Bøger udgivet af Harvard University Press

Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.

"Worlds of Dissent" analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences-diverse, uncertain, nameless-have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Vaclav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West-including Ludvik Vaculik, whose 1980 diary "The Czech Dream Book" is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. "Worlds of Dissent" offers a rare opportunity to understand the texture of dissent in a closed society."

Place and orientation are important aspects of human experience. Place evokes geography and culture and conjures up history and myth. Place is not only a particular physical location but an idea, a mental construction that captures and directs the human relationship to the world. The distinguished contributors to this volume invite us to reflect on the significance of places, real and imagined, in the religious traditions they study and on how places are known, imagined, remembered, and struggled for. Whether looking at the ways myth and ritual reinforce the Yoruba's bond to the land or at Australian Aboriginal engagements with the origins of the created world, exploring Hildegard of Bingen's experience of heaven or myths of the underworld in contemporary American millennialism, listening to oral narratives of divine politics and deserted places of Rajasthan or investigating literal and literary images of the Promised Land, these essays underscore that place is constructed in the intersection of material conditions, political realities, narrative, and ritual performance.

After the American Civil War many soldiers returned to civilian life still battling the lifelong effects of combat, and looked to the federal government for help. This text explores the origins of the National Home within the political culture of the US state formation, and the effects of war.

In "Self-Knowledge and Resentment," Akeel Bilgrami argues that self-knowledge of our intentional states is special among all the knowledges we have because it is not an epistemological notion in the standard sense of that term, but instead is a fallout of the radically normative nature of thought and agency.Four themes or questions are brought together into an integrated philosophical position: What makes self-knowledge different from other forms of knowledge? What makes for freedom and agency in a deterministic universe? What makes intentional states of a subject irreducible to its physical and functional states? And what makes values irreducible to the states of nature as the natural sciences study them? This integration of themes into a single and systematic picture of thought, value, agency, and self-knowledge is essential to the book's aspiration and argument. Once this integrated position is fully in place, the book closes with a postscript on how one might fruitfully view the kind of self-knowledge that is pursued in psychoanalysis.

The central theme of this book is that an economic framework--incorporating such concepts as information asymmetry, moral hazard, and adaptation to changed circumstances--is appropriate for contract interpretation, analyzing contract disputes, and developing contract doctrine. The value of the approach is demonstrated through the close analysis of major contract cases. In many of the cases, had the court (and the litigators) understood the economic context, the analysis and results would have been very different. Topics and some representative cases include consideration (Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon), interpretation (Bloor v. Falstaff and Columbia Nitrogen v. Royster), remedies (Campbell v. Wentz, Tongish v. Thomas, and Parker v. Twentieth Century Fox), and excuse (Alcoa v. Essex).

In a career spanning seven decades, Liu Kuo-sung has reinvented the millennium-old tradition of ink painting. The Liu Kuo-sung Reader, the first anthology in English devoted to the painter, gathers many previously untranslated or unpublished texts, illuminating issues such as the politics of artmaking and the dynamics of creative freedom.

Aëtius¿ Placita (ca. AD 100) is a reconstructed compendium summarizing the principal doctrines and opinions of the Greek philosophers, which served as a multi-purpose manual both for study and for personal enlightenment and which remains a valuable source for our knowledge of pre-Socratic and Hellenistic philosophy.

Volume II of the Loeb Hippocrates presents eight works by or attributed to the ¿Father of Medicine¿ that illustrate the value of medical theory and clinical methods, and propose a new model of medical education. Included are Prognostic, Regimen in Acute Diseases, The Sacred Disease, The Art, Breaths, Law, Decorum, and Dentition.

Kalidasa's The Lineage of the Raghus, or Raghuvä¿a, belongs to the literary tradition of mah¿k¿vya, or court poem. It recounts the lives of ancient kings-such as Dilipa, Raghu, and Rama-who ruled from the capital city of Ayodhya. This volume presents a new edition of the Sanskrit text in the Devanagari script alongside a fresh English translation.

Mhaimbhat¿s God at Play, or L¿¿¿caritra, is a remarkable biography of the medieval religious figure Chakradhar Svami, considered by the Mahanubhavs to be an incarnation of the supreme god. The first volume of this new English translation, accompanied by the Marathi text, describes Chakradhar¿s early life, wanderings, and the gathering of disciples.

The Kannada Mahabharata, known as Kum¿ravy¿sa Bh¿rata, is an innovative fifteenth-century retelling of the famous Mahabharata story centered on Krishna. Volume 1 includes ¿The Book of Beginnings¿ and ¿The Book of the Assembly.¿ This abridged edition presents a new English translation and authoritative Kannada text in the Kannada script.

The last volume in The Image of the Black in Western Art marks a shift by focusing on representation of blacks by black artists in the West. It takes on migration in the U.S and globalization, Negritude and cultural hybridity, black artists' relationship with European traditions and experimentation, as well as photography, jazz and activism.

This book embraces an era of enormous creative variety-the formative period during which the Romantic traditions of the past were abandoned or transformed and a major new literature created. More than a hundred poets are treated in this volume, and many more are noticed in passing.

What is law, and why does it matter? Scott Hershovitz says that law is a moral practice-a tool for adjusting our moral relations. This claim is simple on its face, but it has stark implications for the rule of law. At once erudite and entertaining, Hershovitz's argument engages with the most important legal and political controversies of our time.