Search results for ""The University of Chicago Press""

Finished only weeks before his death in 1994, this autobiography traces the trajectory that led Feyerabend from an isolated, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success as one of this century's most influential intellectuals. He writes of his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain. He recalls his promising talent as an operatic tenor (a lifelong passion), his encounters with everyone from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable love affairs, four marriages, and a career so rich he once held tenured positions at four universities at the same time. Although not written as an intellectual autobiography, "Killing Time" sketches the people, ideas, and conflicts of 60 years. Feyerabend writes frankly of complicated relationships with his mentor Karl Popper and his friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a growing reputation as the "worst enemy of science."

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Anthony C. Yu's translation of "The Journey to the West", initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time. Written in the sixteenth century, "The Journey to the West" tells the story of the fourteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang, one of China's most famous religious heroes, and his four supernatural disciples, in search of Buddhist scriptures. An adventure rich with danger and excitement, this seminal work of the Chinese literary canon is by turns allegory, satire, and fantasy. With one hundred chapters written in both prose and poetry, "The Journey to the West" has always been a complicated and difficult text to render in English while preserving the lyricism of its language and the content of its plot. But Yu has successfully taken on the task, and in this new edition he has made his translations even more accurate and accessible. The explanatory notes are updated and augmented, and Yu has added much new material to his introduction, based on his original research as well as on the newest literary criticism and scholarship on Chinese religious traditions. He has also modernized the transliterations included in each volume, using the now-standard Hanyu Pinyin romanization system. Perhaps most important, Yu has made changes to the translation itself in order to make it as precise as possible.

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As long as there have been maps, cartographers have grappled with the impossibility of portraying the earth in two dimensions. To solve this problem mapmakers have created hundreds of map projections, mathematical methods for drawing the round earth on a flat surface. Yet of the hundreds of existing projections, and the infinite number that are theoretically possible, none is perfectly accurate. This study is a detailed history of map projections from before 500BC to the present. It contains a comprehensive collection of diagrams of the projections used in world mapping, with a compendium of information on their origins and use.

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Western Europe supported a highly developed and diverse medical community in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. In her absorbing history of this complex era in medicine, Siraisi explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.

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Ira Shor is a pioneer in the field of critical education who for over twenty years has been experimenting with learning methods. His work creatively adapts the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire for North American classrooms. In Empowering Education Shor offers a comprehensive theory and practice for critical pedagogy. For Shor, empowering education is a student-centered, critical and democratic pedagogy for studying any subject matter and for self and social change. It takes shape as a dialogue in which teachers and students mutually investigate everyday themes, social issues, and academic knowledge. Through dialogue and problem-posing, students become active agents of their learning. This book shows how students can develop as critical thinkers, inspired learners, skilled workers, and involved citizens. Shor carefully analyzes obstacles to and resources for empowering education, suggesting ways for teachers to transform traditional approaches into critical and democratic ones. He offers many examples and applications for the elementary grades through college and adult education.

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Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and adviser to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca - whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson - to his rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities. Written near the end of Seneca's life, Natural Questions is a work in which Seneca expounds and comments on the natural sciences of his day - rivers and earthquakes, wind and snow, meteors and comets - offering us a valuable look at the ancient scientific mind at work. The modern reader will find fascinating insights into ancient philosophical and scientific approaches to the physical world and also vivid evocations of the grandeur, beauty, and terror of nature.

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Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo - a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours. Writing with great verve and erudition, Rowland traces Bruno's wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy has been called into question, and reveals how he valiantly defended his ideas to the very end, when he was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome's Campo de' Fiori.

