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Neuroscience and Critique
Recent years have seen a rapid growth in neuroscientific research, and an expansion beyond basic research to incorporate elements of the arts, humanities and social sciences. It has been suggested that the neurosciences will bring about major transformations in the understanding of ourselves, our culture and our society. In academia one finds debates within psychology, philosophy and literature about the implications of developments within the neurosciences, and the emerging fields of educational neuroscience, neuro-economics, and neuro-aesthetics also bear witness to a ‘neurological turn’ which is currently taking place. Neuroscience and Critique is a ground-breaking edited collection which reflects on the impact of neuroscience in contemporary social science and the humanities. It is the first book to consider possibilities for a critique of the theories, practices, and implications of contemporary neuroscience. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.
“Don’t Disturb my Masterpiece!”
This book explores a philosophy of learning inspired by humanistic ideals. It reflects on the transformative possibilities opened up by active engagement with experiential domains. It draws attention to epoch-making transformations in the history of Western civilization that have exposed the dynamic relation between conscience, emotions, and learning. An ecological model of learning is proposed that emphasizes emotional, ethical, and cognitive learning as holistic processes. The model focuses on the pragmatics of learning, the creativity of improvisation, rhetorically mediated experience, emotional settings, and the education of the senses. The book is based on an inclusive worldview. Its fundamental tenet is that rational inquiry, emotions, and morality form a continuum in human nature. Hence the book envisions novel scenarios, where learners are valued for their genuine struggle to realize their humane masterpieces.
The Killer of Little Shepherds
At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, dubbed "The Killer of Little Shepherds," terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years-until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era's most renowned criminologist. The two men typified the Belle Epoque, a period of immense scientific achievement and fascination with its promise to reveal the secrets of the human condition. With high drama and stunning detail, Douglas Starr recounts the infamous crime and punishment of Vacher, interweaving the story of how Lacassagne and his colleagues developed forensics as we know it. We see one of the earliest uses of criminal...
Crime and Criminal Behavior
Bringing together work from experts in the field this text looks at key issues such as euthanasia, drug laws and terrorism and extremism.
The Dark Sides of Empathy
Many consider empathy to be the basis of moral action. However, the ability to empathize with others is also a prerequisite for deliberate acts of humiliation and cruelty. In The Dark Sides of Empathy, Fritz Breithaupt contends that people often commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of over-identification and a desire to increase empathy. Even well-meaning compassion can have many unintended consequences, such as intensifying conflicts or exploiting others. Empathy plays a central part in a variety of highly problematic behaviors. From mere callousness to terrorism, exploitation to sadism, and emotional vampirism to stalking, empathy all too often motivates and promotes malicious acts. After tracing the development of empathy as an idea in German philosophy, Breithaupt looks at a wide-ranging series of case studies—from Stockholm syndrome to Angela Merkel's refugee policy and from novels of the romantic era to helicopter parents and murderous cheerleader moms—to uncover how narcissism, sadism, and dangerous celebrity obsessions alike find their roots in the quality that, arguably, most makes us human.
The Woman Who Married the Bear
Stories of the primordial woman who married a bear, appear in matriarchal traditions across the global North from Indigenous North America and Scandinavia to Russia and Korea. In The Woman Who Married the Bear, authors Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Indigenous American culture, and Kaarina Kailo, who specializes in the cultures of Northern Europe, join forces to examine these Woman-Bear stories, their common elements, and their meanings in the context of matriarchal culture. The authors reach back 35,000 years to tease out different threads of Indigenous Woman-Bear traditions, using the lens of bear spirituality to uncover the ancient matriarchies found in rock art, caves, ceremonies, ritu...
Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds
Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally repre...
Blood Rush
As a young man, Jan Verplaetse saw a hare suspended from a meat hook, skinned and gutted. What struck him so forcefully at the time was not the animal itself, but the blood gently dripping from its mouth. His reaction prompted the start of a quest he undertakes in this book: to investigate our fascination with blood, the most vital of fluids. Blood Rush shows how, throughout history, blood has had the capacity to intoxicate us, to the point that we lose ourselves, whether in violence, through hunting, fighting, or killing, or in the vicarious thrill of watching sporting events, horror films, or video games. Are these feelings physical, or in our imagination? Where does the magic of blood come from? In his deeply researched and provocative narrative, Verplaetse moves from antiquity to the present, from magic to experimental psychology, from philosophy to religion and scientific discoveries, to demonstrate why blood at once attracts and repels us.
The Moral Background
In recent years, many disciplines have become interested in the scientific study of morality. However, a conceptual framework for this work is still lacking. In The Moral Background, Gabriel Abend develops just such a framework and uses it to investigate the history of business ethics in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s. According to Abend, morality consists of three levels: moral and immoral behavior, or the behavioral level; moral understandings and norms, or the normative level; and the moral background, which includes what moral concepts exist in a society, what moral methods can be used, what reasons can be given, and what objects can be morally evaluated at all. This backg...
