Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe


Book Description

This book undertakes the first large-scale analysis of women’s agency in Frank Herbert’s six-book science fiction Dune series. Kara Kennedy explores how female characters in the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood—from Jessica to Darwi Odrade—secure control and influence through five avenues of embodied agency: mind-body synergy, reproduction and motherhood, voices, education and memory, and sexuality. She also discusses constraints on their agency, tensions between individual and collective action, and comparisons with other characters including the Mentats, Bene Tleilaxu, and Honored Matres. The book engages with second-wave feminist theories and historical issues to highlight how the series anticipated and paralleled developments in the women’s liberation movement. In this context, it addresses issues regarding sexual difference and solidarity, as well as women’s demand to have control over their bodies. Kennedy concludes that the series should be acknowledged as a significant contribution to the genre as part of both New Wave and feminist science fiction.




Theories and Models of Communication


Book Description

This unique volume offers an overview of the diversity in research on communication, including perspectives from biology, sociality, economics, norms and human development. It includes general social science and humanities approaches to communication, from systems theory to cultural theory, as well as perspectives more specifically related to communication acts, such as linguistics and cognition. The volume also features chapters on the participants and various elements in communication processes, on possible effects and on wider consequences of mediation (with technical media). The scope of the contributions is global, and the volume is relevant to both the empirical and the philosophical traditions in human sciences. Designed as a stand-alone collection to engage undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics, this is also the first book in, and an introduction to, the De Gruyter Mouton multi-volume Handbooks of Communication Science.




Mind and Body in Early China


Book Description

Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as the radical, "holistic" other. The idea that the early Chinese held the "strong" holist view, seeing no qualitative difference between mind and body, has long been contradicted by traditional archeological and qualitative textual evidence. New digital humanities methods, along with basic knowledge about human cognition, now make this position untenable. A large body of empirical evidence suggests that "weak" mind-body dualism is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. Edward Slingerland argues that the humanities need to move beyond social constructivist views of culture, and embrace instead a view of human cognition and culture that integrates the sciences and the humanities. Our interpretation of texts and artifacts from the past and from other cultures should be constrained by what we know about the species-specific, embodied commonalities shared by all humans. This book also attempts to broaden the scope of humanistic methodologies by employing team-based qualitative coding and computer-aided "distant reading" of texts, while also drawing upon our current best understanding of human cognition to transform our basic starting point. It has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities integration.




Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy


Book Description

Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Hwa Yol Jung explores new forms of philosophizing in the age of globalization by challenging the conventional border between the East and the West, as well as the traditional boundaries among different academic disciplines. The essays in this volume examine diverse issues, encompassing globalization, cosmopolitanism, public philosophy, political ecology, ecocriticism, ethics of encounter, and aesthetics of caring. They examine the philosophical traditions of phenomenology of Hursserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger; the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin; the philosophy of mestizaje literature; and Asian philosophical traditions. This rich comparative and cross-cultural investigation of philosophy and political theory demonstrates the importance of cultural and cross-cultural understanding in our reading of philosophical texts, exploring how cross-cultural thinking transforms our understanding of the traditional philosophical paradigm and political theory. This volume honors the scholarship and philosophy of Hwa Yol Jung, who has been a pioneer in the field of comparative political theory, cross-cultural philosophy, and interdisciplinary scholarship. In one of his earliest publications, The Crisis of Political Understanding (1979), Jung described the urgency and necessity of breakthrough in political thinking as a crisis, and he followed up on this issue for his half century of scholarship by introducing Asian philosophy and political thought to Western scholarship, demonstrating the possibility of cross-cultural philosophical thinking. In his most recent publications, Jung refers to this possibility as 'transversality' or 'trans(uni)versality,' a concept which should replace the outmoded Eurocentric universality of modernist philosophy. Jung expounds that in 'transversality,' 'differences are negotiated and compromised rather than effaced and absorbed into sameness.' This volume is a testimony to the very possibility of transversality in our scholarship and thinking.




Synergy


Book Description




The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind


Book Description

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry




Diamond Mind


Book Description

The author combines her wisdom and understanding of quantum mechanics and spiritual science, as they apply to educational programming, personal well-beingness, consciousness, and the creation of preferred realities.--From back cover.




The Synergism Hypothesis


Book Description

This book represents a major theoretical synthesis between the life sciences and the social sciences. Peter Corning shows that the selective advantages arising from various kinds of cooperation - from single-celled creatures to wolf packs to modern nation-states - are the cause of the directional aspect of evolutionary history, that is, the progressive emergence of more complex, hierarchically organized systems in the biological , cultural, and political realms. The Synergism Hypothesis spans a vast intellectual and scientific territory and speaks to the central concerns of evolutionary biology, sociobiology, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, and political science. It is an extraordinary contribution, which should influence all future discussions of why we behave the way we do. -- from back cover.




An End to All Disease


Book Description

We are at the crossroads of world health. On the one hand we face the possibility of a world wide pandemic, the likes of which has never been seen before. We are, likewise on the threshold of discovering natural cures for nearly every disease. As choosing wisely may mean the difference between life and death, this book is designed to help the reader choose alternative options that are seldom if ever in the news. Jared Diamond, in his groundbreaking work, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, addresses the fact that only civilizations that recognize the threats against their existence, and deal with the threat effectively survive. Civilizations with their heads in the sand become extinct or are conquered by more vigorous nations. The robber barons of the last century were able to create a monopoly for oil and the automobile by ruthlessly and systematically destroying all competition. They tore up cable car lines and public transportation so the public would have no other alternative except their oil. Today, the drug monopolies, owned by the descendants of these same robber barons, are nearly complete in their plot to eradicate all natural, low cost remedies for disease prevention and treatment. In the state of Florida, naturopathic physicians were de-licensed unless they also had a conventional medical license. The powers that be want to create a drug induced society, at an enormous financial and emotional cost to the public at large. They are even trying to outlaw vitamins via European health treaties and side step the American constitution and the public. The ever escalating cost of medical care created by lack of natural alternative options can only lead to the eventual total collapse of the entire medical system. It is exceedingly difficult finding the truth about alternative medicine as the system has a vested interest in making profits and keeping the truth from you. A few thousand deaths is an acceptable loss if a few billion dollars can be made. And it will be a cold day in hell before a drug company puts itself out of business by telling you about a low cost natural cure that their product can manage. The guardians of public health know which side their toast is buttered on also. The career politicians and beltway bandits at the FDA know where the money is and they dont get it from you or providers of natural cures. The drug monopolies pay the big bucks. There have been no checks and balances. Corruption has become so pronounced that the US House of Representatives is seeking to pass the Consumers Access to Health Information Act (H.R. 2352) to ensure that accurate health claims ARE NOT SUPPRESSED. Consumers would be given TRUTHFUL AND COMPLETE information about the curative, mitigation, treatment, and prevention effects of foods and dietary supplements on disease or health-related conditions. The time to exercise your God given right to the health care of your choice is now. (www.lef.org) America has the finest emergency health care in the world. Bar none. However that is not the nature of the coming threat. American baby boomers will soon be retiring in the tens of millions. Their health care needs will be staggering and costly. However 92% of American health care providers are trained in emergency medicine and only 8% in long term preventative medicine. As it takes a minimum of 6-7 years to obtain a medical degree, America is unprepared for a crisis that is inevitable.