How do mental events such as choices and decisions lead to physical action? The problem of mental causation is one of the most important and intriguing philosophical issues of our time and has been at the centre of debates in the philosophy of mind for the past fifty years. In opposition to the recent wave of reductionist theories, this book argues that it is possible to account for mental causation within a nonreductive framework as it adopts a broadly Davidsonian approach to mental causation: reasons cause actions because they are identical to physical events. This work then defends this...

This book shows how the beautiful landscape paintings of Meindert Hobbema, a seventeenth-century painter of the Dutch Golden Age, are in accord with the thought of Martin Heidegger, a twentieth-century philosopher, on beauty and truth. Since little is known about Hobbema s life, this work concentrates on ideas that are central to Heidegger s philosophy of art and beauty and the way these ideas are attuned to Hobbema s landscapes. Heidegger holds that the beauty of a great work of art calls out from that work and is firmly linked to the disclosure of hidden truths concerning essences of...

With more than one hundred-fifty books and three hundred published articles on proverb studies that have attracted wide attention of folklorists around the world, it is little wonder that international scholars look upon Wolfgang Mieder as the modern-day Pied Piper of paremiology. For this festschrift, some of the world s leading proverb and folklore scholars have come together to commemorate Mieder s sixty-fifth birthday. Authors from Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, Israel, and the United States have contributed essays representative of the scope and breadth of Mieder s own impressive...

As President Barack Obama outlined his promise for change during the presidential campaign, he made effective use of proverbs and proverbial phrases, and invented many quotable epithets that have all the makings of future proverbs. This book examines how Obama s natural and authentic reliance on traditional metaphors enhances his impressive rhetoric, rather than reducing it to mere sound bites. Proverbs, with their often colorful metaphors, add expressiveness and emotion to his communications, giving people the opportunity to follow his pragmatic or philosophical arguments through common...

An Environmental History of Postcolonial North India is a study of an increasingly important part of the Indian landscape. It examines the social process of accelerated land use as it has been affected by political and epidemiological factors and pays particular attention to the shifting representations of the landscape. As a contribution to the literature of the environmental history of India, this book examines the questions of agricultural colonization, wildlife conservation, and disease control.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Numbers advances a thesis made several years ago by Rudolph Carnap: The sentence -There are numbers- is a trivial truth if construed as an assertion from within mathematics. As such it cannot possibly divide philosophers of mathematics. It lacks sense if construed as an assertion outside of mathematics. Unfortunately, the truth and importance of Carnap s thesis has not been fully appreciated by philosophers of mathematics. The six dialogues that compose Dialogues Concerning Natural Numbers were formed to bring attention and praise to Carnap s...

Climate Change and the Media brings together an international group of scholars to discuss one of the most important issues in human history: climate change. Since public understanding of the issue relies heavily on media coverage, the media plays a pivotal role in the way we address it. This edited collection the first scholarly work to examine the relationship between climate change and the media examines the changing nature of media coverage around the world, from the USA, the UK, and Europe, to China, Australasia, and the developing world. Chapters consider the impact of public...

Climate Change and the Media brings together an international group of scholars to discuss one of the most important issues in human history: climate change. Since public understanding of the issue relies heavily on media coverage, the media plays a pivotal role in the way we address it. This edited collection the first scholarly work to examine the relationship between climate change and the media examines the changing nature of media coverage around the world, from the USA, the UK, and Europe, to China, Australasia, and the developing world. Chapters consider the impact of public...

Teacher education programs are charged with educating teachers to teach all students preparing them to teach multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual, and differently-abled students in an increasingly global, inter-dependent world. This book takes as its starting point the assumption that pre-service teacher candidates, primarily white and middle-class, come to college to pursue a teaching degree having little if any experience of a social nature with persons not like themselves. Rooted in areas of theory and practice and based around the -Schools and Society- and -Culturally Relevant Teaching-...

A number of the greatest classics (both old and modern) of English literature, extending from Antony and Cleopatra to A Passage to India, contain a sympathetic portrayal of the East, which connects them to each other in a way that justifies the term -literary orientalism-. Literary Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Universalism describes this clearly discernable tradition and examines certain key texts of oriental literature for the strong impact that they have had on English literature and for the striking manner in which they have been absorbed and appropriated into...