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Thomas Paine was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. More than just a Founding Father, he was a verbal bomb-thrower, a rationalist, and a rebel. In his influential pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. Today, we are living in times that, as Paine famously said, "try men's souls." Whatever your politics, if you're seeking to understand the political world we live in, where better to look than Paine? The Daily Thomas Paine offers a year's worth of pithy and provocative quotes from this quintessentially American figure. Editor Edward G. Gray argues that we are living in a moment that Thomas Paine might recognize--or perhaps more precisely, a moment desperate for someone whose rhetoric can ignite a large-scale social and political transformation. Paine was a master of political rhetoric, from the sarcastic insult to the diplomatic apercu, and this book offers a sleek and approachable sampler of some of the sharpest bits from his oeuvre. As Paine himself says in the entry for January 20: "The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflexion." The Daily Thomas Paine--the newest addition to the University of Chicago Press's ongoing series of collected wisdom from notable writers--should prove equally incendiary and inspirational for contemporary readers with an eye for politics, even those who prefer the tweet to the pamphlet.

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One didn't dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg—the city where he was born and where he would later die—from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home—and his manuscripts—would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country. "A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

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Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In "Nuns Behaving Badly", Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared to speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were guilty only of misjudgment or of defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenge they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose "misbehavior" - seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses - continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age - and beyond.

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In this volume Leonard Meyer proposes a theory of style and style change that relates the choices made by composers to the constraints of psychology, cultural context, and musical traditions. He seeks to explore why, out of the abundance of compositional possibilities, composers choose to replicate some patterns and neglect others. Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of 19-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into more recent times.

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In "The Cruel Radiance", Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images - and learning to see the people in them - is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns - and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China's Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts - Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book's concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare. A bracing and unsettling book, "The Cruel Radiance" convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it - and to do that, we must begin to look.

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"The Premodern Condition" identifies and explains a surprising affinity for medievalism and medieval studies among the leading figures of critical theory. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical, literary-critical, and sociological works produced within the French nouvelle critique of the 1960s, Holsinger argues for reconceiving these discourses, in part, as a brilliant amalgamation of medievalisms. Holsinger shows that the preoccupation with medieval cultures and practices among Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Bourdieu, and their cohorts was so wide ranging that it merits recognition as one of the most significant epiphenomena of postwar French thought. Not simply an object of nostalgic longing or an occasional source of literary exempla, the medieval epoch was continually mined by these thinkers for specific philosophical vocabularies, social formations, and systems of thought. To supplement its master thesis, "The Premodern Condition" also contains original essays by Bataille and Bourdieu - translated here for the first time into English - that testify in various ways to the strange persistence of medievalisms in French postwar avant-garde writings. What results is an important and original work that will be a touchstone for specialists in medieval studies and critical theory alike.

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The twentieth century was the most destructive in human history, but from its vast landscapes of ruins was born a new architectural type: the cultural monument. In the wake of World War I, an international movement arose which aimed to protect architectural monuments in large numbers, and regardless of style, hoping not only to keep them safe from future conflicts, but also to make them worthy of protection from more quotidian forms of destruction. This movement was motivated by hopeful idealism as much as by a pragmatic belief in bureaucracy. An evolving group--including architects, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, and lawyers--grew out of the new diplomacy of the League of Nations. During and after World War II, it became affiliated with the Allied Military Government, and was eventually absorbed by the UN as UNESCO. By the 1970s, this organization had begun granting World Heritage status to a global register of significant sites--from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi. Examining key episodes in the history of this preservation effort--including projects for the Parthenon, for the Cathedral of St-L , the temples of Abu Simbel, and the Bamyian Buddahs --Lucia Allais demonstrates how the group deployed the notion of culture to shape architectural sites, and how architecture in turn shaped the very idea of global culture. More than the story of an emergent canon, Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings' longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, practices. Yet as entire nations' monumental geographies became part of survival plans, Allais also shows, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction--from bombs to bulldozers--into cultural governance. Thus Designs of Destruction not only offers a fascinating narrative of cultural diplomacy, based on extensive archival findings; it also contributes an important new chapter in the intellectual history of modernity by showing the manifold ways architectural form is charged with concretizing abstract ideas and ideals, even in its destruction.

