Böcker utgivna av University of Chicago Press

A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism. Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two approaches to the spiritual malaise of our times: either we need more God (the "turn to religion") or less religion (the New Atheism). In this book, Brook Ziporyn proposes an alternative that avoids both totalizing theomania and meaningless empiricism. What we need, he argues, is a deeper, more thoroughgoing, even religious rejection of God: an affirmative atheism without either a Creator to provide meaning or finite creatures in need of it--a mystical atheism. In the legacies of Daoism and Buddhism as well as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Ziporyn discovers a critique of theism that develops into a new, positive sensibility--at once deeply atheist and richly religious. Experiments in Mystical Atheism argues that these "godless epiphanies" hold the key to renewing philosophy today.

A philosopher excavates the origins of our state of permanent crisis and charts a more promising path forward. Crises abound--so many that it can be easy to lose perspective. In A Philosophy of Crisis, Miguel de Beistegui traces the intellectual development of ideas about crisis and identifies four distinct forms a crisis might take: crises of deviation, exception, contradiction, and extinction. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and ecocriticism), A Philosophy of Crisis offers new conceptual tools for both understanding and avoiding the dangers of our crisis-saturated time.

How corporations used mass media to teach Americans that capitalism was natural and patriotic, exposing the porous line between propaganda and public service. Business As Usual reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games--what Caroline Jack calls "sponsored economic education media." These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to "sell America to Americans," found their way into communities, classrooms, workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of "free enterprise" under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant--a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility--and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care.

A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies. The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme's association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor and a challenge to twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a forgotten style of literary-historical thought, The Burden of Rhyme reveals the unacknowledged influence of Victorian poetics--and its repudiation--on the development of modern literary criticism.

Moving through the realms of digital technologies, these poems cut to the core of our physical human experiences amid a virtually mediated world. Diving through illusions and phantoms of virtual realms and into the human desire for boundless possibility, Infinity Pool charts the ways technologies have become embedded in our minds, bodies, and lives. Immersed in a world of data streams, neural nets, spider algorithms, and electronic terminals, Jonathan Thirkield's poems plumb the dissonances and shrinking distances between ourselves and digital technologies, imagining what becomes of the fragile machinery of the human body amid a rapidly transforming world. Thirkield turns to language as a mediator and explores infinity as a mathematical concept, a multiverse conceit, and a driver of the computational imagination. Traveling across the full spectrum of digital experience--from satellites crossing the edges of our solar system to microscopic bytes that operate beneath our perception--this collection is a testament to the future we imagine ourselves to be living through and to what happens when our escapist desires give way to the realities of birth, loss, parenthood, and sickness. Through lyrical, narrative, and formal mutations, these poems cut through a decade of exponential technological growth, landing in the reality of our corporeal experiences: the isolation of chronic illness, the daunting journeys of children growing up today, and the hope that we can remain connected to each other no matter how tenuous the ties.

An ethnographic analysis of how insecurity is at the heart of contemporary higher education. Institutions of higher education are often described as "ivory towers," places of privilege where students exist in a "campus bubble," insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that's simply not the case. Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.

Takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages--and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies. Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making--with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims--dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today's society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global--and yet more human--than the story that dominates public understanding today. Coke's research isn't fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.

An ambitious venture into Nietzsche's envisioned philosophy for the future. Nietzsche advocated for a post-theistic "philosophy of the future"--a new approach to human reality that would bend Western thought away from nihilism in a life-affirming, value-creative direction. His early demise left this endeavor only just begun. In Nietzsche Pursued, Richard Schacht examines Nietzsche's revisionist approach to familiar philosophical topics, exploring how some may be further pursued in Nietzschean ways. Each chapter focuses on one topic that is central to Nietzsche's vision of what philosophy can and should be and do. Among them: his kind of naturalism, humanity, perspectivism, morality, and music. Building on his analysis in Nietzsche's Kind of Philosophy, Schacht invites readers to see with new appreciation the ongoing significance of Nietzsche's thought for philosophy's future.

A wide-ranging examination of how policies, parties, and labor strength affect inequality in post-industrial societies. Not all countries are unequal in the same ways or to the same degree. In Challenging Inequality, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens analyze different patterns of increasing income inequality in post-industrial societies since the 1980s, assessing the policies and social structures best able to mitigate against the worst effects of market inequality. Combining statistical data analysis from twenty-two countries with a comparative historical analysis of Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, Huber and Stephens identify the factors that drive increases in inequality and shape persistent, marked differences between countries. Their statistical analysis confirms generalizable patterns and in-depth country studies help to further elucidate the processes at work. Challenging Inequality shows how the combination of globalization and skill-biased technological change has led to both labor market dualization and rising unemployment levels, which in turn have had important effects on inequality and poverty. Labor strength--at both the society level and the enterprise level--has helped to counter rising market income inequality, as has a history of strong human capital spending. The generosity of the welfare state remains the most important factor shaping redistribution, while the consistent power of left parties is the common denominator behind both welfare state generosity and human capital investment.

A contemporary defense of conservationist Aldo Leopold's vision for human interaction with the environment. Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the "land community" or the "biotic community"--communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields. Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta Millstein reexamines Leopold's land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold's ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.

