Böcker utgivna av Academica Press

Timeless Turmoil offers a comprehensive historical and comparative analysis of recent conflicts in Kosovo, Abkhazia, and the Tskhinvali region, examining their geopolitical dynamics from ancient times to the present. With a focus on post-Soviet transitions, noted Georgian international relations scholar Kakhaber Kalichava explores Russia's role in shaping these conflicts, particularly how Russia has strategically exploited them to maintain influence in post-Soviet space. The book also assesses Western recognition of Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 and how it has been leveraged by Russia to support its narrative of the recent Georgian conflicts. As the first book to locate comparisons of Kosovo and Georgia's breakaway regions, Timeless Turmoil reveals both shared and distinct characteristics of those conflicts, fresh insights into the geopolitical landscape of the Balkans and the Caucasus, and a balanced and scholarly perspective on some of the most significant conflicts of our era.

Offers a discussion of John Henry Newman's apologetic defence of the place of Marian doctrines and piety within Catholicism. This is achieved through an analysis of the two of Newman's most important apologetic works: the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) and Letter to Pusey (1866).

The Olavo de Carvalho Reader, a far-reaching selection of philosophical essays by the celebrated Brazilian philosopher available for the first time in English, presents indispensable writings that have generated an intellectual revival in Brazil and beyond. Following Carvalho's definition of philosophy as the "search for unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness, and vice-versa," it lays out the historical roots of the current cultural crisis in the West-both in the phenomenon he called "cognitive parallax" and then in the advent of the "revolutionary mind." Averse to utopian thinking, Carvalho's analyses are often responses to events that have shaped the history of ideas and their factual consequences. His approach seeks truth and expresses reality as Carvalho sees it, resisting pressure to conform to the collective and reaffirming the power of individual consciousness. In writings from a period of over three decades, this edition introduces the reader to one of the greatest philosophers of our time.

Writers Like Us is a poignant literary memoir by Barnaby Conrad, who had the good fortune to be mentored by Sinclair Lewis, the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the spring of 1947, the 25 year-old Conrad was living in Santa Barbara, California, when he met Lewis. Conrad was struggling with his first novel, while Lewis, then 62, was in the twilight of his career. While they both had studied at Yale and had the same literary agent, they could not have been more different. A charming San Francisco-native, Conrad had been a dashing diplomat in Spain during World War II, an amateur bullfighter, a cocktail pianist, and a gifted portrait artist. Lewis was an awkward but strident genius from the Midwest, a sharp-tongued literary giant whose face had been ravaged by skin cancer. He had been married and divorced twice and was deeply lonely. Conrad was in awe of Lewis's global stature and charmed by his crusty humor and humanity. This Odd Couple instantly developed a camraderie. For four summer months, Conrad worked as Lewis's personal secretary, chauffeur, and chess partner at Thorvale, a 700-acre estate near Williamstown, Massachusetts. In turn, Lewis mentored the young man's first novel-in-progress. Although Sinclair Lewis has fallen out of fashion, many agree that no one wrote more clearly about America than he did. Barnaby Conrad's Writers LIke Us, is a fascinating literary memoir about the intertwined lives of authors and the elusive nature of literary success.

Professors Speak Out showcases the powerful stories of eighteen university professors from various fields and backgrounds, all of whom have been investigated by their academic institutions. These shocking narratives reflect the rising frequency and increasing absurdity of campus investigations, which often result from the expression of disfavored opinions that should be protected by inalienable free speech rights and longstanding principles of academic freedom. As the reader will learn, the investigation itself is often the punishment, though the process can inflict serious additional sanctions. Some contributors lost their jobs, while others have faced a variety of other unwarranted consequences. By providing a badly needed platform for persecuted voices in contemporary academia, this unique volume exposes the grave injustice that menaces faculty members today and calls into serious question the reprehensible bureaucratic processes that allow for such investigations. Taken together, the eighteen contributors show how a new campus McCarthyism is brutally assaulting academic freedom.

A Kind of Pantheism: Escape from Cosmic Pessimism and the Quest for a Biocentric Ethic explores how such nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir advanced a biocentric ethic that recognized the intrinsic worth of both plants and animals. This ethic required a pantheistic cosmology to be coherent, however. As science progressed, with developments in evolutionary biology and ecology, the paths of environmental ethics and animal rights diverged. But at the turn of the twentieth century, the nature writer Joseph Wood Krutch, inspired by quantum theory, provided a crucial link that reconnected these fields-a contribution often overlooked even by his own biographers.This book traces the historical development of humanity's attitudes toward the non-human world, highlighting the influence of philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas. In addition to Krutch, it brings attention to such lesser-known figures as Henry Stephens Salt and John Howard Moore, emphasizing their roles in shaping biocentric thought. Ultimately, the book argues that animal rights and environmental ethics are two expressions of the same biocentric outlook. By focusing on Krutch's unique contribution, the book offers a way for secular thinkers to reclaim a pantheistic ethic. In the process, A Kind of Pantheism solves the problem of "cosmic pessimism"-which postulates the cold and meaningless universe implied by modern science, a concept that often undercuts the very ethic it suggests. Through the process of free inqiury, new answers emerge.

