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Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)
by Curtis Hutt Halla Kim Berel Dov LernerTwentieth century continental thinkers such as Bergson, Levinas and Jonas have brought fresh and renewed attentions to Jewish ethics, yet it still remains fairly low profile in the Anglophone academic world. This collection of critical essays brings together the work of established and up-and-coming scholars from Israel, the United States, and around the world on the topic of Jewish religious and philosophical ethics. The chapters are broken into three main sections – Rabbinics, Philosophy, and Contemporary Challenges. The authors address, using a variety of research strategies, the work of both major and lesser-known figures in historical Jewish religious and philosophical traditions. The book discusses a wide variety of topics related to Jewish ethics, including "ethics and the Mishnah," "Afro Jewish ethics," "Jewish historiographical ethics," as well as the conceptual/philosophical foundations of the law and virtues in the work of Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Baruch Spinoza.The volume closes with four contributions on present-day frontiers in Jewish ethics. As the first book to focus on the nature, scope and ramifications of the Jewish ethics at work in religious and philosophical contexts, this book will be of great interest to anyone studying Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Religion.
Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization’, 1940-44 (Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide)
by S. IonescuIonescu examines the process of economic Romanianization of Bucharest during the Antonescu regime that targeted the property, jobs, and businesses of local Jews and Roma/Gypsies and their legal resistance strategies to such an unjust policy.
Jewish Self-Hate
by Theodor LessingThe diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost a commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept’s origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß. Written on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, Lessing’s hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside. This new edition makes a seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time.
The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology
by David NovakThe Jewish Social Contract begins by asking how a traditional Jew can participate politically and socially and in good faith in a modern democratic society, and ends by proposing a broad, inclusive notion of secularity. David Novak takes issue with the view--held by the late philosopher John Rawls and his followers--that citizens of a liberal state must, in effect, check their religion at the door when discussing politics in a public forum. Novak argues that in a "liberal democratic state, members of faith-based communities--such as tradition-minded Jews and Christians--ought to be able to adhere to the broad political framework wholly in terms of their own religious tradition and convictions, and without setting their religion aside in the public sphere. Novak shows how social contracts emerged, rooted in biblical notions of covenant, and how they developed in the rabbinic, medieval, and "modern periods. He offers suggestions as to how Jews today can best negotiate the modern social contract while calling upon non-Jewish allies to aid them in the process. The Jewish Social Contract will prove an enlightening and innovative contribution to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in liberal democracies.
The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology
by David NovakThe Jewish Social Contract begins by asking how a traditional Jew can participate politically and socially and in good faith in a modern democratic society, and ends by proposing a broad, inclusive notion of secularity. David Novak takes issue with the view--held by the late philosopher John Rawls and his followers--that citizens of a liberal state must, in effect, check their religion at the door when discussing politics in a public forum. Novak argues that in a "liberal democratic state, members of faith-based communities--such as tradition-minded Jews and Christians--ought to be able to adhere to the broad political framework wholly in terms of their own religious tradition and convictions, and without setting their religion aside in the public sphere. Novak shows how social contracts emerged, rooted in biblical notions of covenant, and how they developed in the rabbinic, medieval, and "modern periods. He offers suggestions as to how Jews today can best negotiate the modern social contract while calling upon non-Jewish allies to aid them in the process. The Jewish Social Contract will prove an enlightening and innovative contribution to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in liberal democracies.
Jewish Theology for a Postmodern Age (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)
by Miriam Feldmann KayeIn the postmodern, relativist world-view with its refutation of a single, objective, and ultimate truth, it has become difficult if not impossible to argue in favour of one’s own beliefs as preferable to those of others. Miriam Feldmann Kaye’s pioneering study is one of the first English-language books to address Jewish theology from a postmodern perspective, probing the question of how Jewish theology has the potential to survive the postmodern onslaught that some see as heralding the collapse of religion. Basing her arguments on both philosophical and theological scholarship, Feldmann Kaye shows how postmodernism might actually be a resource for rejuvenating religion.Her response to the conception of theology and postmodernism as competing systems of thought is based on a close critical study of Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) and Tamar Ross. Rather than advocating postmodern ideas, she analyses their writings through the lens of the most radical of continental postmodern philosophers and cultural critics in order to offer a compelling theology compatible with that world-view. Whether the reader considers postmodernism to be inherently problematic or merely inconsequential, this study demonstrates why reconsidering these preconceptions is one of the most pressing issues in contemporary Jewish thought.
