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Constructing the New Consumer Society
by John Holmwood Hilary Radner Gerhard Schulze Pekka SulkunenThis book argues that the coming of the 'a new consumerism' in the affluent societies marks a distinct phase of modernity. Limits of production no longer confine consumption to what is necessary or instrumental. Demands for increasing production no longer shape ideology and culture as they did previously. Important contemporary themes of morality, the body, citizenship and inequality are here placed in a new theoretical light. The book provides examples of new codes of happiness in consuming products, culture and entertainment. Issues of nutrition, consumer policy, environmental risk and health are discussed in the light of these new codes.
Constructing the Political Spectacle
by Murray EdelmanThanks to the ready availability of political news today, informed citizens can protect and promote their own interests and the public interest more effectively. Or can they? Murray Edelman argues against this conventional interpretation of politics, one that takes for granted that we live in a world of facts and that people react rationally to the facts they know. In doing so, he explores in detail the ways in which the conspicuous aspects of the political scene are interpretations that systematically buttress established inequalities and interpretations already dominant political ideologies.
Constructing Transgressive Sexuality in Screenwriting: The Feiticeiro/a as Character
by Lj TheoThis book approaches the construction of complex and transgressive ‘pervert’ characters in mainstream (not ‘art’), adult-oriented (not pornographic) cinema. It deconstructs an episteme on which to base the construction of characters in screenplays, in a way that acknowledges how semiotic elements of characterisation intersect. In addition, it provides an extended re-phrasing of the notion of ‘the pervert’ as Feiticiero/a: a newly-coined construct that might serve as an underpinning for complex, sexual filmic characters that are both entertaining and challenging to audiences. This re-phrasing speaks to both an existential/phenomenological conception of personhood and to the scholarly tradition of the ‘linguistic turn’ of continental philosophers such as Foucault and Lacan, who represent language not primarily as describing the world but as constructing it. The result is an original and interdisciplinary volume that is brought to coherence through a queer, post-humanist lens.
Constructing Transgressive Sexuality in Screenwriting: The Feiticeiro/a as Character
by Lj TheoThis book approaches the construction of complex and transgressive ‘pervert’ characters in mainstream (not ‘art’), adult-oriented (not pornographic) cinema. It deconstructs an episteme on which to base the construction of characters in screenplays, in a way that acknowledges how semiotic elements of characterisation intersect. In addition, it provides an extended re-phrasing of the notion of ‘the pervert’ as Feiticiero/a: a newly-coined construct that might serve as an underpinning for complex, sexual filmic characters that are both entertaining and challenging to audiences. This re-phrasing speaks to both an existential/phenomenological conception of personhood and to the scholarly tradition of the ‘linguistic turn’ of continental philosophers such as Foucault and Lacan, who represent language not primarily as describing the world but as constructing it. The result is an original and interdisciplinary volume that is brought to coherence through a queer, post-humanist lens.
Constructing Transnational Political Spaces: The Multifaceted Political Activism of Mexican Migrants
by Stephanie SchützeThis book analyzes Mexican migrant organizations in the US and their political influence in home communities in Mexico. By connecting multifaceted arenas of Mexican migrant’s activism, it traces the construction of transnational political spaces. The author's ethnographic work in the state of Michoacán and in Chicago shows how these transnational arenas overcome the limits of traditional political spaces - the nation state and the local community - and bring together intertwined facets of ‘the political'. The book examines how actors engage in politics within transnational spaces; it delineates the different trajectories and agendas of male and female, indigenous and non-indigenous migrant activists; it demonstrates how the local and actor-centered levels are linked to the regional or state levels as well as to the federal levels of politics; and finally, it shows how these multifaceted arenas constitute transnational spaces that have implications for politics and society in Mexico and the US alike.
Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism in Latin America: The Role of Radical Education (Marxism and Education)
by M. Cole S. MottaIn Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism: The Role of Radical Education, Motta and Cole explore the role of the politics of knowledge and pedagogy in the reinvention of socialism for the twenty-first century. Through a critical analysis of Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela they deconstruct the mechanisms of neoliberal control as an epistemological project of monologue, closure, and violence against all 'others'. The authors develop an affirmative engagement with the traditions, practices, and politics which seek to challenge this closure through the policies of the counter-hegemonic government of Venezuela, the struggles of social movements in Brazil and Colombia, and the daily resistance of critical educators working in formal educational settings in all three countries. This mapping and analysis not only contribute to struggles for alternatives to capitalism in Latin America, but are translatable to other contexts. The book theorizes that with the exhaustion of neoliberalism, it is time to pedagogize the political and politicize the pedagogical in order to create worlds beyond capitalism.
