Reintroducing Philosophy: Thinking as the Gathering of Civilization

According to contemporary, Islamicate and ancient sources

Anthony F. Shaker

That we are now entering a post-Western world is no longer merely a thesis in international studies. But what does the dissolution of “Western” hegemony signify for humanity’s rich learning traditions and the civilizing quest for wisdom? How can this human inheritance assist us today? "Reintroducing Philosophy" seeks a more realistic framework for discourse on these questions than offered by the Western-centric worldview, which continues to be taught in schools almost by rote. It analyzes themes from several world traditions in logic, knowledge and metaphysics connected with the quest for completeness of thinking and practice. Its examination of the relation of knowing and being is based on sources as varied as Leibniz and Frege, Qūnawī and Ṣadrā, ancient Greek and classical Indian and Chinese thought. Shaker brings into the discussion the paradigm (unmūzaj) that Ṣadrā presented as that of man’s being in the world, encapsulating philosophy’s longstanding view of thinking as the gathering of civilization. "Reintroducing Philosophy" is based on a concentrated reading of all these sources, simply because human civilization had already been global and advanced before the present age.

Entangled Bodies: Art, Identity and Intercorporeality

Edited by Tammer El-Sheikh, York University

Organ transplantation is a medical innovation that has offered the potential to enhance and save lives since the first successful procedure in the 1950s. Subsequent developments in scientific knowledge and advances in surgical techniques have allowed for more efficient and refined procurement, minimal surgical complications, and increased success rate. However, procedures such as organ transplantation raise questions about the nature of our relationship with our own bodies; about our embodiment and personal and corporeal identity. This book is comprised of academic essays, personal reflections, and creative writing from researchers and artists involved in an ongoing collaborative art-science project about the experience and culture of heart transplantation. The writings and reflections included discuss embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body and define oneself in relation to it, including struggles with identity formation; set in both clinical and private spaces. The uniqueness of this volume consists in the authors’ aim of connecting the specific experience of heart transplantation to the more widely shared experience of relating to the world and one another through the body’s physical, perceived, and imagined boundaries. Such boundaries and the commonly held beliefs in personal autonomy that are associated with them are a subject of ongoing philosophical and scientific debate. What’s more, the resources of art and culture, including popular culture, literature, historical and contemporary art, are extremely useful in revising our views of what it means for the body’s boundaries to be philosophically ‘leaky.’ Following the discussion initiated by contributor Margrit Shildrick, this book contributes to the field of inquiry of the phenomenon of embodiment and inter-corporeality, the growing body of literature emerging from collaborative art-science research projects, and the wider area of disability studies. This book will be of particular interest to those with personal, scholarly, and creative interests in the experience of transplantation, or illness in general.

How Law Works: Collected Articles and New Essays

Thomas Hemnes

This book chronicles developments in legal practice, intellectual property, and privacy law from the dawn of the digital age to today’s world of social media and cloud technologies. Part autobiography, part legal history, and part philosophy of law, the volume explores the nature of legal reasoning, property, privacy, and personal identity. Hemnes weaves these large issues into meticulously researched analysis of the legal protection for computer software, the mechanics of software licensing, trademark protection and the use of intellectual property as collateral. Hemnes also considers how and why the promise of the early digital age in the 20th century declined into the rampant factionalism, nationalism, and terrorism of the early 21st century. An indispensable resource for anyone studying the emergence of intellectual property rights as a cornerstone of the modern economy, this book also serves as a foundational reference tool for professors, students, and practitioners of intellectual property. The breadth and value of information contained within its pages, from the very basics of computer software protection to the intricacies of negotiation strategy for indemnification clauses, warrants a place on the library shelves of every practitioner of intellectual property and privacy law and on the reading list of every intellectual property, privacy and jurisprudence course.

Publish and Perish: The Practice of Censorship in the British Isles in the Early Modern Period

Edited by Isabelle Fernandes, University of Clermont Auvergne, France

The development of printing practices during Tudor rule led both to the dissemination of religious and secular knowledge, and the development of a legal arsenal to control it. While the vast majority of studies on censorship regard it as being at the origin of the notion of authorship, critics tend to disagree on its actual influence on early modern writings. Who, among the Church and the secular state, were its main supporters? Did it aim at destroying or removing, punishing or protecting, hampering or regulating? Did it propagate a culture of secrecy or, on the contrary, did it help to circulate new ideas and knowledge by controlling them and making them more acceptable to the masses? If the answers to these questions are bound to differ according to the aesthetic and religious biases of both censors and censored, they all lead to one major point of debate: did censorship really work to stop some marginal threat or did it simply improve the lot of early modern writers who turned its limited negative effects into a comforting shield of self-publicity? By suggesting it suppressed neither artistic creativity nor subversive practices, this volume analyses censorship in Britain and Ireland during the Tudor and Stuart periods as an instrument of regulation, rather than a repressive tool. Ideal for both graduate students and general readers interested in Early Modern History, the work sheds new light on a topic as fascinating as it is often misunderstood.

The Idea of Sport in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Contemporary Era

Saverio Battente, University of Siena, Italy

In “The Idea of Sport in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Contemporary Era,” Dr Saverio Battente examines the concept of sport as an element of Western culture. Sport has aided in structuring the collective identities that underpin individual civilisations in the West, and, far from being a merely marginal phenomenon, it has in fact been an essential feature of Western civilisation and culture from antiquity, in its various forms. The starting point of the book is the idea that there is a certain number of universal traits—unchanged across time and different cultures—underlying all sports, even if there are a series of entirely original elements with which sport has been linked over the centuries in specific civilizations. This volume thus makes a comparative analysis of the ancient, modern, and contemporary worlds and various national contexts; longues durées (whose presence transcends anthropological and cultural barriers), divergences, and discontinuities pertaining to the concept of sport are identified and explored. The book also looks at the link between the rise of civilisation and the educational and training function of sport, as well as the connection between a culture’s decline and a growing emphasis on sport as an element of entertainment and spectacle in and of itself.