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On August 20, 1940, Marxist philosopher, politician, and revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in his home in Coyoacan, Mexico. He died the next day. In The Great Prince Died, Bernard Wolfe offers his lyrical, fictionalized account of Trotsky's assassination as witnessed through the eyes of an array of characters: the young American student helping to translate the exiled Trotsky's work (and to guard him), the Mexican police chief, a Rumanian revolutionary, the assassin and his handlers, a poor Mexican "peon," and Trotsky himself. Drawing on his own experiences working as the exiled Trotsky's secretary and bodyguard and mixing in digressions on Mexican culture, Stalinist tactics, and Bolshevik history, Wolfe interweaves fantasy and fact, delusion and journalistic reporting to create one of the great political novels of the past century.

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Exploring the social and cultural hierarchies established in 18th-century France, this volume illustrates how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the 18th-century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he shows how the work of these architects was informed by considerations of symbolic space. Richard Etlin asserts the 18th-century city was a place in which actual physical space was subjected to a complex mental layering of conceptual spaces. He focuses on the design theory of Boullee and Durand and charts their legacy through the architecture of Paul Philippe Cret, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn. He defines the distinctive features of neoclassicism and outlines the new grammar for classical architecture articulated by theorists and architects such as Laugier, Leroy, and Ledoux. After discussing the 18th-century "hotel", revolutionary space, and the transformation of the image of the cemetary, Etlin examines the space of absence as embodied in commemorative architecture from Boullee and Gilly to Cret, Wright, and Terragni. This book provides an accessible introduction to a century of architecture that transformed the classical forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods into building types still familiar today.

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Successor to Claude Levi-Strausa at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture - as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth - is often seen as essentially different than nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies" - animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism - to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.

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Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia - the school of John Updike and Cheever - these three works from the great American humorist Peter De Vries look with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. De Vries' classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig - all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one another's private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of marital quibbles. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries' well-read suburbanites. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries' nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world.

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Scientists have long cautioned against attributing familiar emotions to animals, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can-and should-attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story - from field sites, farms, homes, and more - of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends. The resulting book is both daring and down to earth, strikingly ambitious yet careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.

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From its traces in cryptic images on the dollar bill to Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, Freemasonry has long been one of the most romanticized secret societies in the world. But a simple fact escapes most depictions of this elite brotherhood: There are women Freemasons, too. In this groundbreaking ethnography, Lilith Mahmud takes readers inside Masonic lodges in contemporary Italy, where she observes the many ritualistic and fraternal bonds forged among women initiates of this elite and esoteric society. Offering a tantalizing look behind lodge doors, The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters unveils a complex culture of discretion in which Freemasons simultaneously reveal some truths and hide others. Women - one of Freemasonry's best-kept secrets - are often upper class and highly educated but paradoxically antifeminist, and their self-cultivation through the Masonic path is an effort to embrace the deeply gendered ideals of fraternity. Mahmud unravels this contradiction at the heart of Freemasonry: how it was at once responsible for many of the egalitarian concepts of the Enlightenment and yet has always been, and in Italy still remains, extremely exclusive. The result is not only a thrilling look at an unfamiliar-and surprisingly influential-world, but a reevaluation altogether of the modern values and ideals that we now take for granted.

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When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Rémi Brague in this wide-ranging cultural history.Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality.Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own.

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Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward. Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen - a renowned art historian and cultural theorist - demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience - genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity - and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world.

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Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga's origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize. To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga's practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia's vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities - which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation - to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren't downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. By turns rollicking and sophisticated, "Sinister Yogis" tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.

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With "Kiss of the Yogini", David Gordon White sweeps away centuries of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, returning to original texts, images, and ritual practices to reconstruct the history of South Asian Tantra from the medieval period to the present day. "Kiss of the Yogini" contains White's own translations from over a dozen Tantras that have never before been translated into any European language. It will prove to be the definitive work for anyone seeking to understand Tantra and the crucial role it has played in South Asian history, society, culture, and religion.