Afrikaners have long been portrayed as the villains of South Africa's apartheid state. Because they were such intensely vilified pariahs, many Americans and Europeans remain intrigued by Afrikaners as a vestige of white nationalism living in Africa who nevertheless peacefully transferred political power to South Africa's black majority. Afrikaner Identity tells the longer story of the Afrikaners, starting with the emergence of an accidental Dutch colony at Cape Town in the seventeenth century, and explores how these people came to see themselves distinctly as Afrikaners ("Africans") and why this identity assumed the shape that it did over time. Further, the book unpacks the complex interactions between the emergent identity of "Afrikaner-ness" and the slaves they imported from Asia, Cape-based Khoisan clans, British settlers, and (later) the tribes of the African interior. Eric Louw explains how 150 years of Afrikaner conflict with British imperialism played a pivotal role in shaping Afrikaner identity and also gave rise to the phenomenon of Afrikaner nationalism. Louw also tells how Afrikaner migration modified the community's identity as it came into contact with black Africans. This encounter not only shaped the future of Southern Africa but also influenced how Afrikaners came to view themselves as they faced the new challenges of British hegemony, the Boer War, and the rise of Afrikaner nationalism over the first half of the twentieth century, a process that eventually replaced British power with Afrikaner hegemony and imposed apartheid, in part to deconstruct the British-made state of South Africa. Afrikaner Identity concludes with the transition to black-majority rule since 1994 and Afrikaners' new role as a politically disempowered white minority with new challenges to their identity.

In From Metaphysics to Decision Making, Alexander Mitjashin argues that the laws of logic should be regarded as a paraphrase of an ontology - an understanding of "being" - whose components are distinct one from another, no matter how similar we may consider them. This approach allows us to remove antinomies without using any axiomatic method. The bases of that ontology are much easier to understand than the ones of symbolic logic and may enable us to introduce optimal societal decision making in the realm of public policy. Since metaphysics implies no choice in general methods of thought, it should exclude skepticism. Using Emmy Noether's theorem of physics, in its simplest and most easily understandable form, we can infer that the problem of skeptical doubts of David Hume's kind are removed.

The Law of Interrogations and Confessions traces the evolution of the primary approaches that U.S. courts have taken to regulating the interrogation of suspects by law enforcement officers. It examines the due process approach to the voluntariness of statements; the short-lived "focus of the investigation" test of Escobedo v. Illinois; the landmark Fifth Amendment approach announced in Miranda v. Arizona; and the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel approach to regulating the "deliberate elicitation" of incriminating statements. Henry F. Fradella's authoritative book focuses on lower court interpretations of leading U.S. Supreme Court precedents with regard to issues such as determining when someone is in "custody" and subject to "interrogation" for Fifth Amendment purposes; the form, manner, and timing of Miranda warnings; the impact of multiple interrogations; the validity and scope of expressed and implied waivers; and the counters of Sixth Amendment protections to preserve suspects' rights to counsel in the interrogation context after formal criminal proceedings have been initiated.

What are the unequivocal causes of a scientific revolution? In The Origin of Scientific Revolutions, Rinat Nugayev proposes an ideal model that strives to reconcile cognitive and social facets of the advancement of science and to provide analytical tools for studying the social mechanisms by which diverse structures of scientific knowledge evolve and interweave. Like Bruno Latour, Nugayev strengthens efforts in landing the sky-high epistemological models of scientific revolutions. In the wake of Stephen Shapin, Philip Kitcher, and Helen Longino, this book takes a further step on the path of explanation for the mundane reasons for the triumph of the novel paradigm over the old one. Yet a corresponding expansion of the epistemological basis of research requires historical analysis of the forms of rationality in the "phenomenological perspective" proposed by Husserl and Heidegger. The history of cognition constitutes a series of epochs of' "unconcealment," with the integrity of each 'mathematical projection of nature' provided by reconciliation, plexus, and interpenetration of sundry practices. Profound breakthroughs in science were not due to ingenious contrivances of brave novel paradigms or invention of immaculate ideas ex nihilo. The breakthroughs were caused, among other things, by the harrowing piecemeal processes of accommodation, interpenetration, and intertwinement of old research traditions preceding the radical breaks.

