Ultimate Ambiguities

Author : Peter Berger
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1782386106
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ultimate Ambiguities written by Peter Berger and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these “ultimate ambiguities,” assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications.

Author : James G. March
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801457777
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ambiguities of Experience written by James G. March and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first component of intelligence involves effective adaptation to an environment. In order to adapt effectively, organizations require resources, capabilities at using them, knowledge about the worlds in which they exist, good fortune, and good decisions. They typically face competition for resources and uncertainties about the future. Many, but possibly not all, of the factors determining their fates are outside their control. Populations of organizations and individual organizations survive, in part, presumably because they possess adaptive intelligence; but survival is by no means assured. The second component of intelligence involves the elegance of interpretations of the experiences of life. Such interpretations encompass both theories of history and philosophies of meaning, but they go beyond such things to comprehend the grubby details of daily existence. Interpretations decorate human existence. They make a claim to significance that is independent of their contribution to effective action. Such intelligence glories in the contemplation, comprehension, and appreciation of life, not just the control of it.—from The Ambiguities of Experience In The Ambiguities of Experience, James G. March asks a deceptively simple question: What is, or should be, the role of experience in creating intelligence, particularly in organizations? Folk wisdom both trumpets the significance of experience and warns of its inadequacies. On one hand, experience is described as the best teacher. On the other hand, experience is described as the teacher of fools, of those unable or unwilling to learn from accumulated knowledge or the teaching of experts. The disagreement between those folk aphorisms reflects profound questions about the human pursuit of intelligence through learning from experience that have long confronted philosophers and social scientists. This book considers the unexpected problems organizations (and the individuals in them) face when they rely on experience to adapt, improve, and survive. While acknowledging the power of learning from experience and the extensive use of experience as a basis for adaptation and for constructing stories and models of history, this book examines the problems with such learning. March argues that although individuals and organizations are eager to derive intelligence from experience, the inferences stemming from that eagerness are often misguided. The problems lie partly in errors in how people think, but even more so in properties of experience that confound learning from it. "Experience," March concludes, "may possibly be the best teacher, but it is not a particularly good teacher."

Author : Donald A. Crosby
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791475201
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living with Ambiguity written by Donald A. Crosby and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a religion based on the sacredness of nature deals with the problem of evil.

Author : Brian Stableford
Publisher : Wildside Press LLC
ISBN 13 : 1434443345
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales written by Brian Stableford and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2013-08-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the longest story in this collection, an eleven-year-old girl has a strange adventure in an overgrown garden, and probably saves the world from a fate worse than any conventional apocalypse. Her parents would undoubtedly think that she’s been dreaming if she attempted to explain what had happened, but that’s what parents do, because they think it’s what they ought to do. The other stories all describe similarly equivocal victories, which sometimes don’t appear to the other characters in the stories to be victories at all—but they are: every last one of them. You just have to look at them the right way—and it really is worth doing that? After all, who among us really wants to get stuck in the way things want to seem? Eight scintillating stories of science fiction by a master of the genre!

Author : Malcolm Murray
Publisher : Broadview Press
ISBN 13 : 1770480722
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Atheist's Primer written by Malcolm Murray and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Athiest’s Primer is a concise but wide-ranging introduction to a variety of arguments, concepts, and issues pertaining to belief in God. In lucid and engaging prose, Malcom Murray offers a penetrating yet fair-minded critique of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. He then explores a number of other important issues relevant to religious belief, such as the problem of suffering and the relationship between religion and morality, in each case arguing that atheism is preferable to theism. The book will appeal to both students and professionals in the philosophy of religion, as well as general audiences interested in the topic.

Author : Max Baker-Hytch
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 1009269860
Total Pages : 80 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book God and the Problem of Evidential Ambiguity written by Max Baker-Hytch and published by . This book was released on 2024-05-02 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to what many of us think of as the deepest questions of existence, the answers can seem difficult to make out. This difficulty, or ambiguity, is the topic of this Element. The Element begins by offering a general account of what evidential ambiguity consists in and uses it to try to make sense of the idea that our world is religiously ambiguous in some sense. It goes on to consider the questions of how we ought to investigate the nature of ultimate reality and whether evidential ambiguity is itself a significant piece of evidence in the quest.

