Groundless

Author : Gregory Evans Dowd
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421418665
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Groundless written by Gregory Evans Dowd and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating—and troubling—story of powerful rumors that circulated and influential legends that arose in early America. Why did Elizabethan adventurers believe that the interior of America hid vast caches of gold? Who started the rumor that British officers purchased revolutionary white women’s scalps, packed them by the bale, and shipped them to their superiors? And why are people today still convinced that white settlers—hardly immune as a group to the disease—routinely distributed smallpox-tainted blankets to the natives? Rumor—spread by colonists and Native Americans alike—ran rampant in early America. In Groundless, historian Gregory Evans Dowd explores why half-truths, deliberate lies, and outrageous legends emerged in the first place, how they grew, and why they were given such credence throughout the New World. Arguing that rumors are part of the objective reality left to us by the past—a kind of fragmentary archival record—he examines how uncertain news became powerful enough to cascade through the centuries. Drawing on specific case studies and tracing recurring rumors over many generations, Dowd explains the seductive power of unreliable stories in the eastern North American frontiers from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The rumors studied here—some alluring, some frightening—commanded attention and demanded action. They were all, by definition, groundless, but they were not all false, and they influenced the classic issues of historical inquiry: the formation of alliances, the making of revolutions, the expropriation of labor and resources, and the origins of war.

Author : Michael Williams
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691009070
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Groundless Belief written by Michael Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-07-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this essay Michael Williams attacks phenomenalism and empiricism. He examines and rejects the idea that, unless our beliefs are answerable to a 'given' element in experience, objective knowledge will be impossible.

Author : David Egan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113410829X
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wittgenstein and Heidegger written by David Egan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are arguably the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Their work not only reshaped the philosophical landscape, but also left its mark on other disciplines, including political science, theology, anthropology, ecology, mathematics, cultural studies, literary theory, and architecture. Both sought to challenge the assumptions governing the traditions they inherited, to question the very terms in which philosophy’s problems had been posed, and to open up new avenues of thought for thinkers of all stripes. And despite considerable differences in style and in the traditions they inherited, the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are striking. Comparative work of these thinkers has only increased in recent decades, but no collection has yet explored the various ways in which Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be drawn into dialogue. As such, these essays stage genuine dialogues, with aspects of Wittgenstein’s elucidations answering or problematizing aspects of Heidegger’s, and vice versa. The result is a broad-ranging collection of essays that provides a series of openings and provocations that will serve as a reference point for future work that draws on the writings of these two philosophers.

Author : Lee Braver
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262300966
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Groundless Grounds written by Lee Braver and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-02-03 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth comparison of Wittgenstein and Heidegger shows how the views of both philosophers emerge from a fundamental attempt to dispense with the transcendent. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important—and two of the most difficult—philosophers of the twentieth century, indelibly influencing the course of continental and analytic philosophy, respectively. In Groundless Grounds, Lee Braver argues that the views of both thinkers emerge from a fundamental attempt to create a philosophy that has dispensed with everything transcendent so that we may be satisfied with the human. Examining the central topics of their thought in detail, Braver finds that Wittgenstein and Heidegger construct a philosophy based on original finitude—finitude without the contrast of the infinite. In Braver's elegant analysis, these two difficult bodies of work offer mutual illumination rather than compounded obscurity. Moreover, bringing the most influential thinkers in continental and analytic philosophy into dialogue with each other may enable broader conversations between these two divergent branches of philosophy. Braver's meticulously researched and strongly argued account shows that both Wittgenstein and Heidegger strive to construct a new conception of reason, free of the illusions of the past and appropriate to the kind of beings that we are. Readers interested in either philosopher, or concerned more generally with the history of twentieth-century philosophy as well as questions of the nature of reason, will find Groundless Grounds of interest.

Author : Eric E Hall
Publisher : James Clarke & Company
ISBN 13 : 0227903838
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Groundless Gods written by Eric E Hall and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2014-12-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Groundless Gods: The Theological Prospects of Post-Metaphysical Thought' deals with possible interpretations of an emerging interest in contemporary theology: postmetaphysical theology. This book attempts to openly come to grips, not only with whatmetaphysics and postmetaphysics imply, but also with what it could mean to do or not do theology from the standpoint of the nonmetaphysician. The book asks, for instance, whether this world has any singular definition, and whether God is some being standing apart from the world or an experience within the world.

Author : Michael Marder
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0826434088
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Groundless Existence written by Michael Marder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Groundless Existence discusses the implicit phenomenological and existential foundations of Schmitt's political philosophy. The book's unique contribution lies in its claim that Schmitt decisively breaks with the metaphysical tradition and predicates the political on the 'groundless' categories of existence, including risk, decision, and agonism. This argument is substantiated by both tacit and explicit existentialist and phenomenological underpinnings of Schmitt's work, discussed here for the first time in book form.The book provides an insight into the implications of Schmitt's thought reconceptualized in the light of contemporary political developments. An essential text for anyone interested in the political theory of Carl Schmitt, it offers a new reading of Schmitt's work against the double background of phenomenology and existentialism.

Author : Karl Brunnholzl
Publisher : Shambhala Publications
ISBN 13 : 0834829509
Total Pages : 904 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Groundless Paths written by Karl Brunnholzl and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Abhisamayalamkara summarizes all the topics in the vast body of the prajñaparamita sutras. Resembling a zip-file, it comes to life only through its Indian and Tibetan commentaries. Together, these texts not only discuss the "hidden meaning" of the prajñaparamita sutras—the paths and bhumis of sravakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas—but also serve as contemplative manuals for the explicit topic of these sutras—emptiness—and how it is to be understood on the progressive levels of realization of bodhisattvas. Thus these texts describe what happens in the mind of a bodhisattva who meditates on emptiness, making it a living experience from the beginner's stage up through buddhahood. Groundless Paths contains the first in-depth study of the Abhisamayalamkara (the text studied most extensively in higher Tibetan Buddhist education) and its commentaries from the perspective of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism. This study consists mainly of translations of Maitreya's famous text and two commentaries on it by Patrul Rinpoche. These are supplemented by three short texts on the paths and bhumis by the same author, as well as extensive excerpts from commentaries by six other Nyingma masters, including Mipham Rinpoche. Thus this book helps close a long-standing gap in the modern scholarship on the prajñaparamita sutras and the literature on paths and bhumis in mahayana Buddhism. Arya Maitreya's Ornament of Clear Realization, with its Indian and Tibetan commentaries, presents the complex dynamics of the path to liberation as a succession of realizations of the empty nature of all phenomena. This presentation is a powerful antidote to whatever two-dimensional views we might hold about spiritual experience and the journey to enlightenment.

Author : Deirdre Cooper Owens
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820351342
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medical Bondage written by Deirdre Cooper Owens and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

Author : Jean-Luc Nancy
Publisher : Fordham University Press
ISBN 13 : 0823238466
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ground of the Image written by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as “spectacle” and proliferated in the media, images never cease to present their multiple aspects, their paradoxes, their flat but receding spaces. What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image—which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in the figures of an image—which never does anything but show just exactly what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto their unimaginable others, their imageless origin? In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancy explores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious, cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation, treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence, the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of all these investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies. In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.

Author : James Lee Burke
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451648146
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creole Belle written by James Lee Burke and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picking up where "The Glass Rainbow" ends, "Creole Belle" finds David Robicheaux recuperating in New Orleans near the site an oil well blowout on the Gulf. Robicheaux is visited by a mysterious visitor and is surprised by what's inside a floating block of ice. Available in a tall Premium Edition.