An in-depth analysis of how humanity’s compulsion to categorize affects every aspect of our lived experience. The minute we are born—sometimes even before—we are categorized. From there, classifications dog our every step: to school, work, the doctor’s office, and even the grave. Despite the vast diversity and individuality in every life, we seek patterns, organization, and control. In Categories We Live By, Gregory L. Murphy considers the categories we create to manage life’s sprawling diversity. Analyzing everything from bureaucracy’s innumerable categorizations to the minutiae of language, this book reveals how these categories are imposed on us and how that imposition affects our everyday lives. Categories We Live By explores categorization in two parts. In part one, Murphy introduces the groundwork of categories—how they are created by experts, imperfectly captured by language, and employed by rules. Part two provides a number of case studies. Ranging from trivial categories such as parking regulations and peanut butter to critical issues such as race and mortality, Murphy demonstrates how this need to classify pervades everything. Finally, this comprehensive analysis demonstrates ways that we can cope with categorical disagreements and make categories more useful to our society.

We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? Ásta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful? In a careful, probing investigation, she reveals how social categories are created and sustained and demonstrates their tendency to oppress through examples from current events. To this end, she offers an account of just what social construction is and how it works in a range of examples that problematize the categories of sex, gender, and race in particular. The main idea is that social categories are conferred upon people. Ásta introduces a 'conferralist' framework in order to articulate a theory of social meaning, social construction, and most importantly, of the construction of sex, gender, race, disability, and other social categories.

This book employs a unique approach to introducing and examining sociological principles by posing and answering in each chapter a question such as What does it mean to be human?; Are human beings free?; and Why is there misery in the world? The book examines the philosophies of classical sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, and Berger and looks at how the field of sociology has approached these questions over the past 150 years.

A new reading of Heidegger's reappropriation of Aristotle in his early work.

This is a poignant study of fifty registered nurses who have chosen to specialize in the care of HIV-infected patients in New York City. The nurses explain how they and their patients come to terms with fear, anger, rejection, abandonment, and death.

"In his discussion of Quality, Aristotle reports a debate on whether justice admits of degrees, or whether only the possession of justice does so. Simplicius reports the further development of this controversy in terms of whether justice admits a range or latitude (platos). This debate helped to inspire the medieval idea of latitude of forms, which thus goes back much further than is commonly recognized - at least as far in the past as Plato and Aristotle."--BOOK JACKET.

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This dissertation explores how Jewish Israeli constructed amongst themselves experientially "real" Religiously-Informed social borders. Building upon numerous previous works that draw from documentary or survey data to explore israeli-jewish religious border-making as seen from a global perspective, this work uses detailed ethnographic material, in particular life stories and personal narratives, to examine the multiple processes constructing these boundaries as seen from the less considered local perspective