This essay uses empirical studies to engage Richard Miller’s advocacy of a “cultural turn” in the study of religious ethics found in Friends and Other Strangers. The particular kind of empirical research I highlight here, cultural cognition, emphasizes the ways that belonging to a cultural group influences one’s reasoning when faced with controversial issues involving disputed facts. This approach underscores the significance of the cultural turn, but it also raises some important challenges for Miller’s (...) accounts of moral psychology and public reason. I work to elucidate what those challenges are and point to some ways that taking cultural cognition seriously might open up fresh avenues for addressing perennial ethical issues. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between research and pedagogy in Isis from the perspective of undergraduate teaching. Isis does not think of itself primarily as an organ for supporting education in the history of science, yet contributions to Isis are found across undergraduate syllabi, classrooms, and curricula. This essay makes a start at documenting and exploring some of the ways in which Isis is already being used in undergraduate educational contexts and suggests several ways in which Isis might further support (...) the goal of welcoming new learners in our field. Drawing on the authors’ experience co-teaching an introductory history of science lecture course and on the results of an informal survey of instructors of similar courses at other US institutions, we aim to engage conversations about the past, present, and future of the journal as it relates to the educational mission of our field. (shrink)

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism (...) that would be transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (shrink)

This paper traces developments in Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology. The aim is to introduce the reader to the key components of this theory as it developed from a functionalist focus on societal values through semiotics and linguistic structuralism to a theory of cultural trauma and collective performance.

Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen inThrough the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of (...) reflecting on its implications for intellectual history. (shrink)

This essay responds to four critics of Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics and Culture: Diana Fritz Cates, Eric Gregory, Ross Moret, and Atalia Omer. Focusing on the book’s organizing concepts of intimacy and alterity, engagement with empirical sources, discussion of Augustine’s thought, and attention to moral psychology and political morality, these interlocutors take up various strands in the book’s argument and extend them into metaethical, normative, and metadisciplinary domains. The author organizes his response under three rubrics: Metaethics (...) and Personal Relationships; Political Morality; and Multidisciplinary Horizons. (shrink)

W. Clark Gilpin - The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 3 of Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 549-550 Book Review The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, editors. The Millenarian (...) Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 3 of Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Pp. xxv + 190. Cloth, $85.00. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a significant body of scholars called attention to.. (shrink)

The public release of datasets on the internet by government agencies, environmental scientists, political groups and many other organizations has fostered a social practice of data visualization. The audiences have expectations of production values commensurate with their daily experience of professional visual media. At the same time, access to this data has allowed visual designers and artists to apply their skills to what was previously a field dominated by scientists and engineers. The ‘aesthetic turn’ in data visualization has sparked (...) debates between the new wave and older more scientifically grounded schools of thought on the topic. Sonification is not as well known or commonly practiced as visualization. But sound is a naturally affective, aesthetic and cultural medium. The extension of the aesthetic turn to sonification could transform this field from a scientific curiosity and engineering instrument into a popular mass medium. This paper proposes that a design approach can facilitate an aesthetic turn in sonification that integrates aesthetics and functionality by dissolving divisions between scientific and artistic methods. The first section applies the design perspective to the definition of sonification by replacing the linguistic concept of representation with non-verbal concept of functionality. The next section describes applications of the TaDa design method that raised aesthetic issues particular to sonification practice. The final section proposes a pragmatic aesthetics that distinguishes sonification from the auditory sciences and sonic arts. A design perspective may lead to a future where the general public tunes into pop sonifications for listening enjoyment as well as useful information about the world. (shrink)

The history of landscape appreciation in the West, and especially in the English-speaking world, has been bound up with the concept of taste. For good reason: t.

Much of Africana philosophy concerns itself with the social and political; that is, those issues that relate to “racism” or “racialization” as suffered by Africana persons. Within this understanding, Africana persons become defined by and studied through theories which presume a shared anthropology with their white counterparts. This essay argues that Africana philosophy would benefit in thinking beyond “race” and “racialization” towards a theorization of the cultural aspects of Africana persons as the basis of our study and understanding of (...) Africana persons. Specifically, this essay theorizes the relationship between mytho-logos and the culturalogic as offering a new lens through which to analyze the range problems confronting Africana philosophy. (shrink)

This article analyzes the features of the intellectual and cultural environment in which the ideas of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century liberalism developed. Based on the assumption of l...

