a soup kitchen? In this important and highly revisionist work, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick explains that a reimagining of the Communist state as a provider of goods for the ‘deserving poor’ can be seen as a powerful metaphor for understanding Soviet life as a whole. By positioning the state both as a provider and as a relief agency, Fitzpatrick establishes it as not so much a prison (the metaphor favoured by many of her predecessors), but more the agency that made possible a way of life. Fitzpatrick’s real claim to originality, however, is to look at the relationship between the all-powerful totalitarian government and its own people from both sides – and to demonstrate that the Soviet people were not totally devoid of either agency or resources. Rather, they successfully developed practices that helped them to navigate everyday life at a time of considerable danger and multiple shortages. For many, Fitzpatrick shows, becoming an informer and reporting fellow citizens – even family and friends – to the state was a successful survival strategy. Fitzpatrick's work is noted mainly as an example of the critical thinking skill of reasoning; she marshals evidence and arguments to deliver a highly persuasive revisionist description of everyday life in Soviet time. However, her book has been criticized for the way in which it deals with possible counter-arguments, not least the charge that many of the interviewees on whose experiences she bases much of her analysis were not typical products of the Soviet system.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Frank Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devestating Catastrophe 1958-62
The power of Frank Dikötter's ground-breaking work on the disaster that followed China's attempted ‘Great Leap Forward’ lies not in the detail of his evidence (though that shows that Mao's fumbled attempt at rapid industrialization probably cost 45 million Chinese lives). It stems from the exceptional reasoning skills that allowed Dikötter to turn years of researching in obscure Chinese archives into a compelling narrative of disaster, and above all to link two subjects that had been treated as distinct by most of his predecessors: the extent of the crisis in the countryside, and the actions (hence the responsibility) of the senior Chinese leadership. In Dikötter's view, ultimate responsibility for the catastrophe lies at the door of Mao Zedong himself; the Chairman conceived and ordered the policies that led to the famine, and he did nothing to reverse them or limit the damage that was being wrought when evidence for their disastrous impact reached him. Dikötter's ability to persuade his readers of the fundamental truth of these arguments – despite his admission that his access to sources was necessarily limited and incomplete – together with the clear structure of his presentation combine to produce a work that has had enormous influence on perceptions of Mao and of the Great Leap Forward itself.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Plato's The Republic
The Republic is Plato's most complete and incisive work – a detailed study of the problem of how best to ensure that justice exists in a real society, rather than as merely the product of an idealized philosophical construct. The work considers several competing definitions of justice, and looks closely not only at what exactly a "just life" should be, but also at the ways in which society can organise itself in ways that maximise the opportunities for every member to live justly. Much of the discussion is via imagined dialogues, giving Plato the opportunity to deploy the tools of Socratic debate to remarkable effect; nowhere else, it can be argued, is the Socratic dialectic better exemplified than in The Republic. In large measure, Plato's success is the product of the acute analytical ability that he demonstrates throughout his surviving oeuvre. No one is better at understanding the relationships between the various parts of a successful argument than Plato, and The Republic also demonstrates the Greek philosopher has few peers when it comes to looking for and highlighting the core assumptions that underlie an argument. The demolition of competing views that Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates is based on a series of relentless interventions and counter-examples that this mastery makes possible. Combining analytical skills with great powers of reasoning to produce a well-structured solution that deals emphatically with counter-arguments, Plato crafts one of the most enduring works of philosophy in the entire western canon.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Plato's Symposium
Plato’s Symposium, composed in the early fourth century BC, demonstrates how powerful the skills of reasoning and evaluation can be. Known to philosophers for its seminal discussion of the relationship of love to knowledge, it is also a classic text for demonstrating the two critical thinking skills that define Plato’s whole body of work. Plato’s philosophical technique of dialogue is the perfect frame for producing arguments and presenting a persuasive case for a given point of view, and at the same time judging the strength of arguments, their relevance and their acceptability. Staging a fictional debate between characters (wealthy Athenians at a dinner party) who must respond in turn to each others’ arguments and points of view means that, at every stage, Plato evaluates the previous argument, assesses its strength and relevance, and then proceeds (through the next character) to reason out a new argument in response. Exerting unparalleled influence on the techniques of philosophical thought, Plato’s use of dialogue is a supreme example of these two crucial critical thinking skills.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay's The Federalist Papers