The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton
by Andrew PorwancherThe untold story of the founding father’s likely Jewish birth and upbringing—and its revolutionary consequences for understanding him and the nation he fought to create In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. Hamilton himself wanted it that way, and most biographers have simply assumed he had a Christian boyhood. With a detective’s persistence and a historian’s rigor, Porwancher upends that assumption and revolutionizes our understanding of an American icon.This radical reassessment of Hamilton’s religious upbringing gives us a fresh perspective on both his adult years and the country he helped forge. Although he didn’t identify as a Jew in America, Hamilton cultivated a relationship with the Jewish community that made him unique among the founders. As a lawyer, he advocated for Jewish citizens in court. As a financial visionary, he invigorated sectors of the economy that gave Jews their greatest opportunities. As an alumnus of Columbia, he made his alma mater more welcoming to Jewish people. And his efforts are all the more striking given the pernicious antisemitism of the era. In a new nation torn between democratic promises and discriminatory practices, Hamilton fought for a republic in which Jew and Gentile would stand as equals.By setting Hamilton in the context of his Jewish world for the first time, this fascinating book challenges us to rethink the life and legend of America's most enigmatic founder.
Jews and Muslims in the White Supremacist Conspiratorial Imagination (Conspiracy Theories)
by Ron Hirschbein Amin AsfariJews and Muslims in the White Supremacist Conspiratorial Imagination explores how Jews and Muslims are stigmatized and endangered by the same conspiratorial template. Supremacists imagine that Jews and Muslims secretly strive to replace white, European civilization with an unspeakable tyranny. The authors, a Jew and a Muslim, analyze the nature of the conspiracism that targets their communities. They historicize the supremacist conspiratorial imagination, narrating the paranoia on a continuum, from modernity to the postmodern. They begin with the texts of modernity, following them through to the dark areas of the Internet and examining their violent denouement in synagogues and mosques. The book investigates the classic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and neoclassic variations such as QAnon. It turns to Islamophobic responses to 9/11 such as paranoia regarding the Muslim Brotherhood and the doppelgänger of The Protocols, namely The Project. The authors conclude by questioning how "ordinary" people, prompted by paranoia and recognition hunger, resort to violence and murder. Admittedly, the authors are not certain—certainty is for conspiracists. But they may have a piece of the puzzle. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of conspiracy theories, antisemitism, Judeophobia, Islamophobia, political science, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and criminology.
Jews and Muslims in the White Supremacist Conspiratorial Imagination (Conspiracy Theories)
by Ron Hirschbein Amin AsfariJews and Muslims in the White Supremacist Conspiratorial Imagination explores how Jews and Muslims are stigmatized and endangered by the same conspiratorial template. Supremacists imagine that Jews and Muslims secretly strive to replace white, European civilization with an unspeakable tyranny. The authors, a Jew and a Muslim, analyze the nature of the conspiracism that targets their communities. They historicize the supremacist conspiratorial imagination, narrating the paranoia on a continuum, from modernity to the postmodern. They begin with the texts of modernity, following them through to the dark areas of the Internet and examining their violent denouement in synagogues and mosques. The book investigates the classic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and neoclassic variations such as QAnon. It turns to Islamophobic responses to 9/11 such as paranoia regarding the Muslim Brotherhood and the doppelgänger of The Protocols, namely The Project. The authors conclude by questioning how "ordinary" people, prompted by paranoia and recognition hunger, resort to violence and murder. Admittedly, the authors are not certain—certainty is for conspiracists. But they may have a piece of the puzzle. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of conspiracy theories, antisemitism, Judeophobia, Islamophobia, political science, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and criminology.
Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance
by P. MendesThe historical involvement of Jews in the political Left is well known, but far less attention has been paid to the political and ideological factors which attracted Jews to the Left. After the Holocaust and the creation of Israel many lost their faith in universalistic solutions, yet lingering links between Jews and the Left continue to exist.
Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History (Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism)
by Abigail Green Simon Levis Sullam“This is a timely contribution to some of the most pressing debates facing scholars of Jewish Studies today. It forces us to re-think standard approaches to both antisemitism and liberalism. Its geographic scope offers a model for how scholars can “provincialize” Europe and engage in a transnational approach to Jewish history. The book crackles with intellectual energy; it is truly a pleasure to read.”- Jessica M. Marglin, University of Southern California, USAGreen and Levis Sullam have assembled a collection of original, and provocative essays that, in illuminating the historic relationship between Jews and liberalism, transform our understanding of liberalism itself. - Derek Penslar, Harvard University, USA“This book offers a strikingly new account of Liberalism’s relationship to Jews. Previous scholarship stressed that Liberalism had to overcome its abivalence in order to achieve a principled stand on granting Jews rights and equality. This volume asserts, through multiple examples, that Liberalism excluded many groups, including Jews, so that the exclusion of Jews was indeed integral to Liberalism and constitutive for it. This is an important volume, with a challenging argument for the present moment.”- David Sorkin, Yale University, USAThe emancipatory promise of liberalism – and its exclusionary qualities – shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.
A Jihad for Love
by Mohamed El Bachiri David van ReybrouckMohamed El-Bachiri is a Muslim. He lost his wife Loubna in the Brussels bombing of March 2016 – a young woman murdered by a fanatical jihadist. Mohamed was left to bring up their three sons on his own. Instead of hating or collapsing into grief, he put together a short book of reflections on love, loss and the ways in which we can live together despite differences of religion and ideology. It is a plea for tolerance and compassion, a rejection of fanaticism, and it is a heartbreaking book. Mohamed El-Bachiri shows how an argument for treating each other with kindness and respect can survive even the most brutal atrocity. For him, Islam should be a struggle for love, and the struggle for love should involve us all.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924-1974
by E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.Covering their lives from childhood to the end of the Georgia governorship, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter is one of the few major biographies of an American president that pays significant attention to the First Lady. So deeply were their lives and aspirations intertwined, a close friend once remarked: "You can't really understand Jimmy Carter unless you know Rosalynn." The story of one is the story of the other. To recount their remarkable lives, E. Stanly Godbold, Jr. draws on academic and military records, the governor's correspondence, the recollections of the Carters themselves, as well as original, unpublished interviews with a wide variety of participants in the Carters' political and personal lives. The book reveals a man who was far more complex than the peanut farmer of popular myth, a man who cited both Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan as early influences on his legal philosophy, was heir to a sizable fortune, and who, with the help of Rosalynn, built a lucrative agribusiness. Nicknamed "Hotshot" by his father, Carter was the first president born in a hospital, rode a motorcycle before entering politics, counted Tolstoy, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, and James Agee among his favorite authors, and claimed his wife Rosalynn as the most influential person in his life. Volume I in this two-volume biography details how the Carters rose to power, managed their private and public lives, governed Georgia, and seized control of the national Democratic party. The cast of colorful characters includes "Miss Allie" Smith, "Mr. Earl" and "Miss Lillian," brother Billy, Rachel Clark, Admiral Rickover, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Richard Nixon, daughter Amy, Charles Kirbo, Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, and many more. It is a sweeping, Faulknerian tale of individuals who would change the image of the South in the national mind and the role of the South in the presidency. Indeed, Carter shocked the state of Georgia and the entire country by calling for an end to racial discrimination in 1971, thus launching his national political career. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter neither sanctifies nor vilifies the Carters but offers instead an even-handed, brilliantly researched, and utterly absorbing account of two ordinary people whose lives together took them to the heights of power and public service in America.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights, 1975-2020
by E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.The dual biography of the powerful First Couple who attempted to use their presidency to bring peace, human rights, and justice to all peoples of the world and dedicated the remainder of their long lives to making a safer, more caring world. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter's marriage of over seventy-five years is the longest of any American presidential couple and has been described by them as a "full partnership." President Bill Clinton once said that they have changed more lives around the world than any couple in world history. Their lives have been public and private models of honesty and integrity in post-Watergate America. The second of a two-volume biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter by historian E. Stanly Godbold, Jr., this book offers a comprehensive account of the professional and personal lives of the powerful couple who have worked together as reformers in Georgia, President and First Lady of the United States, and founders of the Carter Center to promote international health, conflict resolution, and democracy. It picks up with their departure from the Georgia governor's mansion and their tireless campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, the first time a Southerner won the White House in over a century. It details the Carter couple's struggle for recognition on a national stage, the challenges of rising energy costs, mounting inflation, geopolitical tensions, and the "October Surprise" that tainted the 1980 election in which they went down to defeat. During these years, Rosalynn demonstrated that she was a better politician than her husband, offering policy advice, serving as ambassador extraordinaire, sitting in on Cabinet meetings, and working determinedly to provide care and respect for those suffering from mental illness. Their post-presidential work has been unprecedented on the international stage with Habitat for Humanity and especially their establishment of the Carter Center to "wage peace, fight disease, build hope." Carter, after reaching the zenith of his career in negotiating the Camp David Accords of 1978, continued for decades to work for peace in the Middle East. