Bøger udgivet af Harvard University Press

Bernard Williams is an eloquent member of that small but important group of distinguished thinkers who are trying to erase the borders between the experts and all of us who grapple with moral issues in our own lives. In this book he delivers a sustained indictment of systematic moral theory from Kant onward and offers a persuasive alternative. Kant's ideas involved a view of the self we can no longer accept. Modern theories such as utilitarianism and contractualism usually offer criteria that lie outside the self altogether, and this, together with an emphasis on system, has weakened ethical thought. Why should a set of ideas have any special authority over our sentiments just because it has the structure of a theory? How could abstract theory help the individual answer the Socratic question "How should I live?" Williams's goal is nothing less than to reorient ethics toward the individual. He accuses modern moral philosophers of retreating to system and deserting individuals in their current social context. He believes that the ethical work of Plato and Aristotle is nearer to the truth of what ethical life is, but at the same time recognizes that the modern world makes unparalleled demands on ethical thought. He deals with the most thorny questions in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about issues such as relativism, objectivity, and the possibility of ethical knowledge. Williams has written an imaginative, ingenious book that calls for philosophers to transcend their self-imposed limits and to give full attention to the complexities of the ethical life.

Discusses the nature of equality and looks at examples related to medical care, employment, political rights and religion.

Because the world has long seen Sweden as a pioneer of democratic socialism, the success or failure of social experiments there has had momentous impact on the development of similar programs elsewhere. Now, in this penetrating inquiry undertaken by one of Sweden's leading political scientists, the problems and practices of Swedish trade unions are fully revealed. Leif Lewin is interested in finding answers to several central questions: How "democratic" are Sweden's unions? How are they governed? How have they avoided the institutional inequities that plague some American unions? What sacrifices have Swedish unions had to make in order to solve their problems? Lewin has gone directly to the people concerned, receiving from some 3,000 union members and leaders the information that forms the basis of his study. But his book is more than an empirical analysis of trade union democracy. It is also a strikingly successful example for all social scientists who have struggled to apply a hypothetical model of "democracy" to the ambiguous, often turbulent world around them. Above all, Lewin shows how the democratic ideal of individual intellectual and moral enrichment can be approached through participation in collective decision making. Thoughtful and balanced, his book addresses many of the problems that are just now being faced by social planners, economists, and union organizers everywhere.

The concept of generation as a historical category is used in Lost Comrades. The socialists of the Front Generation, young men in 1914, were driven into political activity and ideological exploration by the experience of World War I. Their efforts to renew socialism, to carry it beyond Marxism and beyond the working class, were profound and original, yet ultimately failed.

Relations between the Choson and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the "traditional" Chinese "tribute system." In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Choson Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists. Between 1850 and 1910, the Qing attempted to defend its informal empire in Korea by intervening directly, not only to preserve its geopolitical position but also to promote its commercial interests. And it utilized the technology of empire-treaties, international law, the telegraph, steamships, and gunboats. Although the transformation of Qing-Choson diplomacy was based on modern imperialism, this work argues that it is more accurate to describe the dramatic shift in relations in terms of flexible adaptation by one of the world's major empires in response to new challenges. Moreover, the new modes of Qing imperialism were a hybrid of East Asian and Western mechanisms and institutions. Through these means, the Qing Empire played a fundamental role in Korea's integration into regional and global political and economic systems.

From the 1920s through World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in a campaign to overcome racial, ethnic and religious prejudices. They celebrated the 'cultural gifts' that immigrant and minority groups brought to society and encouraged pluralism in many areas of American life.

Autism is a fascinating yet perplexing disorder that continues to intrigue researchers and clinicians studying brain and behavior. In this lucid and elegant book, Francesca Happé provides a concise overview of current psychological theory and research that synthesizes the established work on the biological foundations, cognitive characteristics, and behavioral manifestations of this disorder. She focuses her discussion on the cognitive approaches that deal with both thought and feeling--those hypotheses that link brain to action, deepen our understanding of the autistic person's view of the world, and offer better approaches to effectively managing the behavior of people with autism struggling to live in our world. The book reviews the latest research into the communication, socialization, and imagination impairments in autism, and further distinguishes the levels of severity in the spectrum of autistic disorders. Happé also includes a discussion of the talented few--high-functioning autistic individuals with Asperger's syndrome--and of the many childhood behavioral disorders, unrelated to autism, that manifest autistic-like symptoms. Autism is an important and much-needed contribution to the literature. It will be valued by parents and teachers of autistic children as well as by students and researchers interested in disorders of language and communication.

