This book explores the strong links between sustainability and the humanities, which go beyond the inclusion of social sciences in discussions on sustainability, and offers a holistic discussion on the intellectual and moral aspects of sustainable development. The contributions from researchers in the fields of education, social sciences, religion, humanities, and sustainable development fulfill three main aims: They provide university lecturers interested in humanities and sustainable development with an opportunity to present their work; foster the exchange of information, ideas and (...) experiences acquired in the execution of teaching and research; and discuss methodological approaches and projects that provide a better understanding of how the humanities can contribute to the debate on sustainable development. Prepared by the Inter-University Sustainable Development Research Programme and the World Sustainable Development Research and Transfer Centre, the book reiterates the need to promote integrated approaches to sustainable development. Including practice-based lessons learnt that can be replicated further, it is a valuable resource for scientists and practitioners working in the humanities and sustainable development. (shrink)

Jnanasrimitra (975-1025) was regarded by both Buddhists and non-Buddhists as the most important Indian philosopher of his generation. His theory of exclusion combined a philosophy of language with a theory of conceptual content to explore the nature of words and thought. Jnanasrimitra's theory informed much of the work accomplished at Vikramasila, a monastic and educational complex instrumental to the growth of Buddhism. His ideas were also passionately debated among successive Hindu and Jain philosophers. This volume marks the first English translation (...) of Jnanasrimitra's Monograph on Exclusion, a careful, critical investigation into language, perception, and conceptual awareness. Featuring the rival arguments of Buddhist and Hindu intellectuals, among other thinkers, the Monograph reflects more than half a millennium of competing claims while providing an invaluable introduction to a crucial philosopher. Lawrence J. McCrea and Parimal G. Patil familiarize the reader with the author, themes, and topics of the text and situate Jnanasrimitra's findings within his larger intellectual milieu. Their clear, accessible, and accurate translation proves the influence of Jnanasrimitra on the foundations of Buddhist and Indian philosophy. (shrink)

Philanthropy is a contentious and often polarising topic within egalitarian social movements. There are good reasons for this. Philanthropy is reliant on the inequalities inherent in the capitalist system, is fundamentally at odds with democratic relationships, and can moderate or control the activities of recipients. This article therefore starts from the premise that philanthropy violates egalitarian ideals in very significant ways. However, it goes on to suggest that, absent a ruptural change that would drastically weaken the bases of philanthropic wealth, (...) there is a strategic and contingent case for its selective use so long as it pushes existing configurations of power in more egalitarian directions. In making this case, the article draws primarily on the work of Wright ( 2010 ) but also on recent developments in the political theory of philanthropy. It calls for a critical literacy around philanthropy that combines an openness to experimentation with a clear-eyed sense of its significant risks. In this respect, it outlines specific conditions and strategies that movements should adopt if they pursue or accept philanthropic funding. Firstly, movements must deliberately articulate and actively defend their transformative vision, clarifying in the process the tactical place of philanthropy within this. Secondly, they must resist funder conditionalities, and preserve egalitarian modes of organising in the face of practices which undermine participatory ideals and threaten relations of care and solidarity. The article’s chief contribution is to integrate normative insights with lessons from the sociological literature on movement-philanthropy relations, for the sake of systematically untangling a live and troublesome issue within the praxis of radical movements. (shrink)

This volume marks the first English translation of Jnanasrimitra's Monograph on Exclusion, a careful, critical investigation into language, perception, and conceptual awareness.

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

This is a subject of recurrent interest which calls for review from time to time; I believe the last word upon it can never be said. Several topical reasons might be cited for attempting to deal with it at the present time, but these could not be pursued to the relevant applications in such a short discussion. In fact the subject is obviously a difficult one to deal with at all briefly since it is so closely bound up with other (...) large subjects—causality, space–time, and so on. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into St. (...) Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

Automatic conservation of energy-momentum and angular momentum is guaranteed in a gravitational theory if, via the field equations, the conservation laws for the material currents are reduced to the contracted Bianchi identities. We first execute an irreducible decomposition of the Bianchi identities in a Riemann-Cartan space-time. Then, starting from a Riemannian space-time with or without torsion, we determine those gravitational theories which have automatic conservation: general relativity and the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory, both with cosmological constant, and the nonviable pseudoscalar model. The (...) Poincaré gauge theory of gravity, like gauge theories of internal groups, has no automatic conservation in the sense defined above. This does not lead to any difficulties in principle. Analogies to 3-dimensional continuum mechanics are stressed throughout the article. (shrink)

Einstein's general relativity theory describes very well the gravitational phenomena in themacroscopic world. In themicroscopic domain of elementary particles, however, it does not exhibit gauge invariance or approximate Bjorken type scaling, properties which are believed to be indispensible for arenormalizable field theory. We argue that thelocal extension of space-time symmetries, such as of Lorentz and scale invariance, provides the clue for improvement. Eventually, this leads to aGL(4, R)-gauge approach to gravity in which the metric and the affine connection acquire the (...) status ofindependent fields. The Yang-Mills type field equations, the Noether identities, and conformal models of gravity are discussed within this framework. After symmetry breaking, Einstein's GR surfaces as an effective “low-energy” theory. (shrink)

