From the early years of the Common Era to 1700, Indian intellectuals explored with unparalleled subtlety the place of emotion in art. Their investigations led to the deconstruction of art's formal structures and broader inquiries into the pleasure of tragic tales. _Rasa_, or taste, was the word they chose to describe art's aesthetics, and their passionate effort to pin down these phenomena became its own remarkable act of creation. This book is the first in any language to follow the evolution (...) of rasa from its origins in dramaturgical thought--a concept for the stage--to its flourishing in literary thought--a concept for the page. _Reader on Rasa_ incorporates primary texts by every significant thinker of classical Indian aesthetics, many never translated before. The arrangement of the selections captures the intellectual dynamism that has powered this debate for centuries. Headnotes explain the meaning and significance of each text, a comprehensive introduction summarizes major threads in intellectual-historical terms, and critical endnotes and an extensive bibliography add further depth to the selections. The Sanskrit theory of emotion in art is one of the most sophisticated in the ancient world, a precursor of the work being done today by critics and philosophers of aesthetics. This volume's conceptual detail, historical precision, and clarity will appeal to any scholar interested in a full portrait of global intellectual development. __Reader on Rasa___ is the inaugural book in the Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought series, edited by Sheldon Pollock. These text-based books guide readers through the most important forms of classical Indian thought, from epistemology, rhetoric, and hermeneutics to astral science, yoga, and medicine. Each volume provides fresh translations of key works, headnotes to contextualize selections, a comprehensive analysis of major lines of development within the discipline, and exegetical and text-critical endnotes, as well as a bibliography. Designed for comparativists and interested general readers, Historical Sourcebooks is also a great resource for advanced scholars seeking authoritative commentary on challenging works._. (shrink)

Textures of Time is a rich and challenging book that raises a host of important and hard questions about historical narrative, form, and style; the sociology of texts; and the core problem of ascertaining historical truth. Two that pertain to the book’s main claims are of special interest to nonspecialist readers: Is register or style—“texture”—necessarily and everywhere diagnostic of “history”? Does a new kind of “historical consciousness” emerge in south India beginning in the sixteenth century, indeed as a sign of (...) an Indian early modernity? Textures is not the first book to argue that historical discourse is constitutively marked by a peculiar style, but the claim is beset by difficulties that scholars since Barthes have detailed. Rather than textures of time—accounts of what really happened in history—what these works offer us may be only pretextures of time, textualized forms of a human experience that make claims about its degrees and types of truth through representations of various states of temporality. Instead of assessing, then, whether these works are history or something else like “myth,” we might ask whether they invite us to transcend this very dichotomy, to try, that is, to make sense of historical forms of consciousness rather than to identify forms of historical consciousness. As for modernity, nothing in south Indian historiography from 1500–1800 remotely compares to the conceptual revolution of Europe. But why should we expect the newness of the early modern world to have been experienced the same way everywhere? Modernity across Asia may have shown simultaneity without symmetry. Should this asymmetry turn out to reveal continuity and not rupture, however, no need to lament the fact. There is no shame in premodernity. (shrink)

What India and China Once Were: The Pasts That May Shape the Global Future. Edited by Sheldon I. Pollock and Benjamin A. Elman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 365. $35.

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine the conscious and unconscious forces underlying race as a social formation, conceptualizing race, racial identity, and racism in ways that go beyond traditional modes of psychoanalytic thought Featuring contributions from Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; Latinx and other racialized groups; apartheid and American (...) slavery; and applications of Lacan's concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection both reorients readers' understandings of race through its deployment of Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of subjectivity in relation to race, racism and racial identification. Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and contemporary scholars of race and appeal to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology. (shrink)

This book examines Aristotle's metaphysics and his account of nature, stressing the ways in which his desire to explain observed natural processes shaped his philosophical thought. It departs radically from a tradition of interpretation, in which Aristotle is understood to have approached problems with a set of abstract principles in hand, principles derived from critical reflection on the views of his predecessors. A central example of the book interprets Aristotle's essentialism as deriving from an examination of the kinds of unity (...) that various sorts of things have: elemental motion, alteration, transformation and the growth of organisms. An important conclusion of this argument is that an essence may, under certain circumstances, lack some of its essential attributes. This is a major re-evaluation of Aristotle's metaphysics that will interest philosophers, classicists and historians of science. (shrink)

This book is addressed to readers who have laid the foundation of a liberal education & are beginning the special study of law.