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, a prize which he quickly said equally belonged to Rosalynn and to the Carter Center. Among the greatest peacemakers of the twentieth century, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter emerge from this account as inspirational giants in American history and a shining example of the power of a couple in public service.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights, 1975-2020
by E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.The dual biography of the powerful First Couple who attempted to use their presidency to bring peace, human rights, and justice to all peoples of the world and dedicated the remainder of their long lives to making a safer, more caring world. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter's marriage of over seventy-five years is the longest of any American presidential couple and has been described by them as a "full partnership." President Bill Clinton once said that they have changed more lives around the world than any couple in world history. Their lives have been public and private models of honesty and integrity in post-Watergate America. The second of a two-volume biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter by historian E. Stanly Godbold, Jr., this book offers a comprehensive account of the professional and personal lives of the powerful couple who have worked together as reformers in Georgia, President and First Lady of the United States, and founders of the Carter Center to promote international health, conflict resolution, and democracy. It picks up with their departure from the Georgia governor's mansion and their tireless campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, the first time a Southerner won the White House in over a century. It details the Carter couple's struggle for recognition on a national stage, the challenges of rising energy costs, mounting inflation, geopolitical tensions, and the "October Surprise" that tainted the 1980 election in which they went down to defeat. During these years, Rosalynn demonstrated that she was a better politician than her husband, offering policy advice, serving as ambassador extraordinaire, sitting in on Cabinet meetings, and working determinedly to provide care and respect for those suffering from mental illness. Their post-presidential work has been unprecedented on the international stage with Habitat for Humanity and especially their establishment of the Carter Center to "wage peace, fight disease, build hope." Carter, after reaching the zenith of his career in negotiating the Camp David Accords of 1978, continued for decades to work for peace in the Middle East. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, a prize which he quickly said equally belonged to Rosalynn and to the Carter Center. Among the greatest peacemakers of the twentieth century, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter emerge from this account as inspirational giants in American history and a shining example of the power of a couple in public service.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924-1974
by E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.Covering their lives from childhood to the end of the Georgia governorship, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter is one of the few major biographies of an American president that pays significant attention to the First Lady. So deeply were their lives and aspirations intertwined, a close friend once remarked: "You can't really understand Jimmy Carter unless you know Rosalynn." The story of one is the story of the other. To recount their remarkable lives, E. Stanly Godbold, Jr. draws on academic and military records, the governor's correspondence, the recollections of the Carters themselves, as well as original, unpublished interviews with a wide variety of participants in the Carters' political and personal lives. The book reveals a man who was far more complex than the peanut farmer of popular myth, a man who cited both Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan as early influences on his legal philosophy, was heir to a sizable fortune, and who, with the help of Rosalynn, built a lucrative agribusiness. Nicknamed "Hotshot" by his father, Carter was the first president born in a hospital, rode a motorcycle before entering politics, counted Tolstoy, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, and James Agee among his favorite authors, and claimed his wife Rosalynn as the most influential person in his life. Volume I in this two-volume biography details how the Carters rose to power, managed their private and public lives, governed Georgia, and seized control of the national Democratic party. The cast of colorful characters includes "Miss Allie" Smith, "Mr. Earl" and "Miss Lillian," brother Billy, Rachel Clark, Admiral Rickover, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Richard Nixon, daughter Amy, Charles Kirbo, Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, and many more. It is a sweeping, Faulknerian tale of individuals who would change the image of the South in the national mind and the role of the South in the presidency. Indeed, Carter shocked the state of Georgia and the entire country by calling for an end to racial discrimination in 1971, thus launching his national political career. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter neither sanctifies nor vilifies the Carters but offers instead an even-handed, brilliantly researched, and utterly absorbing account of two ordinary people whose lives together took them to the heights of power and public service in America.