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The second of two volumes collecting the complete tragedies of Seneca. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca offers authoritative, modern English translations of the writings of the Stoic philosopher and playwright (4 BCE–65 CE). The two volumes of The Complete Tragedies presents all of his dramas, expertly rendered by preeminent scholars and translators. The first volume contains Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and Octavia, the last of which was written in emulation of Senecan tragedies and serves as a unique example of political tragedy. This second volume includes Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, and Agamemnon. High standards of accuracy, clarity, and style are maintained throughout the translations, which render Seneca into verse with as close a correspondence, line for line, to the original as possible, and with special attention paid to meter and overall flow. In addition, each tragedy is prefaced by an original translator’s introduction offering reflections on the work’s context and meaning. Notes are provided for the reader unfamiliar with the culture and history of classical antiquity. Accordingly, The Complete Tragedies will be of use to a general audience and professionals alike, from the Latinless student to scholars and instructors of comparative literature, classics, philosophy, drama, and more.

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The most prominent woman in Renaissance Florence, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici (1425-1482) lived during her city's golden age. Wife of Piero de' Medici and mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Tornabuoni exerted considerable influence on Florence's political and social affairs. She was also, as this volume illustrates, a gifted and prolific poet.This is the first major collection in any language of her extensive body of religious poems. Ranging from gentle lyrics on the Nativity to moving dialogues between a crucified Christ and the weeping sinner who kneels before him, the nine laudi (poems of praise) included here are among the few such poems known to have been written by a woman. Tornabuoni's five storie sacre, narrative poems based on the lives of biblical figures-three of whom, Judith, Susanna, and Esther, are Old Testament heroines-are virtually unique in their range and expressiveness. Together with Jane Tylus's substantial introduction, these poems offer us both a fascinating portrait of a highly educated and creative woman and a lively sense of cultural and social life in Renaissance Florence.

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Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto's path breaking book "Leaving College" has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with "Completing College", Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion. Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions for enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. He shows that, especially during the early years, students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action. Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and "Completing College" carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.

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Science is the study of our world, as it is in its messy reality. Nonetheless, science requires idealization to function—if we are to attempt to understand the world, we have to find ways to reduce its complexity. Idealization and the Aims of Science shows just how crucial idealization is to science and why it matters. Beginning with the acknowledgment of our status as limited human agents trying to make sense of an exceedingly complex world, Angela Potochnik moves on to explain how science aims to depict and make use of causal patterns—a project that makes essential use of idealization. She offers case studies from a number of branches of science to demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization, shows how causal patterns are used to develop scientific explanations, and describes how the necessarily imperfect connection between science and truth leads to researchers’ values influencing their findings. The resulting book is a tour de force, a synthesis of the study of idealization that also offers countless new insights and avenues for future exploration.

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In The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, a view of two people enjoying a picnic zooms up and away to show their surroundings, moving progressively farther into space, then zooms back in for a close-up of the hand of the picnicker, travelling deep into the microscopic realm. This is one of the most iconic examples of the “cosmic zoom,” a trope that has influenced countless media forms over the past seventy years. Horton uses the cosmic zoom as a starting point to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of scale as mediated difference. He considers the origins of our notions of scale, how scalar mediation functions differently in analog and digital modes, and how cosmic zoom media has influenced scientific and popular views of the world. Analyzing literature, film, digital media, and database history, Horton establishes a much-needed framework for thinking about scale across multiple domains and disciplines.

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What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Andrea Gadberry looks for answers to these questions in the philosophy of René Descartes and finds them in the philosopher’s implicit poetics. Gadberry argues that Descartes’s thought was crucially enabled by poetry and shows how markers of poetic genres from love lyric and elegy to the puzzling forms of the riddle and the anagram betray an impassioned negotiation with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of reason, Gadberry reveals that the philosopher accused of having “slashed poetry’s throat” instead enlisted poetic form to contain thought’s frustrations. Gadberry’s approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent for the twenty-first. Bringing literature and philosophy into rich dialogue, Gadberry centers close reading as a method uniquely equipped to manage skepticism, tolerate critical ambivalence, and detect feeling in philosophy. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic formations.