Author : Craig J. N. De Paulo
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820463766
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ambiguity in the Western Mind written by Craig J. N. De Paulo and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambiguity in the Western Mind includes a collection of essays by internationally renowned scholars such as John D. Caputo, Camille Paglia, Jaroslav Pelikan and Roland Teske along with a preface by Joseph Margolis, all taking up the question of the significance of ambiguity in Western thought. This engaging topic will be of interest to scholars and students alike from across the disciplines. Tracing the conceptual relevance of ambiguity historically and through some of the great books that have formed Western consciousness, this volume is a major contribution to the contemporary discussion surrounding this controversial notion, especially as a hermeneutical concept for interpreting the classics.

Author : Ingrid M. Hoofd
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0415622077
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ambiguities of Activism written by Ingrid M. Hoofd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the keyboard player for the Cinnamon Roll Six jazz band is murdered after a tour bus accident on the way to Lake Eden, Minnesota, Hannah Swensen investigates and comes up with several local suspects.

Author : Reinhold Niebuhr
Publisher : Read Books Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1447496558
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Faith and History - A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History written by Reinhold Niebuhr and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FAITH AND HISTORY A COMPARISON OF CHRISTIAN AND MODERN VIEWS OF HISTORY by REINHOLD NIEBUHR. PREFACE: THE theme of this volume was first presented as the Lyman Beecher Lectures On Preaching at the Yale Divinity School in 1945. Some of the same lectures were given, by arrange ment, under the Warrack Lectureship On Preaching at the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen in Scotland in the winter of 1947. Some of the chapters were used as the basis of lectures given under the Olaf Petri Foundation of the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I sought to develop various portions of a general theme in these various lectureships. In this volume I have drawn these lectures into a more comprehensive study of the total problem of the relation of the Christian faith to modern conceptions of history. While the total work, therefore, bares little resemblance to the lectures, it does contain consideration of the specific problems which were dealt with in the lectures. I shall not seek to identify this material by chapters as I subjected the whole to reorganization. Two of these lectureships usually deal with the art of preaching, though not a few of the actual lectures have been concerned with the preachers message. Since I had no special competence in the art of homiletics I thought it wise to devote the lectures to a definition of the apologetic task of the Christian pulpit in the unique spiritual climate of our day. Since several of the Beecher lecturers in the past half-century sought to accommodate the Christian message to the prevailing evolutionary optimism of the nineteenth and early twen tieth centuries, I thought it might be particularly appropriate to consider the spiritual situation in a period in which this evolutionary optimism is in the process of decay. This volume is written on the basis of the faith that the Gospel of Christ is true for men of every age and that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. It is, nevertheless, the task of the pulpit to relate the ageless Gospel to the special problems of each age. In doing so, however, there is always a temptation to capitulate to the characteristic prejudices of an age. The preaching of the Gospel was not immune to this temptation in the past centuries. The real alternative to the Christian faith elaborated by modern secular culture was the idea that history is itself Christ, which is to say that historical development is redemp tive. Typical modern theology accommodated itself to this secular scheme of redemption much too readily. Meanwhile the experiences of contemporary man have refuted the modern faith in the redemp tive character of history itself. This refutation has given the Christian faith, as presented in the Bible, a new relevance. It is not the thesis of this new volume that this new relevance could establish the truth of the Christian Gospel in the mind of modern man. The truth of the Christian faith must, in fact, be apprehended in any age by repentance and faith. It is, therefore, not made acceptable by rational validation in the first instance. It is important, nevertheless, for the preacher of the Gospel to understand, and come to terms with, the characteristic credos of his age. It is important in our age to understand how the spiritual com placency of a culture which believed in redemption through history is now on the edge of despair.

Author : Herman Melville
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 039326968X
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (Norton Critical Editions) written by Herman Melville and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Pierre was published one year after Moby-Dick, expectations were high. Readers expected—and Melville delivered—adventure, humor, and brilliance. Magnificent and strange, Pierre is a richly allusive novel mirroring both antebellum America and Melville’s own life. This Norton Critical Edition includes: · The Harper & Brothers 1852 first edition of the novel, accompanied by Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein’s editorial matter. · Six illustrations. · Contextual and source materials, including letters, responses to Pierre by Melville’s contemporaries, and works by Daniel Webster, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, that give readers a sense of Pierre’s time and place. · Seven critical essays on Pierre’s major themes by Sacvan Bercovitch, James Creech, Samuel Otter, Wyn Kelley, Cindy Weinstein, Jeffory A. Clymer, and Dominic Mastroianni. · A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.