Archive for the 'Book' Category

Discourse Analysis: A Social-Philosophical Grounding

Published on November 19, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Discourse Analysis: A Social-Philosophical Grounding by Kyrkos Doxiadis is now available as part of The Humanities series.

Michel Foucault once expressed his disagreement with the “breach” between social history and the history of ideas brought about by the assumption that the former is concerned with how people act without thinking, while the latter analyses how people think without acting. “People both think and act”, he says, by way of a sarcasm consisting in having to point out the obvious.

While in complete agreement with Foucault on this as on several other issues, the author of this book chooses to emphasise another “obviousness” of at least equal importance: that thoughts and (material) actions may well be inseparable in all fields of human/social existence, but they are not the same thing. The maintenance of the distinction between subjectivity/conceptuality on one hand and objectivity /materiality on the other constitutes a fundamental premise for the book’s two closely interrelated goals: to criticise certain extremely influential currents of contemporary thought more or less loosely associated with “poststructuralism” and/or “postmodernism” which, each in its own fashion, have served to undermine this distinction; and to provide a philosophical /theoretical grounding for the methodology of the social sciences known as “discourse analysis”. The importance of the latter is shown to consist in forming a methodological framework for a materialist critique that would escape both the economic reductionism of Marxism and the implicit (or manifest) idealism pertaining to all variations of Hegelianism.

Kyrkos Doxiadis was born in Athens in 1955. In 1986 he received a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Politics and Sociology of Birkbeck College, University of London. He is Professor of Social Theory with special reference to Communication at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Athens.

Call for Book Reviewers

Published on October 28, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: sticky-odd.

Common Ground Publishing is seeking distinguished peer reviewers to evaluate book manuscripts submitted to The Humanities Book Series.

As part of our commitment to intellectual excellence and a rigorous review process, Common Ground sends book manuscripts that have received initial editorial approval to peer reviewers to further evaluate and provide constructive feedback. The comments and guidance that these reviewers supply is invaluable to our authors and an essential part of the publication process.

Common Ground recognizes the important role of referees by acknowledging book reviewers as members of The Humanities Book Series Editorial Review Board for a period of at least one year. The list of members of the Editorial Review Board will be posted on our website. In addition, Common Ground also offers a US$200 voucher for each completed review which meets the standards set out by the Commissioning Editor at the commencement of assignment. Vouchers may be used in the Common Ground Bookstore or for registration at one of our international conferences.

If you would like to referee book manuscripts submitted to The Humanities, please email books@thehumanities.com. Please make sure to include:

a brief description of your professional credentials
a list of your areas of interest and expertise
a copy of your CV with current contact details

If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for manuscripts within your purview, we will contact you.

Discourse Analysis: A Social-Philosophical Grounding

Published on October 19, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Discourse Analysis: A Social-Philosophical Grounding by Kyrkos Doxiadis is now available as part of The Humanities series.

Governing The Future

Published on August 29, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Governing the Future by Derek Wallace is now available from The Humanities series.

Since the Second World War, state administrations of all stripes have sought social stability by privileging the economic – first, through central planning, grounded in confidence in the achievability of human mastery over space and change; then through neo-liberalism, driven by an a-temporal faith in the collective benefits of maximizing individual choice. Both emphases have been equally hubristic, and devastating for the planet. This book inquires into the influencing factors as well as the practical realizations of this project at the level of national state organization and decision-making, with particular reference to Western liberal democracies, using New Zealand as a case study. In its latter stages, the book moves towards an exploration of the prospects and opportunities for a more balanced and realistic approach to managing the future – one that takes into account the demands of sustainable well-being for all. The experience of the last thirty years – characterized by a retreat from central planning followed by a partial return – and the fuller understanding of the limits of government action made possible by that experience make it an appropriate moment for a study of this kind.

Derek Wallace is a senior lecturer in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches academic and professional writing, and interpersonal communication. His scholarly training was in the Department of English at the same university, where he did a doctorate entitled “Managing Power: The role of writing in the formation of public policy”, describing and analyzing the texts surrounding an instance of policy development. A comprehensive account of this work appears in “Writing and the management of power: Producing public policy in New Zealand.” In Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell (eds.), Writing selves/writing societies: Research from activity perspectives. Perspectives on writing, 159–178. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity.

