16 pages of photos.

    His conception of the universe pervades Christian theology. Knowledge of his thought is necessary to understand Bacon, Galileo, and the modern scientific view of nature, as well as Dante and many passages from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Many phrases such as liberal education and theory contrasted with practice originated with this student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great.Writing to inform the beginner and stimulate the expert, eminent scholar A. E. Taylor presents a searching analysis of Aristotle's thought, including classification of the sciences; formal logic; theory of knowledge; matter and form; the four causes; God; physics; biology; sensation; ethics; theory of the state; and the fine arts. He also considers Aristotle's provincialism, errors regarding the nervous system and astronomy, and defense of slavery.The Giants of Philosophy is a series of dramatic presentations, in understandable language, of the concerns, questions, interests, and overall world view of history's greatest philosophers. Special emphasis on clear and relevant explanations gives you a new arsenal of insights toward living a better life.

    In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. The preeminent historian of medicine, Sander Gilman, calls Nobody’s Normal “the most important work on stigma in more than half a century.”

    

    Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global culture. Once the terrain of anthropologists, it is now the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs, while ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin. "Singing to the Plants" sets forth just what this shamanism is about--what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery.

    Although body modification and blood rituals are shown to be common in many religions, rites-of-passage ceremonies, and therapeutic procedures, deviant self-mutilation, the author argues, is a distinct syndrome of impulse dyscontrol beginning in adolescence and often associated with eating disorders. According to the author, up to half of all female chronic self-mutilators have a history of anorexia or bulimia. This edition contains new information on the diagnosis and treatment of self-mutilation; the link between self-mutilation and eating disorders; and new research on the neurotransmitter serotonin, and associated advances in drug therapy.

    Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. Examining the cultures of the Israelites, Greeks, Christians, and Muslims, Shlain reinterprets ancient myths and parables in light of his theory. Provocative and inspiring, this book is a paradigm-shattering work that will transform your view of history and the mind.

    This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning,This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.

    Less visible is the chronic injustice meted out daily by a profoundly defective system.In a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, Amy Bach reveals a judicial process so deeply compromised that it constitutes a menace to the people it is designed to serve. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who brings almost no cases to trial; the court that works together to achieve a wrong verdict. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Bach identifies an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants to keep the court calendar moving, and she exposes the collusion between judge, prosecutor, and defense that puts the interests of the system above the obligation to the people. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible--the first and necessary step to any reform.Full of gripping human stories, sharp analyses, and a crusader's sense of urgency, "Ordinary Injustice" is a major reassessment of the health of the nation's courtrooms.

    Yet today, though the US is home to only about 5 percent of the world's population, we hold nearly one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration is now widely considered one of the biggest social and political crises of our age. How did we get to this point?Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent fifteen years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations - the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons - tell us much less than we think. Pfaff urges us to look at other factors instead, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before. He describes a fractured criminal justice system, in which counties don't pay for the people they send to state prisons, and in which white suburbs set law and order agendas for more-heavily minority cities. And he shows that if we hope to significantly reduce prison populations, we have no choice but to think differently about how to deal with people convicted of violent crimes - and why some people are violent in the first place.An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe, Locked In transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.

    It is a perfect companion to Patrick Suskind's bestseller Perfume.

    These crimes, social workers and prosecutors said, had gone undetected for years, and they consisted of a brutality and sadism that defied all imagining. Children across the country painted a nightmarish picture of their abuse, some claiming they had been taken to graveyards, sometimes to kill animals, and sometimes to dig up bodies, which were removed from their coffins and stabbed. In some cases, investigators said that the abusers were filming the crimes on behalf of international child pornography rings. The dangers of babysitting services and day care centers became a national news media fixation, and legislatures took action to fend off the new threats facing the country's children. Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to more than 80 convictions.But, none of it happened. It was a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria—on a par with the Salem witch trials.Using extensive archival research conducted in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, and drawing on dozens of interviews conducted with the hysteria's major figures, n+1 editor Richard Beck shows how a group of legislators, doctors, lawyers, and parents, most working with the best of intentions, set the stage for a cultural disaster. Psychiatrists and talk therapists turned dubious theories of trauma and recovered memory into a destructive new kind of psychotherapy. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear. Local and national journalists fanned the flames by promoting the story's salacious aspects, while aggressive prosecutors sought to make their careers by unearthing an unspeakable evil where parents feared it most. Beck tracks the panic all the way to its decline at the end of the decade, as parents and prosecutors were finally forced to reckon with the total lack of physical evidence underpinning the story. Yet at the heart of We Believe the Children is the idea that the conditions that made this frenzy of accusations possible were very specific to their moment in American history. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex that had been intensifying for some twenty years. At the root of these accusations were competing visions of society and what it was that threatened it most.

    Maybe it’s what happened to everyone else.”—PoliticoNew York Times bestselling author Alan Dershowitz, one of America’s most respected legal scholars, proves—with incontrovertible evidence—that he is entirely innocent of the sexual misconduct accusations against him, while suggesting a roadmap for how such allegations should truly be handled in a just society.  Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek. Yet he has come under intense criticism for applying those same principles, and his famed “shoe‑on‑the‑other‑foot test,” to those accused of sexual misconduct. In Guilt by Accusation, Dershowitz provides an in‑depth analysis of the false accusations against him, alongside a full presentation of the exculpatory evidence that proves his account, including emails from his accuser and an admission of his innocence from her lawyer, David Boies. Additionally, he examines current attitudes toward accusations of sexual misconduct, which are today, in the age of #MeToo, accepted as implicit truth without giving the accused a fair chance to defend themselves and their innocence, and suggests possible pathways back to a society and legal system in which due process is respected above public opinion and the whims of social media mobs. This book is Alan Dershowitz’s plea for fairness for both accuser and accused, his principled stand for due process no matter the allegation, and his compelling assertion of his own innocence. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the inside story behind the accusations against him or who cares about the current societal debate over how we should handle accusations of sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement has generally been a force for good, but as with many good movements, it is being exploited by some bad people for personal profit. Supporters of the #MeToo movement must not allow false accusers to hurt real victims by hiding behind its virtuous shield, turning it into an exploitive sword against innocent people.

    Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

    Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront and be affronted by the image which others reflect back to them.Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to “normals” He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America’s leading social analysts.