Apart from his voluminous, immensely learned, and spectacularly successful contributions to the fields of Hermeneutics, non-dualist Metaphysics, and poetics, the sixteenth century South Indian polymath Appayyadīkṣita is famed for reviving from obscurity the moribund Śaivite Vedānta tradition represented by the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya of Śrīkaṇṭha. Appayya’s voluminous commentary on this work, his Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, not only reconstitutes Śrīkaṇṭha’s system, but radically transforms it, making it into a springboard for Appayya’s own highly original critiques of standard views of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta. Appayya addresses long (...) sections of his commentary to matters dealt with glancingly or not at all in the root text, drawing conclusions which Śrīkaṇṭha nowhere endorses. Furthermore, the distinctive positions Appayya develops in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā feed into Appayya’s other works in ways that have so far been largely ignored by modern scholars. For example, most or all the discussions Appayya’s Pūrvottaramīmāṃsāvādanakṣatramālā, twenty-seven essays on scattered topics in Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, build on arguments first advanced in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā—most notably Appayya’s totally original theory of the signification of adjectives, first developed in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, the full elaboration and defense of which takes up fully sixteen of the twenty-seven essays that make up the Pūrvottaramīmāṃsāvādanakṣatramālā. (shrink)

I begin by criticizing an elaboration of an argument in this journal due to Hawley , who argued that, where Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles faces counterexamples, invoking relations to save PII fails. I argue that insufficient attention has been paid to a particular distinction. I proceed by demonstrating that in most putative counterexamples to PII , the so-called Discerning Defence trumps the Summing Defence of PII. The general kind of objects that do the discerning in all cases (...) form a category that has received little if any attention in metaphysics. This category of objects lies between indiscernibles and individuals and is called relationals: objects that can be discerned by means of relations only and not by properties. Remarkably, relationals turn out to populate the universe. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to trace certain aspects of the evolution of theories of space-time and mechanics as revealed by a brief comparative study of Newtonian theory, Robb's theory, general relativity, and Milne's kinematical relativity. The first object is to emphasise how each theory leaves us in a position in which the succeeding one appears as a perfectly natural next step in the development of ideas. The second object is to show how, in spite of superficial differences in character, (...) the theories all necessarily possess the same general structure constituted by the presence of hypotheses, from which certain general mathematical relations are deduced, which in their turn are used to predict relations between observable quantities. (shrink)

"Not only one of the best but also the most comprehensive treatment of Stoicism written in this century." --Times Literary Supplement.

Implicitly or explicitly, youth work practitioners, scholars and advocates typically invoke a set of egalitarian values to explain, justify and promote the ethical basis of their work. Despite such commitments, there exists conceptual ambiguity surrounding equality across much of the youth work literature which has significant consequences for how youth work is framed and defended. This article introduces the interdisciplinary field of Equality Studies and argues that an Equality Studies approach provides a means to (i) clarify equality-related normative goals within (...) the youth work field and (ii) enhance radically orientated youth work by strengthening the conception of equality at its core. It analyses three areas of conceptual ambiguity within the youth work literature with respect to the value of equality, in each case demonstrating how an Equality Studies approach can help remedy the problem. These areas are: (i) the assumption that equality means ‘sameness’; (ii) the limits of equality of opportunity and anti-discrimination; and (iii) the relationship between equality and other values. It then evaluates the concept of ‘equity’, arguing that it is a vague, inadequate and unnecessary vehicle for capturing egalitarian concerns. The article concludes with some comments on the feasibility of radically egalitarian youth work. (shrink)

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp (...) of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)

Through letters, memoirs, contemporary documents, and a stunning assemblage of photographs - many of which have never before been published - author Ron McCrea tells the fascinating story of the building of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin, ...

Vedānta Deśika produced his monumental poetic biography of Kṛṣṇa in a time when Kṛṣṇa-centered devotionalism was expanding to become perhaps the dominant mode of bhakti across South Asia. Central to this phenomenon is the growing popularity of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and especially of its exploration of Kṛṣṇa’s erotic play with the gopīs in his youth. Troubled by the unrestrained and seemingly adharmic sexuality of Kṛṣṇa, Deśika used the literary techniques and narrative paradigms of the mahākāvya to assimilate but also domesticate this (...) increasingly important Bhāgavata episode: Kṛṣṇa’s eroticism remains central but confined within more conventional marital norms and is thus made dharmically and theologically acceptable. Once he has resolved these dharmic problems, however, Deśika is happy to explore the soteriological, devotional, and paradoxical dimensions of erotic love with Kṛṣṇa. (shrink)

The Community FoodBank of NJ was a $100 million charitable organization that distributed over 44 million pounds of food each year through its partner organizations like food pantries, soup kitchens and the like. Its mission was to “fight hunger and poverty in New Jersey [USA] by assisting those in need and seeking long term solutions.” In a time of governmental cutbacks and shrinking private donations, the nonprofit sought new sources of revenue. One idea was to leverage perishable bakery donations and (...) an in-house commercial kitchen, by creating and marketing an up-scale bagel crisp. After product development and market testing, the resulting business plan won a “Break the Gala Addiction” cash prize from the Prudential Foundation to further the social entrepreneurship effort. Now the organization needs to decide if it should use its scarce resources to scale the business internally—to maximize job creation, leverage existing facilities and capture all the revenue, or if it should outsource production and distribution for a percentage of sales so that it can focus on other efforts more tightly aligned to its mission. Students are encouraged to use ethical frameworks to think through the nonprofit’s dilemma. (shrink)

Leading and Managing Early Childhood Settings: Inspiring People, Places and Practices examines what it means to be a leader, manager and administrator across the early childhood education field. The first section of the book introduces readers to core concepts, including self-understanding through professional reflection and consideration of people's beliefs and values. These chapters explore the challenges of working within various early childhood settings and the importance of connecting and communicating with families and the broader community. The second section considers four (...) key roles that early childhood professionals undertake – team stakeholder, policy designer, pedagogy creator and rights advocate. This book challenges readers to make links across research, theories and everyday practices by thinking, reflecting, sharing with others and writing stories. The storytelling approach guides readers through the chapters and explores the themes of embodiment and sustainability. Leading and Managing Early Childhood Settings is an invaluable resource for pre- and in-service educators alike. (shrink)