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

The strategy of this paper is to throw light on rational cognition and epistemic justification by examining irrationality. Epistemic irrationality is possible because we are reflexive cognizers, able to reason about and redirect some aspects of our own cognition. One consequence of this is that one cannot give a theory of epistemic rationality or epistemic justification without simultaneously giving a theory of practical rationality. A further consequence is that practical irrationality can affect our epistemic cognition. I argue that practical irrationality (...) derives from a general difficulty we have in overriding built-in shortcut modules aimed at making cognition more efficient, and all epistemic irrationality can be traced to this same source. A consequence of this account is that a theory of rationality is a descriptive theory, describing contingent features of a cognitive architecture, and it forms the core of a general theory of “voluntary” cognition — those aspects of cognition that are under voluntary control. It also follows that most of the so-called “rules for rationality” that philosophers have proposed are really just rules describing default (non- reflexive) cognition. It can be perfectly rational for a reflexive cognizer to break these rules. The “normativity” of rationality is a reflection of a built-in feature of reflexive cognition — when we detect violations of rationality, we have a tendency to desire to correct them. This is just another part of the descriptive theory of rationality. Although theories of rationality are descriptive, the structure of reflexive cognition gives philosophers, as human cognizers, privileged access to certain aspects of rational cognition. Philosophical theories of rationality are really scientific theories, based on inference to the best explanation, that take contingent introspective data as the evidence to be explained. (shrink)

For centuries, philosophers have debated the question of free will. Do we make our own choices? Or are we more like rudderless ships drifting on the ocean, buffeted by winds and currents outside ourselves? In TK, research psychologist Ken Sheldon reveals that the way we answer these questions has serious implications for our wellbeing. We may never know for certain whether free will exists, Sheldon argues, but recent studies have found that believing in free will matters-indeed, it's an (...) essential component of psychological health. Freely Determined offers an argument for embracing our capacity to choose our own destiny, and a guide for how we might recognize our freedom and use it wisely. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work on motivation, as well as recent research in personality science and social psychology, Sheldon shows us that far from being in the thrall of animal urges and unconscious biases, we humans are constantly making conscious choices: whether to eat the nachos or the salad, whether to shoot the basketball or pass it to a teammate, whether to take that job or marry that person or write that novella. Indeed, over decades of research, Sheldon has established that seeing ourselves as change-makers in our own lives, and in the world, helps us feel happier and even behave more ethically. By identifying and pursuing our deepest values, he argues, we can set and achieve meaningful goals, ones that will help us and our communities flourish. Offering readers insight into how they can live a more self-directed, satisfying life, Freely Determined demystifies the science of choice and reveals that we are radically free to live with greater purpose. (shrink)

Lessons in the study of habits by Walter L. Sheldon. This book is a reproduction of the original book published in 1903 and may have some imperfections such as marks or hand-written notes.

Princeton University Press, 984. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.9 MB).

Political Theory as a Vocation -- Transgression, Equality, and Voice -- Norm and Form : The Constitutionalizing of Democracy -- Fugitive Democracy -- Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory -- Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism -- On Reading Marx Politically -- Max Weber : Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory -- Reason in Exile : Critical Theory and Technological Society -- Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political -- Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time -- The (...) Liberal/Democratic Divide : On Rawls's Political Liberalism -- On the Theory and Practice of Power -- Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism -- Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth -- The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism -- From Progress to Modernization : The Conservative Turn -- Editorial -- What Revolutionary Action Means Today -- The People's Two Bodies -- The New Public Philosophy -- Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition -- Constitutional Order, Revolutionary Violence and Modern Power -- Agitated Times. (shrink)

Princeton University Press, 1982. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) waiting list was designed as a just and equitable system through which the limited number of organs is allocated to the millions of Americans in need of a transplant. People have trusted the system because of the belief that everyone on the list has an equal opportunity to receive an organ and also that allocation is blind to matters of financial standing, celebrity or political power. Recent events have revealed that certain practices and (...) policies have the potential to be exploited. The policies addressed in this paper enable those on the list with the proper resources to gain an advantage over other less fortunate members, creating a system that benefits not the individual most in medical need, but the one with the best resources. These policies are not only unethical but threaten the balance and success of the entire UNOS system. This paper proposes one possible solution, which seeks to balance the concepts of justice and utility. (shrink)

This book is a story about promoting systemic change of SEL in the mindset and capabilities of staff, in the structure of the district, and in the vision, mission, and policies that guide the district.

Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural (...) racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture. (shrink)