Chibber’s The Class Matrix and Confronting Capitalism aim to rescue class from the cultural turn. Rather than thinking that mass media mollified the working class, he suggests we re-investigate capitalism itself. We can then see how hard capitalism makes it to take risks for the collective. Chibber’s solution is to shift people from ‘individualistic to solidaristic’ ways of thinking through lived practices, rather than the arts. This review argues, however, that by excluding the culture industry from encouraging solidaristic (...) ways of thinking, Chibber removes a crucial tool in the socialist armory: the way in which artistic representations can help us see ourselves and the world differently. (shrink)

In the Club of Rome report Come on! Capitalism, Short-Termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet (2018) Kant, along with other “old” Enlighteners, is presented as the father of a world-view which led to the destabilisation of the environment in which humanity exists. The authors of the report argue that the “old Enlightenment” with its individualism, faith in the market and a consumerist attitude to nature should be scrapped. I maintain that this assessment of Kant’s philosophy is groundless and (...) that his ideas allow us both to conduct a more profound diagnosis of the crisis and to propose a more solidly founded strategy of overcoming it. First, I sum up the position of the authors concerning the loss of sustainability of development which they attribute to the philosophy of Enlightenment. Next, I outline the history and content of the notion of “sustainable development” and offer an analysis of the sources of progressivist commitment to the conquest of nature which lie outside Modern Times in the idea of the “cultural mandate”. Then I present the Kantian diagnosis of the causes of the crisis which attributes it to humankind’s failure to “mature”. I compare the idea of “the full world” formulated by the authors of the report with the idea of the “the world come of age” and their diagnosis of “capitalism — short-termism — depletion of resources” with the Kantian assessment of the attempts to escape from the predicaments of the present into the past or the future. I draw attention to Kant’s solutions to some of the specific problems indicated in the report. Instead of the strategy of “return of the cultural mandate”, proposed at this time by the authors of the report, the Kant­ian answer to the crisis is a “Copernican turn” and re-direction of the cultivating effort to the inner moral development of the human being. (shrink)

In the first part of the article, the author describes the polymorphic phenomenon of return to the past, which occurs in various areas of culture, social and political, as well as private and family life. Then he points to several key interlocking causes of this phenomenon, such as: working through traumas, democratization of history and memory, compensation of high costs of modernization, uncertainty of the future, searching for an antidote to the progressing identity deficit, commodification of history/memory combined with the (...) emotionalization of the attitude towards the past, decline of the idea of progress, disappearance of utopias and an increase of post-secular tendencies. (shrink)

This article considers intersections between cultural studies and New Testament studies. It ponders and focuses on possible approaches to the bearing of the 'cultural turn' on biblical studies. Following a brief consideration of cultural studies and its potential value for New Testament studies, four promising developments in cultural studies approaches to the New Testament are noted.

In this article, I engage with three overlapping expressions of the increasingly postsecular cast of social and cultural theory. These currents — guided, respectively, by genealogical critique, neo-vitalist social philosophy and postcolonial anti-historicism — seek to problematize the frame of previous radical theorizing by exposing definite connections between the epistemological and political levels of secular understanding, and by assuming that the nature of those linkages counts heavily against secularism. As well as offering an interpretive overview of these contributions, I (...) suggest that they are traversed by a number of conceptual flaws and inconsistencies. The tensions, I argue, stem from the fact that in spite of appearing to be driven by a strong anti-secular thrust, these positionings remain thoroughly intra-secular in character. This needs to be more emphatically acknowledged if the ‘postsecular turn’ is to be productive. (shrink)