A Construction Manual for Robots' Ethical Systems: Requirements, Methods, Implementations (Cognitive Technologies)
by Robert TrapplThis book will help researchers and engineers in the design of ethical systems for robots, addressing the philosophical questions that arise and exploring modern applications such as assistive robots and self-driving cars.The contributing authors are among the leading academic and industrial researchers on this topic and the book will be of value to researchers, graduate students and practitioners engaged with robot design, artificial intelligence and ethics.
The Construction of Belief: Reflections on the Thought of Mohammed Arkoun
by Mohammed ArkounMohammed Arkoun was one of the most prominent and influential Arab intellectuals of his day. During a career spanning more than thirty years, he was revered as an outstanding research scholar, a bold critic of the theoretical tensions embedded within Islamic Studies and an outspoken public figure, upholding political, social and cultural modernism. This Festschrift honours Arkoun's scholarship, bringing together the contributions of eleven distinguished scholars of history, religious studies and philosophy. It offers a comprehensive selection of critical engagements with Arkoun's work, reflecting on his considerable influence on contemporary thinking about Islam and its ideological, philosophical and theological dimensions. The authoritative reference study on the work of Mohammed Arkoun, The Construction of Belief is essential reading for students and scholars of Islam, Muslim societies and cultures, modernity, religious studies, philosophy and semanti.
The Construction of Cognitive Maps (GeoJournal Library #32)
by Juval Portugaliand processes which are exclusive to humans in their encoding, storing, decoding and retrieving spatial knowledge for various tasks. The authors present and discuss connectionist models of cognitive maps which are based on local representation, versus models which are based on distributed representation, as well as connectionist models concerning language and spatial relations. As is well known, Gibson's (1979) ecological approach suggests a view on cognition which is diametrically different from the classical main stream view: perception (and thus cognition) is direct, immediate and needs no internal information processing, and is thus essentially an external process of interaction between an organism and its external environment. The chapter by Harry Heft introduces J. J. Gibson's ecological approach and its implication to the construction of cognitive maps in general and to the issue of wayfinding in particular. According to Heft, main stream cognitive sciences are essentially Cartesian in nature and have not as yet internalized the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. Gibson, in his ecological approach, has tried to do exactly this. The author introduces the basic terminology of the ecological approach and relates its various notions, in particular optic flow, nested hierarchy and affordances, to navigation and the way routes and places in the environment are learned.
The Construction of Human Kinds
by Ron MallonRon Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. Social constructionist explanations of human kinds like race, gender, and homosexuality are commonplace in the social sciences and humanities, but what do they mean and what are their implications? This book synthesizes recent work in evolutionary, cognitive, and social psychology as well as social theory and the philosophy of science, in order to offer a naturalistic account of the social construction of human kinds. Mallon begins by qualifying social constructionist accounts of representations of human kinds by appealing to evidence suggesting canalized dispositions towards certain ways of representing human groups, using race as a case study. He then turns to interpret constructionist accounts of categories as attempts to explain causally powerful human kinds by appealling to our practices of representing them, and he articulates a view in which widespread representations produce entrenched social roles that could vindicate such attempts. Mallon goes on to explore constructionist concerns with the social consequences of our representations, focusing especially on the way human kind representations can alter our behaviour and undermine our self understandings and our agency. Mallon understands socially constructed kinds as the real, sometimes stable products of our cognitive and representational practices, and he suggests that reference to such kinds can figure in our everyday and scientific practices of representing the social world. The result is a realistic, naturalistic account of how human representations might contribute to making up the parts of the social world that they represent.
The Construction of Logical Space
by Agustín RayoOur conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use to navigate the world. In The Construction of Logical Space Agustín Rayo defends the idea that one's conception of logical space is shaped by one's acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements: statements like 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of H2O', or 'for the number of the dinosaurs to be zero just is for there to be no dinosaurs'. The resulting picture is used to articulate a conception of metaphysical possibility that does not depend on a reduction of the modal to the non-modal, and to develop a trivialist philosophy of mathematics, according to which the truths of pure mathematics have trivial truth-conditions.
The Construction of New Mathematical Knowledge in Classroom Interaction: An Epistemological Perspective (Mathematics Education Library #38)
by Heinz SteinbringMathematics is generally considered as the only science where knowledge is uni form, universal, and free from contradictions. „Mathematics is a social product - a 'net of norms', as Wittgenstein writes. In contrast to other institutions - traffic rules, legal systems or table manners -, which are often internally contradictory and are hardly ever unrestrictedly accepted, mathematics is distinguished by coherence and consensus. Although mathematics is presumably the discipline, which is the most differentiated internally, the corpus of mathematical knowledge constitutes a coher ent whole. The consistency of mathematics cannot be proved, yet, so far, no contra dictions were found that would question the uniformity of mathematics" (Heintz, 2000, p. 11). The coherence of mathematical knowledge is closely related to the kind of pro fessional communication that research mathematicians hold about mathematical knowledge. In an extensive study, Bettina Heintz (Heintz 2000) proposed that the historical development of formal mathematical proof was, in fact, a means of estab lishing a communicable „code of conduct" which helped mathematicians make themselves understood in relation to the truth of mathematical statements in a co ordinated and unequivocal way.