Much of our law is based on authoritative texts, such as constitutions and statutes. The common law, in contrast, is that part of the law that is established by the courts. Common law rules predominate in some areas of law, such as torts and contracts, and are extremely important in other areas, such as corporations. Nevertheless, it has been far from clear what principles courts use--or should use--in establishing common law rules. In this lucid yet subtly argued book, Melvin Eisenberg develops the principles that govern this process. The rules established in every common law case, he shows, are a product of the interplay between the rules announced in past precedents, on the one hand, and moral norms, policies, and experience, on the other. However, a court establishing a common law rule is not free, as a legislator would be, to employ those norms and policies it thinks best. Rather, it can properly employ only those that have a requisite degree of social support. More specifically, the common law should seek to satisfy three standards. First, it should correspond to the body of rules that would be arrived at by giving appropriate weight to all moral norms, policies, and experiential propositions that have the requisite support, and by making the best choices where norms, policies, and experience conflict. Second, all the rules that make up the body of the law should be consistent with one another. Third, the rules adopted in past precedents should be applied consistently over time. Often, these three standards point in the same direction. The central problems of legal reasoning arise when they do not. These problems are resolved by the principles of common law adjudication. With the general principles of common law adjudication as a background, the author then examines and explains the specific modes of common law reasoning, such as reasoning from precedent, reasoning by analogy, drawing distinctions, and overruling. Throughout the book, the analysis is fully illustrated by leading cases. This innovative and carefully worked out account of the common law will be of great interest to lawyers, law students, students in undergraduate legal studies programs, scholars interested in legal theory, and all those who want to understand the basic legal institutions of our society.

There were heroic lives and deaths before and after, but none quite like Socrates'. He did not die by sword or spear, braving all to defend home and country, but as a condemned criminal, swallowing a painless dose of poison. And yet Socrates' death in 399 BCE has figured large in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book Emily Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination. Beginning with the accounts of contemporaries like Aristophanes, Xenophon, and, above all, Plato, the book offers a comprehensive look at the death of Socrates as both a historical event and a controversial cultural ideal. Wilson shows how Socrates' death--more than his character, actions, or philosophical beliefs--has played an essential role in his story. She considers literary, philosophical, and artistic works--by Cicero, Erasmus, Milton, Voltaire, Hegel, and Brecht, among others--that used the death of Socrates to discuss power, politics, religion, the life of the mind, and the good life. As highly readable as it is deeply learned, her book combines vivid descriptions, critical insights, and breadth of research to explore how Socrates' death--especially his seeming ability to control it--has mattered so much, for so long, to so many different people.

This book tells the story of how the transition to democracy in South Africa enfranchised blacks politically but without raising most of them from poverty. It shows in detail how the continuing strength of the white establishment forces the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) to compromise plans for full political and economic transformation. Deferring the economic transformation, the new dispensation nurtures a small black elite. The new elite absorbs the economic interests of the established white elites while continuing to share racial identities with the majority of their countrymen, muffling the divisions between rich whites and poor blacks, thus ensuring political stability in the new South Africa.Although democratic South Africa is officially "non-racial," the book shows that racial solidarities continue to play a role in the country's political economy. Ironically, racial identities, which ultimately proved the undoing of apartheid, have come to the rescue of contemporary democratic capitalism. The author explains how and why racial solidarities are being revamped, focusing particularly on the role of black economic empowerment, the black bourgeoisie, and how calls to represent the identities of black South Africans are having the effect of substituting the racial interests of black elites for the economic interests of the black poor.

Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Michael Thompson s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus.In three investigations, Thompson considers life, action, and practice successively, attempting to exhibit these interrelated concepts as pure categories of thought, and to show how a proper exposition of them must be Aristotelian in character. He contends that the pure character of these categories, and the Aristotelian forms of reflection necessary to grasp them, are systematically obscured by modern theoretical philosophy, which thus blocks the way to the renewal of practical philosophy. His work recovers the possibility, within the tradition of analytic philosophy, of hazarding powerful generalities, and of focusing on the larger issues like life that have the power to revive philosophy.As an attempt to relocate crucial concepts from moral philosophy and the theory of action into what might be called the metaphysics of life, this original work promises to reconfigure a whole sector of philosophy. It is a work that any student of contemporary philosophy must grapple with."

What does it mean for scientists to truly understand, rather than to merely describe, how the world works? Michael Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientific explanation and understanding that overhauls and augments the familiar causal approach to explanation. What is replaced is the test for explanatorily relevant causal information: Strevens discards the usual criterion of counterfactual dependence in favor of a criterion that turns on a process of progressive abstraction away from a fully detailed, physical causal story. The augmentations include the introduction of a new, non-causal explanatory relevance relation entanglement and an independent theory of the role of black-boxing and functional specification in explanation.The abstraction-centered notion of difference-making leads to a rich causal treatment of many aspects of explanation that have been either ignored or handled inadequately by earlier causal approaches, including the explanation of laws and other regularities, with particular attention to the explanation of physically contingent high-level laws, idealization in explanation, and probabilistic explanation in deterministic systems, as in statistical physics, evolutionary biology, and medicine.The result is an account of explanation that has especially significant consequences for the higher-level sciences: biology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences."

Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on Ethics and the Internet. The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don't have a clue how to answer a question?Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn't come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students' understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions.Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure."

Known to the Greeks as opos or opion, as afiun in Persian and Arabic, and fuyung in Chinese, opium is at once a palliative and a poison. Its exotic origins, its literary associations, and the properties that are, often erroneously, attributed to it have ensured an ongoing air of mystery. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy reveals the long and fascinating history of a powerful and addictive drug and explores the changing fortunes of the modern-day illicit opium trade, especially in the remote regions of Asia. He answers key questions: Why have anti-drug policies failed despite four decades of increasing effort? And what are the shortcomings and limitations of forced eradication, alternative development, "silver bullets," and other quick fixes? In answering these questions, Chouvy draws upon geography, anthropology, politics, and development studies. He shows that the history of opium production is unexpectedly linked to the history of Afghanistan. A compelling account of a narcotic as old as humanity, Opium offers powerful insights into the complex politics and economics of the poppy in the world today.

Based on extensive new research and a bold interpretation of the man and his texts, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

In the first extensive American study of child psychiatry in the Soviet Union, Dr. Nancy Rollins explains that her aim is two-fold: to expand knowledge of the theory, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric disorders of children and adolescents and to stimulate a professional dialogue. Her attainment of this goal is clearly evidenced here by means of her astute assessment of the findings of her four-month visit to Russia as an individual investigator on the Medical Cultural Exchange program. The author's basic concern about the relationship between a society's child-rearing practices, character formation, and psychiatric disorder propelled her to ponder such questions as: Is there a describable difference between the Soviet conscience and the American conscience, as it develops during the years of childhood and adolescence? What about the problems of sexual identity in the two societies? Identity crises? Why have Soviet psychiatrists and educators remained so consistently anti-Freudian?In addressing herself to the various questions that intrigued her, Dr. Rollins first considers the history of Soviet psychiatric thought, with the major influences shaping the direction of Soviet child psychiatry and the social perspective with personal impressions of Soviet culture and society. Ensuing chapters, based upon first-hand observations and case material, take a close look at such topics as the organization of psychiatric services, diagnosis, general treatment methods, special psychotherapy, research, and psychiatric training programs. The author's reactions to the people she encountered in children's psychoneurological hospitals, polyclinics, sanatoria, and research institutions contributes a lively dimension to this impressive work.The study points out some differences between Soviet and American treatment methods; for example, Soviet treatment aims at inducing peace and relaxation in the patient, whereas American methods encourage exposure to and mastery of conflicts and tolerance of anxiety. Dr. Rollins also offers suggestions for further study and reflects on the relation of psychiatry and culture in the two countries.

