In this, the first truly philosophical study of nationalism, Paul Gilbert attempts to make sense of the fact that there are different sorts of nationalism-for example, political and cultural-and that each concept functions with a different understanding of what a nation is. He sets out to explore whether there are any common ideas about what constitutes nationhood and whether these "nations" have particular rights due to them. By treating nationalism as a coherent body of ideas, the text permits a rational reconstruction of the origins of nationalist movements. The book also examines the work...

Throughout the text Gilbert shows how two psychological systems (derived from ethological and experimental work), labelled the defense and safety system dominate the unfolding and integration of human mental life.

Philosophers and therapists have long theorised about how psychological mechanisms for love, jealousy, anxiety, depression and many other human characteristics may have evolved over millions of years. In the dawn of the new insights on evolution, provided by Darwin's theories of natural selection, Freud, Jung and Klein sought to identify and understand human motives, emotions and information processing as functions deeply-rooted in our evolved history. Despite this promising start and major developments in modern evolutionary psychology, anthropology and sociobiology, the last fifty years has...

What is compassion, how does it affect the quality of our lives and how can we develop compassion for ourselves and others?

Humans are capable of extreme cruelty but also considerable compassion. Often neglected in Western psychology, this book looks at how compassion may have evolved, and is linked to various capacities such as sympathy, empathy, forgiveness and warmth. Exploring the effects of early life experiences with families and peers, this book outlines how developing compassion for self and others can be key to helping people change, recover and develop ways of living that...

Though psychology as a discipline has grown enormously in popularity in recent years, compulsory courses in research methods and statistics are seldom embarked upon with any great enthusiasm within the undergraduate and postgraduate communities. Many postgraduate and PhD students start their research ill-equipped to design effective experiments and to properly analyse their results. This lack of knowledge also limits their ability to critically assess and evaluate research done by others.
This book is a practical guide to carrying out research in health psychology and clinical psychology....

Here, for the first time, contemporary Continental thought comes into conversation with analytic philosophy on all the principal topics of philosophy of mind. Rejecting the dominant Anglo-American paradigm, which reduces mental phenomena to their roles in a scientific psychology, the authors present a non-mysterious, naturalistic alternative. Characterising mental life is, they seek to show, capturing the world from the point of view of the subject. But the subject is essentially embodied, so that mental phenomena are modes of our fleshly existence in the world.The book aims to bring together...