MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

BY MAX HORKHEIMER AND THEODOR W. ADORNO

Dialectic of Enlightenment is, quite justifiably, one of the most celebrated and often cited works of modern social philosophy. It has been identified as the keystone of the 'Frankfurt School', of which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were the leading members, and does not cease to impress in its wide-ranging ambition and panache. Adorno and Horkheimer addressees themselves to a question which went to the very heart of the modern age, namely 'why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism'. Modernity, far from redeeming the promises and hopes of the Enlightenment, had resulted in a stultification of mankind and an administered society, characterised by simulation and candy-floss entertainment. To seek an answer to the question of how such a condition could arise, Adorno and Horkheier subjected the whole history of Western catagories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche, to a searching philosophical and psychological critique. Drawing on psychoanalytical insights, their own work on the 'culture industry', deep knowledge of the key Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thinkers, as well as fascinating considerations on the relationship between reason and myth - the rational and the irrational - the authors exposed the domination and violence towards both nature and humanity that underpin the Enlightenment project

Verso, 1997, 258 pages

Edited by Ibo van de Poel, Lily Frank, Julia Hermann, Jeroen Hopster, Dominic Lenzi, Sven Nyholm, Behnam Taebi, and Elena Ziliotti

Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.

Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023 188p.

By JM Berger

Can legal codes and court rulings function as extremist ideological texts? 

Academics usually define extremism as a set of beliefs that fall outside the norms of the society in which they are situated, but entire societies have at times been organized around recognizably extreme beliefs. This paper will examine the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1856), more commonly known as the Dred Scott decision. Widely considered the worst Supreme Court decision of all time, the opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decreed that Black people, whether enslaved or free, could never become citizens of the United States and that they had no rights under the Constitution. 

This paper will analyze the Dred Scott decision to consider whether and how it implements and institutionalizes many widely recognized tropes of extremist ideology. The paper will conclude with a discussion of empirical frameworks that can enable and empower the study of lawful extremism. 

United States, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Montery. 2023, 57pg

By Enzo Nussio

How do moral beliefs influence favorability to collective violence? In this article, I argue that, first, moral beliefs are influential depending on their salience, as harm avoidance is a common moral concern. The more accessible moral beliefs in decision-making, the more they restrain harmful behavior. Second, moral beliefs are influential depending on their content. Group-oriented moral beliefs can overturn the harm avoidance principle and motivate individuals to favor collective violence. Analysis is based on a representative survey in Mexico City and focuses on a proximate form of collective violence, locally called lynching. Findings support both logics of moral influence. Experimentally induced moral salience reduces favorability to lynching, and group-oriented moral beliefs are related to more favorability. Against existing theories that downplay the relevance of morality and present it as cheap talk, these findings demonstrate how moral beliefs can both restrain and motivate collective violence.
Comparative Political StudiesOnlineFirst© The Author(s) 2023

Edited by Willemijn Ruberg, Lara Bergers, Pauline Dirven and Sara Serrano Martínez

This edited volume examines the performance of physicians, psychiatrists and other scientists as expert witnesses in modern European courts of law and police investigations. Its chapters discuss cases from criminal, civil and international law to parse the impact of forensic evidence and expertise in different European countries (Scotland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Norway and the Netherlands) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They show how modern forensic science and technology was inextricably entangled with political ideology, gender norms, changes in the law and legal systems. New scientific ideas and technology, such as blood tests and DNA, helped develop forensic science, but did not necessarily lead to a straightforward acceptance of expertise in the courtroom. Discussing fascinating case studies, the chapters in this book highlight how the ideology of authoritarian and liberal regimes affected the practical enactment of forensic expertise. They also emphasise the influence of images of masculinity and femininity on the performance of experts and their assessment of evidence, victims and perpetrators, for example in cases of rape, infanticide and crimes of passion. This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of modern European forensic practices, which, as several chapters underline, sometimes surprisingly diverge from institutional regulations.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2023. 304p.

By Syed Muhammad Ishraque Osman, Antonia Gkergki

Limited scholarly attention has been devoted to examining the impact of immigration on developing economies relative to developed ones. Even the impact of immigration on developed nations continues to be a subject of intense debate. The voluminous empirical literature that has emerged in this field is far from conclusive. In this paper we test the impact of an unprecedented increase in immigrants with dissimilar social, but similar human capital on the host country’s crime. To do this we explore the Syrian refugee influx in Turkey. Our work contributes to the new area of research in the literature by examining how immigrants with varying levels of social capital affect emerging economies rather than developed ones. We found no impact on violent crime, but found a significant impact on non-violent crime. Using a more machine learning approach of ‘Trajectory Balancing’, we found our significant impact result for the non-violent crime to be robust and strikingly close. We also use 'Causal Forest' which is one of the most sophisticated (if not the most) causal machine learning methods. Using Causal Forest, we effectively unmasked the average treatment effect on the non-violent crime rate and investigate the heterogeneous treatment effect depending on region level characteristics, which can greatly assist policymakers in this regard. We also argue that the higher impact on non-violent crime rate is due to the displacement of natives by migrants, from the more competitive informal job (agricultural) sector in the treated regions

Unpublished paper, 2023. 41p.