What is postmodernism -- postmodernism as philosophy -- and what should we think of it? The first eight chapters of Julian Young's new book examine the thought of key postmodernist philosophers: Lyotard, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Vattimo, Rorty, and Judith Butler. In the final chapter, Young turns to the question of what makes them "postmodernists." His conclusion is that postmodernism is best thought of as composed of two elements: "descriptive postmodernism" and "normative postmodernism." Descriptive postmodernism is the sociological thesis that in the middle of the twentieth century a rupture occurred in Western society that was sufficiently radical to differentiate "modernity" and "postmodernity" into two different historical epochs. What defines our new epoch is, above all, the loss of "grand narratives" -- or, as Nietzsche called it, "the death of God." Normative postmodernism is the view that we should accept, even celebrate, our "postmodern condition." With some exceptions, postmodernist philosophers subscribe to both the descriptive and the normative theses. Young argues that while descriptive postmodernism presents an essentially true account of our current cultural condition, that condition is a pathological development in the history of the West. Since postmodern philosophy welcomes the condition it, too, he concludes, is a pathological development. Grand narratives are something we need, so we should not celebrate their loss. Postmodernists, in Young's assessment, use obscure and fuzzy language. Generally hailing from literary rather than philosophical backgrounds, their commentators are often even more obscurer and fuzzier. Writing as a philosopher, Young attempts to subject the postmodernists to philosophical standards of cogency and clarity.

Scholars of Richard Wagner's works have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our understanding of his art systematically. Paul Heise's quest to grasp the allegorical unity underlying Wagner's canonical artworks began in the 1970s. Following his allegorical interpretation of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, The Wound That Will Never Heal (Academica Press, 2021), this fresh installment of Heise's lifelong Wagner project will demonstrate how the composer employed key facets of the plots of his first three canonical operas The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin in building the sophisticated allegorical superstructure which culminated in his Ring of the Nibelung and his other mature music-dramas, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal. This study casts a retrospective light on the many meanings hidden within these three operas, which were the prequel to the Ring, revealing their heretofore subliminal content as never before.

Scholars devoted to analysis of Richard Wagner's operas and music-dramas have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our systematic understanding of his art. Following Heise's allegorical interpretation of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, The Wound That Will Never Heal (Academica Press, 2021), this second installment of the author's lifelong Wagner project will examine Wagner's mature music-dramas Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal in light of their relationship to the Ring as understood through Heise's allegorical interpretation. It will demonstrate how Wagner's Ring is a master-myth which can make sense of these other mature music-dramas as never before.

America is suffering from a deep spiritual crisis. The national polarization that so many miscast as political is really a conflict between two spiritual solutions pointing in drastically different directions. One is Wokeism, a new religion that speaks most clearly to America's spiritually starved young, urban, credentialed, professional elites. Its unique takes on race, gender, climate, virology, and misinformation provide adherents with an understanding of persistent unfairness and inequality, pervasive evil, the true self, the end of days, the source of ritual, and the dangers of blasphemy-effectively filling core spiritual needs without ever conceding that such needs exist. The Woke, who deny that theirs is a faith, are rapidly turning Wokeism into the established religion of the United States. The other solution is the American Spirit, a reconnection with our nation's spiritual roots and the traditional faiths that fueled them. For far too long, we have denied the existence of such a spirit, seen it as a source of shame, buried it, or recast it as an embarrassing artifact of an older time. The way forward thus requires us to face a harsh reality: we are mired in a deep spiritual crisis, the new religion of Wokeism is ascendant, and only a revival of America's founding spirit can preserve the American nation and save the Republic.

Nuclear Agendas in Japan and Taiwan compares practical management cases regarding nuclear energy in regional neighbouring partners: Japan and Taiwan. An introductory overview of Japan's nuclear policy leads to the specification of important factors tangible in everyday life. What we perceive as knowledge transfer innovation and renewed industrial assessments shift to a regional territory that develops its own rules and practices within the dimension of nuclear energy innovation technology and post-crisis regulatory agendas. This literature-based discussion refers to complementary systems and recovery practices that have been envisioned in a post-Fukushima nuclear adaptive model. Thematic information about environmental effects and institutional partnerships advance the idea of a comparable ecosystem in which deliberative processes undertaken in Japan follow science, technology, and societal (STS) exchanges that form concurrent regional action plans with contextual disaster risk arrangements. Taiwan is an essential complementary innovation case reviewed in this analysis for contextual environmental policy directions. Reflections about regional knowledge transfers and energy innovation technology in Taiwan highlight some history-related factors that can facilitate a specific understanding of regional innovation in Asia-Pacific and local energy innovation partnerships. Nuclear energy organizational plans for Taiwan are introduced in association with the (STS) approach due to comparable socioeconomic dynamics that can deeply influence science and technology enterprises and Taiwanese localities, thereby offering objective participation. In both Japanese and Taiwanese nuclear regulatory cases, this technical account indicates the build-up of communication systems and a regional development framework that has been reformed progressively, but nevertheless shows an increased tendency to classify promotional learning networks through safety and security schemes intertwined with nuclear energy transitions worldwide.