The Cultural Production of Social Movements offers a theory of cultural practices, protest tactics, strategic planning and deliberation, and movement organizational structures: “ideological contention.” It is a theory of ideology “from below.” The Cultural Production of Social Movements shows how conflicts—both with external political forces and disagreements, dissensus, and the decision-making process internal to social movements—produce knowledge and meanings that, in turn, impact upon and change the practices that contribute to how social movements are structured and (...) organized. The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes the relationship between consciously held superordinate ideas, the changing composition of progressive and oppositional social struggles, and the social worlds they hope to inhabit. Analyzing the Black Panther Party, specifically Kathleen Cleaver’s break with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and her contributions to the Party, Operaismo (or Workerism) in Italy and the relationship between shifting organizational strategies, inventive tactics, and novel and expansive ways to theorize class struggles, and the communal composition of “Worker-Recovered Enterprise Movements” in contemporary Argentina, this book shows how movement ideologies change and how meanings structure organizations, mobilizations, and futures. In The Cultural Production of Social Movements ideology is neither a static set of principles, nor is an unconscious orientation towards power and governance. Rather, it is the contentious, democratizing, and deliberative processes—which become realized as tactics in protests, struggles, defeats, and victories—that makes the relationship between movements, and what they “mean” conscious to its participants. (shrink)

Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment the adequacy (...) of our approach. Many of these resources have been developed productively by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. The encouragement to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze results not in a turn back to the masculinist masters, but to a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an “authentic” representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. In turning to the problem of heart transplantation, I hope to demonstrate such a move at work in a specific material context. (shrink)

The paper intends to bridge the existing gap between aesthetic knowledge and contemporary society. The first part focuses on the cultural turn in aesthetics, the roots of which can already be found in the English criticism of the eighteenth century. This enterprise is inspired by a methodology that regards aesthetics as a "meeting place" of many disciplines and varying cultural traditions. A second type of cultural turn is carried out by writers (e.g. Baudelaire): the target (...) of their polemic is the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness. According to them, the beautiful, instead, has to create the greatest interest because it is none other than the promise of happiness. However, the two different approaches are not so incompatible as seems at first sight. Finally, the text focuses on the New Age and the culture of performance, which, even if presenting opposite traits, have one thing in common: they translate at the empirical and factual level experiences that originally belonged to another sphere, namely the spiritual and the symbolic. (shrink)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief (concepts, etc.) that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to (...) the arguments of Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays. (shrink)