By Carolina Scaramutti https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4587-5316c.scaramutti@gmail.com, Renae Danielle Schmidt, et al.

Millions of Venezuelans have fled their country in hopes for a better future outside the political and financial turmoil in their home country. This paper examines the self-reported needs of Venezuelans in the United States and Colombia. Specifically, it looks at perceived discrimination in each country and its effect on the service needs of Venezuelan immigrants. The authors used data from a larger project conducted in October to November 2017 to perform a qualitative content analysis on the specific services that participants and others like them would need following immigration. The sample consisted of 647 Venezuelan immigrant adults who had migrated to the United States (n = 342) or Colombia (n = 305).

Its findings indicate statistically significant differences between the two countries. Venezuelan immigrants in the United States were more likely to identify mental health and educational service needs, while those in Colombia were more likely to list access to healthcare, help finding jobs, and food assistance. When looking at perceived discrimination, means scores for discrimination were significantly greater for participants who indicated needing housing services, who indicated needing assistance enrolling children in school and who indicated needing food assistance, compared to participants who did not list those needs. Venezuelans who had experienced greater negative context of reception were less likely to indicate needing mental health services, where 11.9 percent of those who did not perceive a negative context of reception responded that they needed mental health services.

Evaluating existing service networks will be essential in working to bridge the gap between the services provided to and requested by Venezuelans. Collaboration between diverse government actors, community-based organizations (CBOs) and other stakeholders can help identify gaps in existing service networks. CBOs can also facilitate communication between Venezuelan immigrants and their new communities, on the need to invest in necessary services.

 Journal on Migration and Human Security, 0(0).  (online 2023)

Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan

The events of September 11, 2001, have had a strong impact on theory and the humanities. They call for a new philosophy, as the old philosophy is inadequate to account for them. They also call for reflection on theory, philosophy, and the humanities in general. While the recent location and killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan on May 2, 2011—almost ten years after he and his confederates carried out the 9/11 attacks—may have ended the “war on terror,” it has not ended the journey to understand what it means to be a theorist in the age of phobos nor the effort to create a new philosophy that measures up with life in the new millennium. It is in the spirit of hope—the hope that theory will help us to understand the age of terror—that the essays in this collection are presented.

With essays by Christian Moraru, Terry Caesar, David B. Downing, Horace L. Fairlamb, Emory Elliott, Elaine Martin, Robin Truth Goodman, Sophia A. McClennen, William V. Spanos, Zahi Zalloua.

Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press - An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor , 2012. 250p.

By Nicholas Austin

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian Dominican friar and Catholic priest, is one of the most influential theologians in the Christian tradition. Scholarship on Aquinas is flourishing, with studies of natural law theory, action theory, the morality of the passions, feminism, political theory, etc. Yet despite the contemporary renewal of virtue ethics, to date no full-length treatment of Aquinas' theory of virtue exists. Aquinas on Virtues offers a new and comprehensive interpretation of how Aquinas uses the four causes--formal, material, final, and efficient--to understand virtue in general, and how these causes underlie his treatment of specific virtues that make up the bulk of his ethics. In the final part of the book Austin applies the causal approach to four contested issues in contemporary virtue theory: practical wisdom; virtue and the passions; the teleology (or ultimate end) of virtue; and infused moral virtues, exploring the relation between grace and virtue.

Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018. 258p.

Edited by Gerhard Ernst and Jan-Christoph Heilinger

The notion of "human rights" is widely used in political and moral debates. The core idea, that all human beings have some inalienable basic rights, is appealing and has an important practical function: It allows moral criticism of various wrongs and calls for action in order to prevent them. The articles in this collection take up a tension between the wide political use of human rights claims and some intellectual skepticism about them. In particular, three major issues call for clarification: the questions of how to justify human rights, how to determine their scope and the corresponding obligations, and how to overcome the tension between universal normative claims and particular moralities.

Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2011. 273p.

By Frauke Albersmeier

What is moral progress? Are we striving for moral progress when we seek to "make the world a better place"? What connects the different ways in which moral agents, their actions, and the world can become morally better? This book proposes an explication of the abstract concept of moral progress and explores its relation to our moral lives.

Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2022. 257p.

By John J. Dilulio, Jr..

FROM THE JACKET: “Do you know is you are going to heaven?" Shortly after being appointed the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives--the "faith czar." John J. Dilulio, Jr., was asked this question. Suddenly Dilulio, a practicing Catholic and a New Democrat who had pioneered "faith factor" studis and founded programs for inner-city children, became acutely aware that he was no longer a private citizen who might have humored the television evangelist standing before him. Now he was an Assistant to the President, as he recalls in his introduction-"someone responsible for assisting President George W. Bush in faithfully upholding the Constitution, faithfully executing democratically enacted public laws, and faithfully acting in the public interest without regard to religious identities (and all contrary political purposes be damned). So I paused.*

Using his brief tenure in the Bush administration as a springboard, Dilulio leaps into the ongoing debate over whether as a nation America is Christian or secular and to what degree church-state separation is compelled by the Constitution. Avoiding political pieties, this lively, informative, and entertaining book makes an impassioned case for a middle way: one that recognizes the United States as a "Godly republic" under whose Constitution sacred institutions may be empowered to partner with the government…”

Berkeley Los Angeles. University Of California Press. 2007.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP.