Humanistic Ecology: The Integration of Magic, Medicine, and Science

Published on June 17, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Humanistic Ecology: The Integration of Magic, Medicine, and Science by Paolo Palmieri is now available from The Humanities series.

This book is a work of cultural, pedagogical, and social advocacy. It sketches the project of humanistic ecology, the idea that cultural, social, and educational renewal can and should be pursued within a humanistic framework. Humanistic ecology builds on the interrelatedness of traditions such as
magic, medicine, and science, as exemplified in the history of Western civilization. Humanistic ecology aims at integrating forgotten or marginalized pathways to knowledge and wellbeing. It emphasizes their transformative power for the betterment of our lives.

The book looks at the future but is informed with the spirit the past. Knowledge, happiness, and health are not inscribed in our genes, or in the social institutions of industrialized societies. In a nutshell, humanistic ecology envisions holistic forms of inquiry, learning, and healing, beyond the sectarian divisions of contemporary social and intellectual life.

Paolo Palmieri is a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Unstuck with Yahia Lababidi

Published on February 12, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 2 Comments

Brian Chappell reviews Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing

Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (2010) is the type of book critics want to write. It is an intellectual memoir, a sharing of one’s own personal engagement with those who have had a dramatic impact. In the spirit of Susan Sontag (who receives an entire chapter), Lababidi replaces systematizing and arguing with a Montaignian (whose idea of the essai opens the Preface and serves as inspiration for the title of the book) of figuring things out as we go along. “I’m always in a state of discovery and beginning,” he told me, “what I think I know, I’m trying to communicate. You have to get out of your system whatever is yours, whatever speaks to you.” This, for him, is a refreshing departure from the work of academics, who too often “go to the same well to drink, excluding the regular people who perhaps may be more curious. If you give it to me in a way that is forbidding, I’m not interested.”

Trial by Ink, therefore, strives for the opposite. He stresses as much in the Preface:

This…is a subjective work where I attempt to evaluate what I care for and generally test my responsiveness to literature and culture. In the course of such investigations particular judgments emerge, expressions of taste and values. They are my trials, where I am simultaneously scratching my head and my pen across the paper, to determine what I think about a given subject….In turn, what you have before you is a catalogue of interests, possessions, exorcisms and even passing enthusiasms, derived from what I was thinking, reading, watching, dreaming, and living over a seven-year period.

I envy the intellectual freedom, which Lababidi takes up here, to, say, write about Dostoevsky, without the requisite knowledge of Russian language or history, simply because I love him so much. Lababidi has such a relationship with Nietzsche, Wilde, Rilke, Baudelaire, Kafka and many others. He reminded me, though, that to do this, one must always come from a place of relative authority. “Not to dis the blog,” he says, “but they are not essays.” They don’t partake of the type of “deep and continuous mining” and “literary soul-gazing” that are the rudiments of a trial, of an essay.

View the complete review here.

Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of Consciousness through Death

Published on January 13, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of Consciousness through Death by Susan Shore is now available from The Humanities imprint.

Is there anything beyond death? And is it worth having?

This book begins with the latest science on the Near-death Experience, then explores the passage through physical death to the states of conscious being beyond. These states ~ often blissful ~ are outlined by our great religious traditions, and detailed in Tibetan Buddhism and the perennial philosophy, particularly in the Alice Bailey books. Traditional sources are compared with findings of science and medicine, and psychology from Jung and Piaget to Wilber. Later chapters examine clinical studies by reputable psychiatrists and psychologists: These were undertaken after they accidentally took subjects into ‘the place the Tibetans call the Bardo’ ~ the state after death /between lives.

In a letter to acclaimed Australian journalist Pamela Bone, author Susan Shore wrote:

You say in your book Bad Hair Days that the brain is the only thinking mechanism, therefore consciousness cannot survive death. In my book, I examine a mass of evidence…to the contrary…that is ignored. This is due to its rejection by a materialistic science that can be as inflexible (Dawkins is its apologist) as the religion it often deplores.

Death, Our Last Illusion examines the science of dying (in studies in the Lancet etc.), and discovers that hypoxia, drugs, religious training etc., have no explanatory power as causes of the Near-death Experience.’ (23 August 2007).

Pamela Bone, whose book Bad Hair Days was about the passage to her own death, found the book ‘wonderful…deeply thoughtful…beautifully written. It has made me think again’, she concluded.