Beyond Duality and Polarization explores an experience-based learning model, the Phenomenal Patterning approach for personal transformation. Rather than traditional prescriptive learning, methods of personal discovery help us understand how the human mind actually functions. Dr. Koziey introduces two modern Zen skills, watching and catharsis, to increase self-awareness. This frees us from habitual patterns we learned in childhood. We identify the patterns of our own thinking and behaving and see that many of the problems we face are self-created. Repressions are revealed in the shadow psyche and we are able to dissolve our negativity. The overriding message is that when we stop fighting, life starts flowing again.

Environmental destruction, animal abuse, and widespread indifference toward plants and elemental systems demand that a human-centric view of the world be permanently dismantled. But once it is, what functional hierarchies take its place, if any? This volume brings Alfred North Whitehead's process-relational worldview into conversation with deeper empirical perspectives on science and religion, with activist and de/constructive philosophies, with South Asian and indigenous traditions, and with...

Is death the final event in human life, or does another existence follow? What are the signs and possible proofs of such continuity? Such questions have sparked speculation in philosophy, religion, art, and science throughout human history and remain a familiar concern for even the most casual observer of the human condition. In his provocative new book, Fred Frohock explores the possibility that our existence is neither defined by nor limited to the purely physical-nor is it terminated at death. Fearlessly pursuing such a sensitive subject, Frohock suggests that death's domain may not be quite the "undiscovered country" lamented by Hamlet. He wades boldly into the debates between hardcore materialists and devout spiritualists; provides glimpses of recent findings in brain research, the so-called mind-body problem, and consciousness studies; and in general offers an idiosyncratic introduction to some of the most provocative and least understood aspects of what we call "conscious" life. In the process, he provides fresh insights into the narratives, claims, and conundrums associated with life after death, near-death and out-of-body experiences, reincarnation, and a host of psychic phenomena that continue to puzzle the experts. Demonstrating a keen grasp of subjects ranging from neurochemistry to popular culture, Frohock is a sure-footed tour guide through a richly diverse field of research. He considers what past life regression therapy suggests about reincarnation, assessing the credibility of pioneering research by Brian Weiss and Ian Stevenson. He introduces readers to the work of the University of Virginia's Near Death Experience Project, with reports stretching back 35 years, and the Human Consciousness Project's study of 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. And he contemplates whether people in permanent vegetative states, like Terri Schiavo and Sunny von Blow, are alive or not-and what these transitional states tell us about death. Leavened with humor and a Renaissance-style intellect that draws in Tolstoy and Hemingway along with films like Solaris and Blade Runner, Frohock's deep meditations are deftly interposed with brief fictional interludes that humanize his book's more abstract dimensions while exploring claims about the supernatural. Approaching the world's most baffling subjects with a critical eye, an open mind, and an agnostic's heart, Beyond looks beyond the last threshold and points the way toward a better understanding of human existence.

This book of 10 engaging and original essays brings Spinoza outside the realm of academic philosophy, and presents him as a thinker who is relevant to contemporary problems and questions across a variety of disciplines.

Through an examination of the work of great scholars from fields including philosophy, literature, philology, semiology, quantum physics, history, and anthropology, this book argues that building on the contribution of non-economists can open new areas of reflection in economics beyond the usual schools of thought. The purpose of the book is twofold. First, it offers a critique and discussion of the limits of contemporary economic discourse, both mainstream and self-styled alternative theories. The central theme on which the book is built is that the discipline of economics fails to examine the nature of social reality in a systematic way. This prompts the economists to become fully aware of the methodology on which they base their representation, analysis, and argumentation in a way that economists currently are not. Second, the book proposes alternative ways of thinking that can help readers of economics to overcome the current limitations of their discipline. This means going beyond various dominant dualities – orthodox/heterodox, micro/ macro, epistemology/ontology – because it is not a question of doing ‘the economy’ differently, but of overcoming the economy as a representation of the world that strives to submit everything to its realm. Thus, the book does not simply propose a broader conceptual framework than that portrayed by mainstream economists or those who propose an alternative approach but raises questions that do not usually come from the minds of economists at all. The book will be of particular interest to readers of economic methodology and pluralism, philosophers of science, and other social scientists interested in methodological issues.

This book addresses the flaws and fallacies in the grounds for atheism and theism – flaws and fallacies that contaminate the arguments of non-believers and believers alike. Focusing on the highly visible debates between the New Atheists – such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris on the one hand – and their main theist opponents – including Frank Turek, John Lennox, and William Lane Craig on the other – it approaches these debates from the perspective of the sociology of religion and science. With entire worldviews at stake, it explores various failings in the logic, language, and knowledge of the protagonists, revealing mistaken and oversimplified understandings of both science itself and the sociocultural and symbolic roles of religion on both sides. Advancing a secular and humanist worldview unburdened by the problems that beset both atheism and theism, the author argues for a sociological perspective on religion, God, and science as a practice, together with a critical realist approach to the nature of the real world as we experience it. Beyond New Atheism and Theism will therefore appeal to scholars and students of sociology and cultural studies with interests in the conflicting worldviews of science and religion.

Interpretative Qualitative Research: Agency, Subjectivity, and Experience frames the concerns and processes of standard analytic induction, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interaction in terms of cutting-edge issues for contemporary qualitative research. It is the first book to demonstrate how interpretive paradigms for qualitative data analysis produce research findings that are rooted to significantly different understandings of personal agency and social structures; subjectivity and identity; and, the nature of human experience. Specifically, the book explores the analytical process, interpretative power, and political effects of these three styles of interpretative research. The result is a rich, pedagogical resource that explores not only how data is interpreted but also the kinds of problems, solutions, and questions that can be investigated.

Thus the virtues of absolute idealism are re-examined, as are the wider consequences of adopting its understanding of truth within the philosophy of science."--BOOK JACKET.

"She's hysterical." For centuries, the term "hysteria" has been used by physicians and laymen to diagnose and dismiss the extreme emotionality and mysterious physical disorders presumed to bedevil others—especially women. How did this medical concept assume its power? What cultural purposes does it serve? Why do different centuries and different circumstances produce different kinds of hysteria? These are among the questions pursued in this absorbing, erudite reevaluation of the history of hysteria. The widely respected authors draw upon the insights of social and cultural history, rather than Freudian psychoanalysis, to examine the ways in which hysteria has been conceived by doctors and patients, writers and artists, in Europe and North America, from antiquity to the early years of the twentieth century. In so doing, they show that a history of hysteria is a history of how we understand the mind. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.