The Construction of Social Reality
by John R SearleIn this fascinating, provocative account, eminent philosopher John Searle shows how our everyday actions and cultural knowledge are of a metaphysical complexity that is truely staggering. He explores the charecter of the structures of our daily work that exist by human agreement and from this, the nature of objective reality. For example, how can it be completely objective fact that coins are money, if something is money only because we belive it is money? And what is the role of language constitutiing such facts?In examining the difference between what can and what cannot be socially constructed, he also shows how biology, which offers facts that are independant of human opinion and is often seen in opposition to the social sciences, forms the basis of these cultural and consititutional forms.
Constructions: Making Sense Of Things
by Michael FraynFirst published in 1974 and republished following the success of Frayn's masterly work of philosophy, The Human Touch, Constructions is a dazzling, thought-provoking and fascinating book which explores some of the great problems in philosophy and of everyday life.
Constructive Analysis (Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften #279)
by E. Bishop Douglas BridgesThis work grew out of Errett Bishop's fundamental treatise 'Founda tions of Constructive Analysis' (FCA), which appeared in 1967 and which contained the bountiful harvest of a remarkably short period of research by its author. Truly, FCA was an exceptional book, not only because of the quantity of original material it contained, but also as a demonstration of the practicability of a program which most ma thematicians believed impossible to carry out. Errett's book went out of print shortly after its publication, and no second edition was produced by its publishers. Some years later, 'by a set of curious chances', it was agreed that a new edition of FCA would be published by Springer Verlag, the revision being carried out by me under Errett's supervision; at the same time, Errett gener ously insisted that I become a joint author. The revision turned out to be much more substantial than we had anticipated, and took longer than we would have wished. Indeed, tragically, Errett died before the work was completed. The present book is the result of our efforts. Although substantially based on FCA, it contains so much new material, and such full revision and expansion of the old, that it is essentially a new book. For this reason, and also to preserve the integrity of the original, I decided to give our joint work a title of its own. Most of the new material outside Chapter 5 originated with Errett.
Constructive Commutative Algebra: Projective Modules Over Polynomial Rings and Dynamical Gröbner Bases (Lecture Notes in Mathematics #2138)
by Ihsen YenguiThe main goal of this book is to find the constructive content hidden in abstract proofs of concrete theorems in Commutative Algebra, especially in well-known theorems concerning projective modules over polynomial rings (mainly the Quillen-Suslin theorem) and syzygies of multivariate polynomials with coefficients in a valuation ring.Simple and constructive proofs of some results in the theory of projective modules over polynomial rings are also given, and light is cast upon recent progress on the Hermite ring and Gröbner ring conjectures. New conjectures on unimodular completion arising from our constructive approach to the unimodular completion problem are presented.Constructive algebra can be understood as a first preprocessing step for computer algebra that leads to the discovery of general algorithms, even if they are sometimes not efficient. From a logical point of view, the dynamical evaluation gives a constructive substitute for two highly nonconstructive tools of abstract algebra: the Law of Excluded Middle and Zorn's Lemma. For instance, these tools are required in order to construct the complete prime factorization of an ideal in a Dedekind ring, whereas the dynamical method reveals the computational content of this construction. These lecture notes follow this dynamical philosophy.
Constructive Empiricism: Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science
by P. DickenConstructive empiricism is not just a view regarding the aim of science; it is also a view regarding the epistemological framework in which one should debate the aim of science. This is the focus of this book – not with scientific truth, but with how one should argue about scientific truth.
Constructive Mathematics: Proceedings of the New Mexico State University Conference Held at Las Cruces, New Mexico, August 11-15, 1980 (Lecture Notes in Mathematics #873)
by F. Richman
Constructive Methods in Computing Science: International Summer School directed by F.L. Bauer, M. Broy, E.W. Dijkstra, C.A.R. Hoare (NATO ASI Subseries F: #55)
by F. L. Bauer M. Broy E. W. Dijkstra C. A. HoareComputing Science is a science of constructive methods. The solution of a problem has to be described formally by constructive techniques, if it is to be evaluated on a computer. The Marktoberdorf Advanced Study Institute 1988 presented a comprehensive survey of the recent research in constructive methods in Computing Science. Some approaches to a methodological framework and to supporting tools for specification, development and verification of software systems were discussed in detail. Other lectures dealt with the relevance of the foundations of logic for questions of program construction and with new programming paradigms and formalisms which have proven to be useful for a constructive approach to software development. The construction, specification, design and verification especially of distributed and communicating systems was discussed in a number of complementary lectures. Examples for those approaches were given on several levels such as semaphores, nondeterministic state transition systems with fairness assumptions, decomposition of specifications for concurrent systems in liveness and safety properties and functional specifications of distributed systems. Construction methods in programming that were presented range from type theory, the theory of evidence, theorem provers for proving properties of functional programs to category theory as an abstract and general concept for the description of programming paradigms.
Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity (Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies)
by Jr. Kenneth J. Archer L. William OliverioThis book presents the work of leading hermeneutical theorists alongside emerging thinkers, examining the current state of hermeneutics within the Pentecostal tradition. The volume’s contributors present constructive ideas about the future of hermeneutics at the intersection of theology of the Spirit, Pentecostal Christianity, and other disciplines. This collection offers cutting-edge scholarship that engages with and pulls from a broad range of fields and points toward the future of Pneumatological hermeneutics. The volume’s interdisciplinary essays are broken up into four sections: philosophical hermeneutics, biblical-theological hermeneutics, social and cultural hermeneutics, and hermeneutics in the social and physical sciences.
Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity (Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies)
by Kenneth J. Archer And L. William Oliverio Jr.This book presents the work of leading hermeneutical theorists alongside emerging thinkers, examining the current state of hermeneutics within the Pentecostal tradition. The volume’s contributors present constructive ideas about the future of hermeneutics at the intersection of theology of the Spirit, Pentecostal Christianity, and other disciplines. This collection offers cutting-edge scholarship that engages with and pulls from a broad range of fields and points toward the future of Pneumatological hermeneutics. The volume’s interdisciplinary essays are broken up into four sections: philosophical hermeneutics, biblical-theological hermeneutics, social and cultural hermeneutics, and hermeneutics in the social and physical sciences.
Constructive Semantics: Meaning in Between Phenomenology and Constructivism (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science #44)
by Christina WeissThis edited book brings together research work in the field of constructive semantics with scholarship on the phenomenological foundations of logic and mathematics. It addresses one of the central issues in the epistemology and philosophy of mathematics, namely the relationship between phenomenological meaning constitution and constructive semantics. Contributing authors explore deep structural connections and fundamental differences between phenomenology and constructivism. Papers are drawn from contributions to a prestigious workshop held at the University of Friedrichshafen. Readers will discover insight into structural connections between the phenomenological concept of meaning constitution and constructivist concepts of meaning. Discussion ranges from more specific conceptualizations in the philosophy of logic and mathematics to more general considerations in epistemology, inferential semantics and phenomenology. Questions such as a possible phenomenological understanding of the relationship between structural rules and particle rules in dialogical logic are explored. Significant aspects of both phenomenology and dialectics, and dialectics and constructivism emerge. Graduates and researchers of philosophy, especially logic, as well as scholars of mathematics will all find something of interest in the expert insights presented in this volume.
Constructivism and Science: Essays in Recent German Philosophy (The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science #44)
by Robert E. Butts J. R. BrownThe idea to produce the current volume was conceived by Jiirgen Mittelstrass and Robert E. Butts in 1978. Idealist philosophers are wrong about one thing: the temporal gap separating idea and reality can be very long indeed - even ten or so years! Problems of timing were joined by personal problems and by the pressure of other professional commitments. Fortunately, James Brown agreed to cooperate in the editing of the volume; the infusion of his usual energy, good judgement and good-natured promptness saved the volume and made its produc tion possible. Despite the delays, the messages of the papers included in the book have not gone stale. An extremely worthwhile exercise in international philosophical cooperation has come to fruition; the German constructivist philosophical position is here represented in papers in English that will make its contemporary importance available to a larger audience. The editors owe thanks to many persons. All involved in the project owe much to the interest and support of Nicholas Rescher, a friend of the undertaking from the time of its inception. My review of the translations was helped immensely by Andrea Purvis' careful copy editing of the typescript. Most of all, however, we owe gratitude and admiration for the tireless efforts on behalf of this enterprise to Jiirgen Mittelstrass.
Constructivism and Teachers in Chinese Culture: Enriching Confucianism with Constructivism
by Zitong WeiThis book provides a refreshing look at kindergarten teachers’ practical knowledge and their context-specific reasoning of the usefulness of constructivism from a culturally emic perspective. Examining the similarities and differences between constructivism and Confucianism from both instructional and moral perspectives, it provides a unique contribution to teaching and teacher education. An understanding of the compatibility between constructivism and Confucianism is valuable in cross-cultural exchange and learning, and as such the book is a great source for educational researchers in a time of globalization.