One’s philosophical points of view, which form the bases for assumptions that we bring to management theory and practice matter, and matter deeply, to management thinking and corporate behavior. In this paper I outline three related threads of philosophical conversations and explain how they are important in management theory and practice: the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, deriving from the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a social constructionist perspective: a set of theories at least implicitly derived from the linguistic (...) class='Hi'>turn in philosophy, and the notion of the impartial spectator. I then use these three theories to analyze the idea of the corporation, corporate cultures and corporate mission statements, stakeholder theories and their differences, and the limitations of the popular notion of “corporate social responsibility.” I conclude that how one frames these management ideas makes a difference, a difference in theory and in practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Plastic Turn by Ghosh, RanjanMaria MargaroniGhosh, Ranjan. The Plastic Turn. Cornell University Press, 2022. 224pp.In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (2005; 2010), Catherine Malabou argues that “the concept of plasticity is becoming both the dominant formal motif of interpretation and the most productive exegetical and heuristic tool of our time,” supplanting older theoretical paradigms such as “writing” and “the trace” (57). (...) Almost twenty years later, the truth of this statement is certainly confirmed not only by Malabou’s own developing elaboration of this concept and the growing body of works inspired by her creative adaptation of neurological theory in the realm of philosophy, but also by the proliferation of studies that seek to reflect on the ecological, anthropological, ethical, or political consequences of what has been termed the “Plasticene.”1 There is no doubt, then, that we are witnessing yet another “turn” in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the plastic turn coming to displace or supplement a host of currently competing theoretical tendencies: i.e., the material turn, the affective turn, the cognitive turn, and the mimetic turn, among others.2Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn is the first in a trilogy intended to theorize the aims, scope and effects of a “plastic Humanities.”3 Interestingly, Ghosh does not locate the “turn” in the 1990s when plastic “gained widespread public acceptance” (Mah 31) and when (with the development of the neurosciences) brain plasticity was increasingly adopted as “the most effective sensor of energy and meaning” of our contemporary era (Malabou, Plasticity 31-32). Instead, he goes back to the turn of the twentieth century when plastic as a new material and plasticity as a scheme of thought were still in the realm of potentiality, triggering, countering, and reshaping many of our political, cultural, and aesthetic modern imaginaries.Much has been written about the promise of plastic as a “magical” substance, capable of sublimating matter into what Roland Barthes describes as the trace of a metamorphic movement that produces an abundance of forms out of the singularity of its origin (104-105). In “The Material Consciousness of Plastics,” Russell Gagg notes that “in the early part of the twentieth century, plastics were seen as leading a new utopian vision for economic growth after the depression of the pre-war and austerity of the post-war years” (32). In the interwar period, plastics were [End Page 149] promoted for their democratic, egalitarian potential in making “designed consumer goods […] commercially viable,” thus introducing an aesthetics of the popular and the banal (Gagg 44-45; Ghosh 9, 20). One of the many strengths of Ghosh’s book is that it takes inspiration not merely from plastic as the stuff of fantasy but also from the very materiality of plastic, namely, its polymeric structure, malleability of form, sensitivity to the change of temperature, crystalline-amorphous texture, diverse modes of esterification, and resistance to biodegradability. In his first chapter, Ghosh acknowledges the influence of Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table which, as he argues, bring “the chemical metaphor to bear on human relationships” (20). He points to the development of a body of contemporary works that elaborate a “chemo-poetics,” aiming to “connect life and its undulations with molecular formations” (21).4 In subsequent chapters, the author succeeds in re-molding the chemical metaphor exploited in these works into a full-blown “material-aesthetic” that enables him to produce new readings of the forces behind literary modernism; the possibilities, limits, and stakes of world literature; the emergence of uncanny forms of plastic nature and art; and the distinct affective modalities caused by our petro-modernity.In analyzing side-by-side the diverse histories of, on the one hand, plastic as an increasingly disgraced material and, on the other hand, our literary, aesthetic, and critical production from the early 20th century to the present, Ghosh is dependent on an analogical process that permits him to think across multiple disciplines and subjects, connecting terms, ideas, and practices that resonate but remain asymmetrical (1). As he emphasizes, it is the “asymmetrically analogous (metaphors)” that “deepens the framework of my arguments” (3). Indeed... (shrink)

The ecological turn in water management has usually been interpreted as a political and cultural rather than technical and professional accomplishment. The dynamics of the uptake of ecological expertise into hydraulic engineering bureaucracies have not been well described. Focusing on the controversy around the damming of the Oosterschelde estuary in the Netherlands in the 1970s, this article shows how public environmental politics transformed the politics of interprofessional competition. Andrew Abbott’s concept of “jurisdictional vacancies” is mobilized to illuminate how (...) ecologists took advantage of the political bankruptcy of the Dutch coastal engineering agency to extend their professional jurisdiction. The subsequent “ecologization” of Dutch coastal engineering was successful, however, only because the ecologists were able and willing to adapt their practices to the professional culture of the hegemonic civil engineers. (shrink)

The headscarf debate in France exemplifies what is widely perceived as the battle between a culture-free citizenship and a culturally-laden other. This battle, however, presumes the existence of a neutral state that must either tolerate or ban particular cultural differences. In this Article, I challenge that presumption by demonstrating how both cultural difference and citizenship are imagined and produced. The citizen is assumed to be modern and motivated by reason; the cultural other is assumed to be traditional (...) and motivated by culture. Yetcitizenship is both a cultural and anti-cultural institution: citizenship positions itself as oppositional to culture, even as it is constituted by cultural values. Recent scholars of multiculturalism have turned to concepts of citizenship as a solution to the dilemma raised by conflicts over culture. But these concepts of citizenship, namely deliberative democracy and civic participation, replicate the presumption of a culture-less "citizenship" — and thus constitute an ironic choice of solution to the problem of cultural difference. (shrink)