By Huston Smith

FROM THE PREFACE: “In the spring of 1995 I gave a course on The Religions of Man over KETC, The St.Louis educational television station. The response revealed a real hunger on the part of Americans to know the great faiths that have motivated and continue to motivate the peoples of the world. Over 1200 men and women in this one community enrolled as tuition-paying students while the viewing audience rose to the neighborhood of 100,000. The second thing the response revealed was the need for a different kind of book on world religions, a book which without sacrificing depth would move more rapidly than the usual survey into the meaning these religions carry for the lives of their adherents…”

NY. Harper & Row. 1986.

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By Edith Hamilton

FROM THE COVER: “The Classic Of Classics ...A father and husband caught up in a quarrel between gods and who finds his short sail home turning into a twenty-year journey filled with witches, storms, and one-eyed monsters. A family cursed by the sacrifice of a daughter in return for favorable sailing wnds a curse that can only be expiated in blood. A worried goddess who exacts a promise from all living things never to harm her son--but who misses one little, fatal shrub ….

"Classical mythology has long needed such a popular exposition as Miss Edith Hamilton has given us in this volume, which is at once a reference book and a book which may be read for stimulation and pleasure." -New York Times Book Review.

NY. Warner Books. 1942. 347p.

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By Sam Harris

FROM THE COVER: “In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs- even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic.

"The End of Faith is a genuinely frightening book. ... Read Sam Harris and wake up." -Richard Dawkins, The Guardian

NY. W•W• Norton. 2004. 341p.

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By Susan Jacoby

FROM THE JACKET: At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers celebrates the noble and essential secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, Susan Jacoby offers a powerful defense of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth-century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with tolerant and liberal religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for social reforms opposed by reactionaries in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow--as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great Agnostic"-Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanist champions. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the unique combination of secular government and religious liberty that is and always has been the glory of the American system.

NY. Henry Holt and Company. 2004. 441p.

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By Frank Morison

FROM THE COVER: “I wanted to take this last phase of the life of Jesus, with all its quick and pulsating drama, its sharp, clear-cut background of antiquity, and its tremendous psychological and human intersEt - -to strip it of its overgrowth of primitive beliefs, dogmatic suppositions, and to see this supremely great Person as He really was.”

Such was English journalist Frank Morison's drive to learn of Christ. The strangeness of the Resurrection story had captured his attention, and, influenced by skeptic thinkers at the turn of the century, he set out to prove that the story of Christ's Resurrection was only a myth. His probings, however, led him to discover the validity of the biblical record in a moving, personal way. Who Moved the Stone? is considered by many to be a classic apologetic on the subject of the Resurrection. Morison includes a vivid and poignant account of Christ's betrayal, trial, and death as a backdrop to his retelling of the climactic Resurrection itself.”

Grand Rapids. Michigan. Lamplighters Books. 1958 (1930) 192p.

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By Dr. Benjamin Spock and Michael Zimmerman

FROM THE COVER: “The Untold Story of Vietnam- WHAT IS THE TRUTH? What would happen if the U.S. stopped the bombing? Or pulled out her troops? Or else went after total military victory? Are we in Vietnam because of a request from the Vietnamese people? Or because of treaty obligations? Or because of past pledges? Do the Viet Cong hold the people in check through terror? Is the war in the South an invasion from the North? What was the significance of the recent South Vietnamese elections? How valid is the "domino theory? What is the danger from China? Is the United States being threatened? Can we believe what our own government tells us? You may think you have the answers to these ques tions. You may not be quite as sure when you finish this book by a famous American who could no longer remain silent.

NY. Dell. 1968. 96p.

Edited by Liisa Janssens

New technologies are often implemented before their ethical consequences have been fully understood. In this volume, experts working in the sciences, arts, and philosophy of technology share novel perspectives on how we can

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. 144p.

By Donelson R. Forsyth

This fascinating new book examines diversity in moral judgements, drawing on recent work in social, personality, and evolutionary psychology, reviewing the factors that influence the moral judgments people make. Why do reasonable people so often disagree when drawing distinctions between what is morally right and wrong? Even when individuals agree in their moral pronouncements, they may employ different standards, different comparative processes, or entirely disparate criteria in their judgments. Examining the sources of this variety, the author expertly explores morality using ethics position theory, alongside other theoretical perspectives in moral psychology, and shows how it can relate to contemporary social issues from abortion to premarital sex to human rights. Also featuring a chapter on applied contexts, using the theory of ethics positions to gain insights into the moral choices and actions of individuals, groups, and organizations in educational, research, political, medical, and business settings, the book offers answers that apply across individuals, communities, and cultures. Investigating the relationship between people’s personal moral philosophies and their ethical thoughts, emotions, and actions, this is fascinating reading for students and academics from psychology and philosophy and anyone interested in morality and ethics.

New York: Routledge, 2010. 211p.