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The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe. Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in "Bourgeois Dignity", a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book "The Bourgeois Virtues", "Bourgeois Dignity" is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians.

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Plotinus, the Roman philosopher (c. 204-270 CE) who is widely regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism, was also the creator of numerous myths, images, and metaphors. They have influenced both secular philosophers and Christian and Muslim theologians, but have frequently been dismissed by modern scholars as merely ornamental. In this book, distinguished philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark shows that they form a vital set of spiritual exercises by which individuals can achieve one of Plotinus's most important goals: self-transformation through contemplation. Clark examines a variety of Plotinus's myths and metaphors within the cultural and philosophical context of his time, asking probing questions about their contemplative effects. What is it, for example, to "think away the spatiality" of material things? What state of mind is Plotinus recommending when he speaks of love, or drunkenness, or nakedness? What starlike consciousness is intended when he declares that we were once stars or are stars eternally? What does it mean to say that the soul goes around God? And how are we supposed to "bring the god in us back to the god in all"? Through these rich images and structures, Clark casts Plotinus as a philosopher deeply concerned with philosophy as a way of life.

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Algebraic topology is a basic part of modern mathematics and some knowledge of this area is indispensable for any advanced work relating to geometry, including topology itself, differential geometry, algebraic geometry and Lie groups. This book provides a treatment of algebraic topology both for teachers of the subject and for advanced graduate students in mathematics either specializing in this area or continuing on to other fields. J. Peter May's approach reflects the enormous internal developments within algebraic topology, most of which are largely unknown to mathematicians in other fields. But he also retains the classical presentations of various topics where appropriate. Most chapters end with problems that further explore and refine the concepts presented. The final four chapters provide sketches of substantial areas of algebraic topology and the book concludes with a list of suggested readings for those interested in delving further into the field.

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Discourses on Livy is the founding document of modern republicanism, and Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov have provided the definitive English translation of this classic work. Faithful to the original Italian text, properly attentive to Machiavelli's idiom and subtlety of thought, it is eminently readable. With a substantial introduction, extensive explanatory notes, a glossary of key words, and an annotated index, the Discourses reveals Machiavelli's radical vision of a new science of politics, a vision of "new modes and orders" that continue to shape the modern ethos. "[Machiavelli] found in Livy the means to inspire scholars for five centuries. Within the Discourses, often hidden and sometimes unintended by their author, lie the seeds of modern political thought. . . . [Mansfield and Tarcov's] translation is careful and idiomatic."—Peter Stothard, The Times"Translated with painstaking accuracy—but also great readability."—Weekly Standard"A model of contemporary scholarship and a brave effort at Machiavelli translation that allows the great Florentine to speak in his own voice."—Choice

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In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison explores the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living - the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us. This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn. A profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living, and a work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book speaks to all who have suffered grief and loss.

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Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth's surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition? The Birth of Territory provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players - historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists - and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth's surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

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What do our clothes say about who we are or who we think we are? How does the way we dress communicate messages about our identity? Is the desire to be "in fashion" universal, or is it unique to Western culture? How do fashions change? These are just a few of the intriguing questions Fred Davis sets out to answer in this provocative look at what we do with our clothes--and what they can do to us. Much of what we assume to be individual preference, Davis shows, really reflects deeper social and cultural forces. Ours is an ambivalent social world, characterized by tensions over gender roles, social status, and the expression of sexuality. Predicting what people will wear becomes a risky gamble when the link between private self and public persona can be so unstable.