Jimmy Carter and the Middle East: The Politics of Presidential Diplomacy (Middle East Today)
by Daniel StrieffBased on newly declassified documents, this book offers a provocative new analysis of President Jimmy Carter's political role in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. It analyzes the reflexive relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy, especially the roles played by the media, public opinion and pro-Israel lobby groups.
Joachim Lambek: The Interplay of Mathematics, Logic, and Linguistics (Outstanding Contributions to Logic #20)
This book is dedicated to the life and work of the mathematician Joachim Lambek (1922–2014). The editors gather together noted experts to discuss the state of the art of various of Lambek’s works in logic, category theory, and linguistics and to celebrate his contributions to those areas over the course of his multifaceted career. After early work in combinatorics and elementary number theory, Lambek became a distinguished algebraist (notably in ring theory). In the 1960s, he began to work in category theory, categorical algebra, logic, proof theory, and foundations of computability. In a parallel development, beginning in the late 1950s and for the rest of his career, Lambek also worked extensively in mathematical linguistics and computational approaches to natural languages. He and his collaborators perfected production and type grammars for numerous natural languages. Lambek grammars form an early noncommutative precursor to Girard’s linear logic. In a surprising development (2000), he introduced a novel and deeper algebraic framework (which he called pregroup grammars) for analyzing natural language, along with algebraic, higher category, and proof-theoretic semantics. This book is of interest to mathematicians, logicians, linguists, and computer scientists.
Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory
by Matthew R. McLennanLooking at the breadth of Joan Didion's writing, from journalism, essays, fiction, memoir and screen plays, it may appear that there is no unifying thread, but Matthew R. McLennan argues that 'the ethics of memory' – the question of which norms should guide public and private remembrance – offers a promising vision of what is most characteristic and salient in Didion's works.By framing her universe as indifferent and essentially precarious, McLennan demonstrates how this outlook guides Didion's reflections on key themes linked to memory: namely witnessing and grieving, nostalgia, and the paradoxically amnesiac qualities of our increasingly archived public life that she explored in famous texts like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking and Salvador. McLennan moves beyond the interpretive value of such an approach and frames Didion as a serious, iconoclastic philosopher of time and memory. Through her encounters with the past, the writer is shown to offer lessons for the future in an increasingly perilous and unsettled world.
Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory
by Matthew R. McLennanLooking at the breadth of Joan Didion's writing, from journalism, essays, fiction, memoir and screen plays, it may appear that there is no unifying thread, but Matthew R. McLennan argues that 'the ethics of memory' – the question of which norms should guide public and private remembrance – offers a promising vision of what is most characteristic and salient in Didion's works.By framing her universe as indifferent and essentially precarious, McLennan demonstrates how this outlook guides Didion's reflections on key themes linked to memory: namely witnessing and grieving, nostalgia, and the paradoxically amnesiac qualities of our increasingly archived public life that she explored in famous texts like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking and Salvador. McLennan moves beyond the interpretive value of such an approach and frames Didion as a serious, iconoclastic philosopher of time and memory. Through her encounters with the past, the writer is shown to offer lessons for the future in an increasingly perilous and unsettled world.
Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth
by Ann W. AstellCalling into question the common assumption that the Middle Ages produced no secondary epics, Ann W. Astell here revises a key chapter in literary history. She examines the connections between the Book of Job and Boethius' s Consolation of Philosophy—texts closely associated with each other in the minds of medieval readers and writers—and demonstrates that these two works served as a conduit for the tradition of heroic poetry from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. As she traces the complex influences of classical and biblical texts on vernacular literature, Astell offers provocative readings of works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Malory, Milton, and many others.Astell looks at the relationship between the historical reception of the epic and successive imitative forms, showing how Boethius's Consolation and Johan biblical commentaries echo the allegorical treatment of" epic truth" in the poems of Homer and Virgil, and how in turn many works classified as "romance" take Job and Boethius as their models. She considers the influences of Job and Boethius on hagiographic romance, as exemplified by the stories of Eustace, Custance, and Griselda; on the amatory romances of Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, and Troilus and Criseyde; and on the chivalric romances of Martin of Tours, Galahad, Lancelot, and Redcrosse. Finally, she explores an encyclopedic array of interpretations of Job and Boethius in Milton's Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
Jobs for the Boys: Patronage And The State In Comparative Perspective
by Merilee S. GrindlePatronage systems in public service are reviled as undemocratic and corrupt. Yet patronage was the prevailing method of staffing government for centuries, and in some countries it still is. Grindle considers why patronage has been ubiquitous in history and explores the processes through which it is replaced by merit-based civil service systems.
Jobs for the Boys: Patronage And The State In Comparative Perspective
by Merilee S. GrindlePatronage systems in public service are reviled as undemocratic and corrupt. Yet patronage was the prevailing method of staffing government for centuries, and in some countries it still is. Grindle considers why patronage has been ubiquitous in history and explores the processes through which it is replaced by merit-based civil service systems.
Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics (Outstanding Contributions to Logic #5)
by Alexandru Baltag Sonja SmetsThis book illustrates the program of Logical-Informational Dynamics. Rational agents exploit the information available in the world in delicate ways, adopt a wide range of epistemic attitudes, and in that process, constantly change the world itself. Logical-Informational Dynamics is about logical systems putting such activities at center stage, focusing on the events by which we acquire information and change attitudes. Its contributions show many current logics of information and change at work, often in multi-agent settings where social behavior is essential, and often stressing Johan van Benthem's pioneering work in establishing this program. However, this is not a Festschrift, but a rich tapestry for a field with a wealth of strands of its own. The reader will see the state of the art in such topics as information update, belief change, preference, learning over time, and strategic interaction in games. Moreover, no tight boundary has been enforced, and some chapters add more general mathematical or philosophical foundations or links to current trends in computer science. The theme of this book lies at the interface of many disciplines. Logic is the main methodology, but the various chapters cross easily between mathematics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive and social sciences, while also ranging from pure theory to empirical work. Accordingly, the authors of this book represent a wide variety of original thinkers from different research communities. And their interconnected themes challenge at the same time how we think of logic, philosophy and computation. Thus, very much in line with van Benthem's work over many decades, the volume shows how all these disciplines form a natural unity in the perspective of dynamic logicians (broadly conceived) exploring their new themes today. And at the same time, in doing so, it offers a broader conception of logic with a certain grandeur, moving its horizons beyond the traditional study of consequence relations.
Johann Bernhard Basedow and the Transformation of Modern Education: Educational Reform in the German Enlightenment
by Robert B. LoudenBest known for the progressive school he founded in Dessau during the 18th century, Johann Bernhard Basedow was a central thinker in the German Enlightenment. Since his death in 1790 a substantial body of German-language literature about his life, work, and school (the Philanthropin) has developed. In the first English intellectual biography of this influential figure, Robert B. Louden answers questions that continue to surround Basedow and provides a much-needed examination of Basedow's intellectual legacy. Assessing the impact of his ideas and theories on subsequent educational movements, Louden argues that Basedow is the unacknowledged father of the progressive education movement. He unravels several paradoxes surrounding the Philanthropin to help understand why it was described by Immanuel Kant as “the greatest phenomenon which has appeared in this century for the perfection of humanity”, despite its brief and stormy existence, its low enrollment and insufficient funding. Among the many neglected stories Louden tells is the enormous and unacknowledged debt that Kant owes to Basedow in his philosophy of education, history, and religion. This is a positive reassessment of Basedow and his difficult personality that leads to a reevaluation of the originality of major figures as well as a reconsideration of the significance of allegedly minor authors who have been eclipsed by the politics of historiography. For anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of the history of German philosophy, Louden's book is essential reading.