The last third of the twentieth century brought about cultural changes, including the rapid scientific progress and the informatization that began in the 1960s. Artists of this period, especially the progressive artists of New York, responded to the changes by integrating the digital reality and a new scientific understanding of the universe into their oeuvre. Such art projects were based on the pure data comprised of facts, instead of subjective ideas, and conveyed in a strongly reduced non-semiotic form. I (...) define this trend as informational art to describe a shift from the verbal, visual and conceptual cognition toward the data-oriented thinking. This pivotal moment in Western history has not been given enough scholarly attention yet. For this reason, the achievement of Walter De Maria and his colleagues in the placement of scientific principles at the foundation of contemporary art has not been fully appreciated. In my paper, I aim to highlight the role of informational art in the advancement of the modern scientifically based ›Weltanschauung‹. (shrink)

In The Corporeal Turn, political theorist John Tambornino offers a thorough rethinking of ethical and political theory by emphasizing human embodiment, and the primacy of passion and need, in response to the neglect of these matters in much of contemporary thought. Tambornino calls for a 'corporeal turn' or, as he explains, sustained attention to human embodiment—something that is often occluded when priority is given to reason or language. Working through a diverse set of thinkers, exploring such themes as (...) necessity and freedom, need and desire, nature and convention, and public and private, and noting vivid instances of politicized embodiment, Tambornino takes seriously Nietzsche's claim that philosophy has largely been an interpretation and misunderstanding of the body. The result is nothing less than a new orientation to ethical and political theory—one that appreciates the complex relations of language, politics, culture and corporeality-and a powerful intervention into those domains. (shrink)

Straddling the divide between universalism and relativism, agonistic reason as construed by Foucault and Castoriadis dismisses universal foundations without becoming context-bound or inescapably subjectivist. It is propelled by a strong commitment to freedom and it draws flexibly on available resources and its creative potentials in order to vindicate its conditional claims. This provides a hyper-critical and liberating mode of critical reason which delves into the underlying norms of agency in order to open them up to question and to enhance free (...) self-direction. The argument that is put forward, then, is threefold. Firstly, Castoriadis’ accent on ontological reflection, the imaginative disclosure of new figures and the global intent of critique contrasts with Foucault’s account of agonistic reason and yields a more robust version of critical rationality. Secondly, this form of reflective agonism can effectively address fundamental challenges and reason across contexts, tackling moral and other issues that arise from cultural innovation and exchange. Lastly, agonistic reason need not, and should not, call upon absolute principles on any level in order to uphold its own values and do justice to its radical others. (shrink)

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays (...) of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate. (shrink)

In the following interview with Manlio Iofrida, Aldo Giorgio Gargani retraces the fundamental moments and key phases of his intellectual development: his early childhood and adolescence in Genoa, strongly marked by the influence of his artist father and of the social context of the immediate post-war situation; his studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and subsequently at the University of Oxford, which resulted to his first book on Wittgenstein; the achievement during the 1960s of a distinctive philosophical position (...) of his own, reflected in the publication of the book Il sapere senza fondamenti [Knowledge without Foundations]; the renewal of philosophical culture in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, in which Gargani himself was one of the main protagonists; the return to an engagement with Wittgenstein, after a period in which he had dedicated himself principally to literary questions and concerns, one pursued specifically in the context of the new issues raised at the beginning of the 21st century. This historical and autobiographical reconstruction of his intellectual career is accompanied at every turn by philosophical reflections on our contemporary situation and by specific critical responses to other contemporary philosophical trends and developments: the interview thus constitutes a telling summation of the fundamental themes and aspects of the author’s thought in general. (shrink)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief (concepts, etc.) that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to (...) the arguments of Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays. (shrink)

This book provides an exciting and diverse philosophical exploration of the role of practice and practices in human activity. It contains original essays and critiques of this philosophical and sociological attempt to move beyond current problematic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. It will be useful across many disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, science, cultural theory, history and anthropology.