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Since its publication in 2007, A Brief History of the Spanish Language has become the leading introduction to the history of one of the world's most widely spoken languages. Moving from the language's Latin roots to its present-day forms, this concise book offers readers insights into the origin and evolution of Spanish, the historical and cultural changes that shaped it, and its spread around the world. A Brief History of the Spanish Language focuses on the most important aspects of the development of the Spanish language, eschewing technical jargon in favor of straightforward explanations. Along the way, it answers many of the common questions that puzzle native speakers and non-native speakers alike, such as: Why do some regions use tu while others use vos? How did the th sound develop in Castilian? And why is it la mesa but el agua? David A. Pharies, a world-renowned expert on the history and development of Spanish, has updated this edition with new research on all aspects of the evolution of Spanish and current demographic information. This book is perfect for anyone with a basic understanding of Spanish and a desire to further explore its roots. It also provides an ideal foundation for further study in any area of historical Spanish linguistics and early Spanish literature. A Brief History of the Spanish Language is a grand journey of discovery, revealing in a beautifully compact format the fascinating story of the language in both Spain and Spanish America.

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In 1949, a small book had a big impact on education. In just over one hundred pages, Ralph W. Tyler presented the concept that curriculum should be dynamic, a program under constant evaluation and revision. Curriculum had always been thought of as a static, set program, and in an era preoccupied with student testing, he offered the innovative idea that teachers and administrators should spend as much time evaluating their plans as they do assessing their students. Since then, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction has been a standard reference for anyone working with curriculum development. Although not a strict how-to guide, the book shows how educators can critically approach curriculum planning, studying progress and retooling when needed. Its four sections focus on setting objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing instruction, and evaluating progress. Readers will come away with a firm understanding of how to formulate educational objectives and how to analyze and adjust their plans so that students meet the objectives. Tyler also explains that curriculum planning is a continuous, cyclical process, an instrument of education that needs to be fine-tuned. This emphasis on thoughtful evaluation has kept Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction a relevant, trusted companion for over sixty years. And with school districts across the nation working feverishly to align their curriculum with Common Core standards, Tyler's straightforward recommendations are sound and effective tools for educators working to create a curriculum that integrates national objectives with their students' needs.

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Blending social analysis and philosophy, Albert Borgmann maintains that technology creates a controlling pattern in our lives. This pattern, discernible even in such an inconspicuous action as switching on a stereo, has global effects: it sharply divides life into labor and leisure, it sustains the industrial democracies, and it fosters the view that the earth itself is a technological device. He argues that technology has served us as well in conquering hunger and disease, but that when we turn to it for richer experiences, it leads instead to a life dominated by effortless and thoughtless consumption. Borgmann does not reject technology but calls for public conversation about the nature of the good life. He counsels us to make room in a technological age for matters of ultimate concern—things and practices that engage us in their own right.

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In this intriguing blend of the commonplace and the ancient, Jean Bottero presents the first extensive look at the delectable secrets of Mesopotamia. Bottero's broad perspective takes us inside the religious rites, everyday rituals, attitudes and taboos, and even the detailed preparation techniques involving food and drink in Mesopotamian high culture during the second and third millenniums BCE, as the Mesopotamians recorded them. Offering everything from translated recipes for pigeon and gazelle stews to the contents of medicinal teas and broths and the origins of ingredients native to the region, this book reveals the cuisine of one of history's most fascinating societies. Links to the modern world, along with incredible re-creations of a rich, ancient culture through its cuisine, make Bottero's guide an entertaining and mesmerizing read.

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Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here engage in a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination - though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential. Persuasive and provocative, "Intimacies" is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.

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"On Tyranny" is Leo Strauss' classic reading of Xenophon's dialogue Hiero, or Tyrannicus, in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. Included are a translation of the dialogue from its original Greek, a critique of Strauss' commentary by the French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, and the complete correspondence between the two. This corrected and expanded edition introduces important revisions throughout and expands Strauss' restatement of his position in light of Kojeve's commentary to bring it into conformity with the text as it was originally published in France.

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