An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy. In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra "So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble." For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their "supervisor," and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children's lives changed dramatically. Nobody's Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins's story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody's Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century.

A thought-provoking history of touch in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. This book tells the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain through a single sense--touch. In this time and place, historian Simeon Koole argues, our sense of ourselves and others as physical bodies changed as new encounters made us both more intimate and more vulnerable. Taking us inside different spaces--subway cars, tea shops, classrooms, police stations, foggy London streets--Koole shows how the experience of touch was transformed. At its core, Intimate Subjects is about the nexus of embodiment and modernity. In addition to analyzing specific spaces, he also examines how the emerging disciplines of neurology and experimental psychology sought to understand the connections between sensation and selfhood. Tracing understandings, experiences, and practices of touch, this book shows us how personal space--and its disruption--shapes history.

An enlightening examination of what it means when Americans rely on family and friends to stay on top of politics. Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on mass media, but the reality is that many Americans today do not learn about politics from direct engagement with the news. Rather, about one-third of Americans learn chiefly from information shared by their peers in conversation or on social media. How does this socially transmitted information differ from that communicated by traditional media? What are the consequences for political attitudes and behavior? Drawing on evidence from experiments, surveys, and social media, Taylor N. Carlson finds that, as information flows first from the media then person to person, it becomes sparse, more biased, less accurate, and more mobilizing. The result is what Carlson calls distorted democracy. Although socially transmitted information does not necessarily render democracy dysfunctional, Through the Grapevine shows how it contributes to a public that is at once underinformed, polarized, and engaged.

A foundational new collection examining the mechanics of privacy in the digital age. The falling costs of collecting, storing, and processing data have allowed firms and governments to improve their products and services, but have also created databases with detailed individual-level data that raise privacy concerns. This volume summarizes the research on the economics of privacy and identifies open questions on the value of privacy, the roles of property rights and markets for privacy and data, the relationship between privacy and inequality, and the political economy of privacy regulation. Several themes emerge across the chapters. One is that it may not be possible to solve privacy concerns by creating a market for the right to privacy, even if property rights are well-defined and transaction costs are low. Another is that it is difficult to measure and value the benefits of privacy, particularly when individuals have an intrinsic preference for privacy. Most previous attempts at valuation have focused only on quantifiable economic outcomes, such as innovation. Finally, defining privacy through an economic lens is challenging. The broader academic and legal literature includes many distinct definitions of privacy, and different definitions may be appropriate in different contexts. The chapters explore a variety of frameworks for examining these questions and provide a range of new perspectives on the role of economics research in understanding the benefits and costs of privacy and of data flows. As the digital economy continues to expand the scope of economic theory and research, The Economics of Privacy provides the most comprehensive survey to date of this field and its next steps.

A fresh look at the global dimensions of US painting from the 1850s to 1898. Painting US Empire is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Maggie M. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters' complicity and resistance in the face of ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical paintings: landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, genre painting, and ethnographic portraiture. Revealing how the US empire was "hidden in plain sight" in the art of this period, Cao examines artists who both championed and expressed ambivalence toward the colonial project. She also tackles the legacy of US imperialism, examining Euro-American painters of the past alongside global artists of the present. Pairing each chapter with reflections on works by contemporary anticolonial artists including Maria Thereza Alves, Tavares Strachan, Nicholas Galanin, Yuki Kihara, and Carlos Martiel, Cao addresses current questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity. This book foregrounds an overlooked topic in the study of nineteenth-century US art and illuminates the ongoing ecological and economic effects of the US empire.

A new collection of essays reflecting on the centrality of writing anthropological practice from one of the discipline's most influential thinkers. Michael Taussig's work is known for its critical insights and bold, experimental style. In the eleven essays in this new collection, Taussig reflects on the act of writing itself, demonstrating its importance for anthropological practice and calling for the discipline to keep experiential knowledge from being extinguished as fieldnotes become scholarship. Setting out to show how this can be done, And the Garden Is You exemplifies a form of exploratory writing that preserves the spontaneity of notes scribbled down in haste. In these essays, the author's reflections take us from his childhood in Sydney to trips to Afghanistan, Colombia, Finland, Italy, Turkey, and Syria. Along the way, Taussig explores themes of fabulation and provocation that are central to his life's work, in addition to the thinkers dearest to him--Bataille, Benjamin, Burroughs, and Nietzsche, among others. This collection is vintage Taussig, bound to interest longtime readers and newcomers alike.

A revelatory critique of public display in the United States. In Religion in Plain View, Sally M. Promey analyzes religion's visible saturation of American public space and the histories that shaped this exhibitionary aesthetics. In street art, vehicle décor, signs, monuments, architecture, zoning policy, and more, Promey exposes American display's merger of evangelicalism, capitalism, and imperialism. From this convergence, display materializes a distinctly American drive to advertise, claim territory, invalidate competitors, and fabricate a tractable national heritage. Charting this aesthetics' strategic work as a Protestant technology of white nation formation, Religion in Plain View offers a dynamic critique of the ways public display perpetuates deeply ingrained assumptions about the proper shape of life and land in the United States.

What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past--from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century--one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives--including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have indeed been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and he invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally changed how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.

How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers' visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state. In 1918, South Africa's climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren't disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers' agricultural practices--an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari's basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick's timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz's plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.