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Cultural diversity and cultural change make it difficult to define and theorize cultural phenomena. This is especially apparent in the case of such cultural areas as religion and popular culture. This book presents ways to understand and explain the diversity and variability of religious and popular culture phenomena. The first part of this book focuses on the cognitive foundations and cultural dimensions of religious phenomena. The cognitive science of religion provides a new theoretical framework for explaining religious diversity and variability. The second part is dedicated to the study of selected phenomena of popular culture from the perspective distinctive to cultural anthropology. It attempts to bring into light this features of popular culture phenomena that have direct impact on cultural subjects.
This volume revisits the concepts of reality and realism with regard to their relation to religion and the religious real. Religion remains one of the most significant social forces and cultural constituencies, and it can even be said that religion and religious truths are becoming increasingly important in these so-called “post-secular” times, when the sphere of the (secular) social/political and the sphere of the religious have to be reconsidered. The relevancy of religious truths and the way they structure our understanding of “reality” overcomes the sphere of theology and particular religious practices. Religion, truth, and reality, and the way these concepts are approached and understood, continue to be vital for a broader cultural discourse as well, from philosophy and science to politics, mass media and show-business. The book presents ten essays that offer methodologically diverse and intellectually challenging analyses of various aspects of the topics of Religion and Realism. The essays are based on papers presented at the international conference on Religion and Realism, which took place at the American University of Rome in 2014.
Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion takes an in-depth look at the generation of post-WWII babies who came of age in the 1960s, and how they acted as a transitional generation between religious parents and non-religious children and grandchildren, forged different practices and sites of meaning, morality, community, and transcendence.
Essays collected in this volume deal with various problems from the philosophy of mathematics. What connects them are two questions: how mathematics is created and how it is acquired. In 'Three Worlds of Mathematics' we are familiarized with David Tall's ideas pertaining to the embodied, symbolic and formal worlds of mathematics. In 'Basic Ideas of Intuitionism', we focus on an epistemological approach to mathematics which is distinctive to constructive mathematics. The author focuses on the computational content of intuitionistic logic and shows how it relates to functional programming. 'The Brave Mathematical Ant' carefully selects mathematical puzzles related to teaching experiences in a way that the solution requires creativity and is not obtainable by following an algorithm. Moreover the solution gives us some new insight into the underlying idea. 'Degrees Of Accessibility Of Mathematical Objects' discusses various criteria which can be used to judge accessibility of mathematical objects. We find logical complexity, range of applications, existence of a physical model as well as aesthetic values.
This book focuses on the standards of philosophical rationality, corresponding to a philosophy that aspires to be more than the wisdom that stems from and addresses everyday human needs. It is a search for standards that would, as it were, show the way to philosophical wisdom for anyone who is willing and able to assess it. One of the problems is that people have had a different understanding of the basic concept of rationality, which is the rationale. (Series: Development in Humanities - Vol. 1)
Art in the Postmodern Era examines how artists and intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe got involved in debating postmodernism and how this postmodern in turn impacted the way of thinking about art in Central Europe. The book starts with a brief survey of 20th-century art and then focuses on the neo-avant-garde and the birth of postmodern art, with its democratization and subsequent shift towards a post-artistic epoch when anything can become art. The book also raises an important issue concerning art in the time of globalization. (Series: Development in Humanities - Vol. 3)
Facing otherness in everyday interpersonal relations, making decisions within demanding contexts, living with the plenitude of values - all of these experiences permanently challenge one's moral cognition. Neither a single moral agent nor ethics itself can pretend omniscience when dealing with complex, real world situations. In this book, author Ewa Nowak presents her own research findings to account for the experimental nature of ethics. Nowak questions a popular conviction that declaring values and following norms is a sufficient condition to be moral. She applies Georg Lind's dual-aspect theory of morality to all sorts of spectacular contexts. (Series: Development in Humanities - Vol. 6)
This book is dedicated to the problems faced by universities. The author frequently refers to those events from the past that resulted in universities becoming institutions of public benefit. This benefit is of course understood in various ways, but in ways always involving the institutions’ function of serving. What is debatable is whom and what they were and are meant to serve, and how they can and how they should fulfil these functions. Although such questions are global in character, the answers to them can be both global and local, meaning that they may relate to both the most general tasks of universities and to those that might be or are to some degree only performed by institutions of a particular type.
This volume contains four essays which may attract the attention of those readers, who are interested in mathematical cognition The main issues and questions addressed include: How do we achieve understanding of mathematical notions and ideas? What benefits can be obtained from mistakes of great mathematicians? Which mathematical objects are standard and which are pathological? Is it possible characterize the intended models of mathematical theories in a unique way?