The 85 essays that maker up The Federalist Papers’ clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion. Written between 1787 and 1788 by three of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States, the Papers were written with the specific intention of convincing Americans that it was in their interest to back the creation of a strong national government, enshrined in a constitution – and they played a major role in deciding the debate between proponents of a federal state, with its government based on central institutions housed in a single capital, and the supporters of states’ rights.The papers’ authors – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay – believed that centralised government was the only way to knit their newborn country together, while still preserving individual liberties. Closely involved with the politics of the time, they saw a real danger of America splintering, to the detriment of all its citizens. Given the fierce debates of the time, however, Hamilton, Jay and Madison knew they had to persuade the general public by advancing clear, well-structured arguments – and by systematically engaging with opposing points of view. By enshrining checks and balances in a constitution designed to protect individual liberties, they argued, fears that central government would oppress the newly free people of America would be allayed. The constitution that the three men helped forge governs the US to this day, and it remains the oldest written constitution, still in force, anywhere in the world.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless exposé of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things. Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule. Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
Clifford Geertz has been called ‘the most original anthropologist of his generation’ – and this reputation rests largely on the huge contributions to the methodology and approaches of anthropological interpretation that he outlined in The Interpretation of Cultures. The centrality of interpretative skills to anthropology is uncontested: in a subject that is all about understanding mankind, and which seeks to outline the differences and the common ground that exists between cultures, interpretation is the crucial skillset. For Geertz, however, standard interpretative approaches did not go deep enough, and his life’s work concentrated on deepening and perfecting his subject’s interpretative skills. Geertz is best known for his definition of ‘culture,’ and his theory of ‘thick description,’ an influential technique that depends on fresh interpretative approaches. For Geertz, ‘cultures’ are ‘webs of meaning’ in which everyone is suspended. Understanding culture, therefore, is not so much a matter of going in search of law, but of setting out an interpretative framework for meaning that focuses directly on attempts to define the real meaning of things within a given culture. The best way to do this, for Geertz, is via ‘thick description:’ a way of recording things that explores context and surroundings, and articulates meaning within the web of culture. Ambitious and bold, Geertz’s greatest creation is a method all critical thinkers can learn from.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone
American political scientist Robert Putnam wasn’t the first person to recognize that social capital – the relationships between people that allow communities to function well – is the grease that oils the wheels of society. But by publishing Bowling Alone, he moved the debate from one primarily concerned with family and individual relationships one that studied the social capital generated by people’s engagement with the civic life. Putnam drew heavily on the critical thinking skill of interpretation in shaping his work. He took fresh looks at the meaning of evidence that other scholars had made too many assumptions about, and was scrupulous in clarifying what his evidence was really saying. He found that strong social capital has the power to boost health, lower unemployment, and improve life in major ways. As such, any decrease in civic engagement could create serious consequences for society. Putnam’s interpretation of these issues led him to the understanding that if America is to thrive, its citizens must connect.
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Macat International Limited An Analysis of William James's The Principles of Psychology
The impact of William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology is such that he is commonly known as the father of his subject. Though psychology itself is a very different discipline in the 21st-century, James’s influence continues to be felt – both within the field and beyond. At base, Principles was designed to be a textbook for what was then an emerging field: a summary and explanation of what was known at that point in time. As its continuing influence shows, though, it became far more – a success due in part to the strength of James’s analytical skills and creative thinking. On the one hand, James was a masterful analyst, able to break down what was known in psychology, to trace how it fitted together, and, crucially, to point out the gaps in psychologists’ knowledge. Beyond that, though, he was a creative thinker, who looked at things from different angles and proposed inventive solutions and hypotheses. Among his best known was an entirely new theory of emotion (the James-Lange theory), and the influential notion of the “stream of consciousness” – the latter of which has influenced generations of psychologists and artists alike.
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