Since the arrival of the Puritans, various religious groups, including Quakers, Jews, Catholics, and Protestant sects, have migrated to the United States. The role of religion in motivating their migration and shaping their settlement experiences has been well documented. What has not been recorded is the contemporary story of how migrants from Mexico and Central America rely on religion their clergy, faith, cultural expressions, and everyday religious practices to endure the undocumented journey. At a time when anti-immigrant feeling is rising among the American public and when immigration is often cast in economic or deviant terms, "Migration Miracle" humanizes the controversy by exploring the harsh realities of the migrants desperate journeys. Drawing on over 300 interviews with men, women, and children, Jacqueline Hagan focuses on an unexplored dimension of the migration undertaking the role of religion and faith in surviving the journey. Each year hundreds of thousands of migrants risk their lives to cross the border into the United States, yet until now, few scholars have sought migrants own accounts of their experiences."

In a world where more people know who Princess Di was than who their own senators are, where Graceland draws more visitors per year than the White House, and where Michael Jordan is an industry unto himself, fame and celebrity are central currencies. In this book, Tyler Cowen explores and elucidates the economics of fame.

This important contribution to the literature on mobility in nineteenth-century America examines with a fine microscope the world of work in Poughkeepsie, New York. The careers of all workers in each occupation--the entire labor force in this city with an 1870 population of 20,000--are traced over three decades. The book clarifies for the first time in any mobility study the meaning of shifts in employment through detailed examination of individual occupations. It shows concretely how industrialization altered the structure of opportunity; it specifies how the change affected the occupational niches and paths of mobility found by Irish, German, and British newcomers compared to white and black natives. By reassessing the significance of achieving particular occupations such as clerking and craft proprietorships, the book poses important questions for historical interpretations of gross indices of mobility such as shift from blue-collar to white-collar status. The authors favor comparability in their general analysis of mobility from federal census rolls and city directories, but they refine it through a broad research base, including tax rolls, local newspapers, and voluntary association records. Their study is one of the first to make systematic use of the credit reports on every business in one city from the R. G. Dun & Co. manuscripts. It also provides the first full description of the employment of women, permitting comparison with the opportunities for men. Other distinctive aspects include treatment of the crucial dimension of wealth and income, close attention to shifts in occupations produced by transformations in technology, marketing, and finance, and some disentangling of the influence of religion and nationality upon achievement. The fine lens of this microscopic study has enabled Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen to describe geographic, occupational, and property mobility in a small city with statistical precision, to illuminate the larger social processes which shaped that mobility, and, simultaneously, to vivify the working lives of anonymous American men and women.

Eli Friedlander reads Rousseau's autobiography, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as philosophy. Reading this work against Descartes's Meditations, Friedlander shows how Rousseau's memorable transformation of experience through writing opens up the possibility of affirming even the most dejected state of being and allows the emergence of the innocence of nature out of the ruins of all social attachments. In tracing the re-creation of a human subject in reverie, Friedlander is alive to the very form of the experience of reading the Reveries by showing the ways this work needs to--and in effect does--generate a reader, without betraying Rousseau's utter solitude. Friedlander's book provides an afterlife for the Reveries in modern philosophy. It constitutes an alternative to the analytic tradition's revival of Rousseau, primarily through Rawls's influential vision of the social contract. It also counters the fate of Rousseau's writings in the continental tradition, determined by and large by Derrida's deconstruction. Friedlander's reading of the Reveries, a work that has fascinated generations of readers, is an incomparable introduction to one of the greatest thinkers in Western culture.

The controversies between traditionalists and postmodernists are the topic of this book. It examines questions at the heart of the debate, such as: truth, reason, and objectivity - can we survive without them? What happens to law, science and the persuit of justice when these ideals are abandoned? The clash of belief and skepticism, and our need for intellectual stability are also examined.