What makes us human? Why do people think, feel and act as they do? What is the essence of human nature? What is the basic relationship between the individual and society? These questions have fascinated both great thinkers and ordinary humans for centuries. Now, at last, there is a solid basis for answering them, in the form of accumulated efforts and studies by thousands of psychology researchers. We no longer have to rely on navel-gazing and speculation to understand why people (...) are the way they are - we can instead turn to solid, objective findings. This book, by an eminent social psychologist at the peak of his career, not only summarizes what we know about people - it also offers a coherent, easy-to-understand, though radical, explanation. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, the author argues that culture shaped human evolution. Contrary to theories that depict the individual's relation to society as one of victimization, endless malleability, or just a square peg in a round hole, he proposes that the individual human being is designed by nature to be part of society. Moreover, he argues that we need to briefly set aside the endless study of cultural differences to look at what most cultures have in common - because that holds the key to human nature. Culture is in our genes, although cultural differences may not be. This core theme is further developed by a powerful tour through the main dimension of human psychology. What do people want? How do people think? How do emotions operate? How do people behave? And how do they interact with each other? The answers are often surprising, and along the way the author explains how human desire, thought, feeling, and action are connected. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in HistoryCharles W. J. WithersI. IntroductionA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits—and consequences—of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), (...) the advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications—consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become [End Page 637] more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography—that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world—has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place—as a particular location, and the character or sense of place—are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographical in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place [End Page 638] as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. Place (In Geography): A Partial HistoriographyPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). So, too, does the distinction between chorography and chronology as... (shrink)

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an (...) alternative framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices. (shrink)

Stimulated by a general salience of neuroscientific research and the declaration of neuroscience as one of the leading disciplines of the current century, a diversity of disciplines from the social sciences and the humanities have engaged in discussions about the role of the brain in various social and cultural phenomena. The general importance assigned to the brain in so many areas of academic and social life nowadays has been called the ‘neuroscientific turn’. One of the fields that gained (...) particular attention in this context is neuroethics. It is, however, not clear if neuroethics should be regarded simply as an indicator of a change toward a brain-centered anthropological outlook in Western societies or as an entity that itself plays a crucial role in the development and promotion of this outlook. In this chapter, we present two perspectives on the ‘neuroscientific turn’, sketch a landscape of neuroethics, and scrutinize the current state and development of neuroethics as one of the new fields at the intersection between the neurosciences and the humanities. We will ask to what extent neuroethics is itself a product or a booster of a cultural turn toward neuroscience and which interpretations of neuroscientific knowledge and which public expectations of the potential of neuroscience have actually been put to work in the formation of neuroethics. As our analysis underlines, the interactions of neuroscience and ethics in the field of neuroethics are complex and multidirectional. On the one hand, philosophical and anthropological discourse has favored certain theoretical assumptions about the role of the brain for human self-understanding. On the other hand, neuroscience has stimulated many discourses in ethical theory, as well as in society, of which neuroethics can be regarded as a recent derivative. Finally, neuroethics itself occasionally functions as an amplifier of the assumption that neuroscience provides relevant information to help us understand the nature of human morality and the nature of good social norms and institutions. (shrink)

America is driven by vengeance in Terry Aladjem's provocative account – a reactive, public anger that is a threat to democratic justice itself. From the return of the death penalty to the wars on terror and in Iraq, Americans demand retribution and moral certainty; they assert the 'rights of victims' and make pronouncements against 'evil'. Yet for Aladjem this dangerously authoritarian turn has its origins in the tradition of liberal justice itself – in theories of punishment that justify inflicting (...) pain and in the punitive practices that result. Exploring vengeance as the defining problem of our time, Aladjem returns to the theories of Locke, Hegel and Mill. He engages the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche, Paine and Foucault to challenge liberal assumptions about punishment. He interrogates American law, capital punishment and images of justice in the media. He envisions a democratic justice that is better able to contain its vengeance. (shrink)

This essay critically explores resources and reasons for the study of culture in religious ethics, paying special attention to rhetorics and genres that provide an ethics of ordinary life. I begin by exploring a work in cultural anthropology that poses important questions for comparative and cultural inquiry in an age alert to "otherness," asymmetries of power, the end of value-neutrality in the humanities, and the formation of identity. I deepen my argument by making a foundational case for the (...) importance of culture as a topic of normative analysis through a discussion of the emotions as cultural artifacts. To illustrate how cultural analysis can inform religious ethics, I turn to works by Wayne Meeks, Margaret Trawick, and Charles Taylor. I conclude by sketching some implications of a "cultural turn" for future work in religious ethics. (shrink)