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American author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 work Hitler's Willing Executioners is one of the most controversial history books of modern times. While most historians have sought to explain the horror of the Holocaust by focusing on Nazi leaders and their ideologies, Goldhagen set out to investigate whether ordinary Germans enthusiastically embraced their goals. His conclusion: "eliminationist anti-Semitism"-a genocidal hatred of Jews unique to Germany-caused...
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Advertisements for soap. The image of a film star. The sight of a car as beautiful as a goddess. We accept all these common objects and experiences as a normal part of our life, and as timeless and universal as myth. But they are also carrying hidden messages that none of us even suspect, as Barthes demonstrates with a unique analysis of the signs that generate meanings and assumptions we all take for granted. These things have been "taken out of...
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In Citizen and Subject, Ugandan academic and author Mahmood Mamdani challenges dominant views about the crisis of postcolonial Africa. Many studies emphasize that the problems the continent faces are home grown-the consequence of poor government, widespread corruption, and other local factors. Citizen and Subject challenged these ideas. It argues that the current crisis has come about because of the institutional legacy of colonialism.
According...
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How do we know what knowledge is? In his 1963 article "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" American philosopher Edmund Gettier radically challenged the accepted definition of knowledge itself.
Greek philosopher Plato, discussing knowledge well over 2000 years ago, defined it as "justified true belief." To be considered knowledge a proposition had to fulfill three criteria: A) It is true. B) You believe it to be true. C) You are justified in believing...
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Drawing on the work of renowned evolutionary scientists, Dawkins makes his argument about evolution by focusing on the gene itself. While others considered evolution to occur at the level of the individual or the group, here Dawkins sees the process of natural selection differently.
For him, the individual is nothing more than a vessel for a gene-a selfish gene-whose only impulse is to guarantee it survives into the future, even if that means the...
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Sigmund Freud was born in 1856, in Vienna, Austria, and died in London in 1939, but his reputation as "the father of psychoanalysis" lives on. The theories he introduced in his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, revolutionized the treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth century.
Based on his success in using new techniques he had developed with his patients, and on conclusions he drew from analyzing his own dreams, Freud said that...
7) A Macat Analysis of Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the S
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Distinguished British historian Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous seventeenth century, when nations were in the grip of what was known as the General Crisis.
First published in 2013, Global Crisis reveals that freak weather was a key reason why the people of the 1600s lurched between droughts, famines, and countless wars. Plunging temperatures in the Little Ice Age combined with bad political decisions...
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Originally published in 1861, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism systematically details and defends the doctrine of the moral theory of utilitarianism.
Arguing first that what might be termed a morally good action is one that increases the general sum of happiness in the world, Mill then says that general principles of justice should be based on this idea. Therefore, in life, there is no conflict between what is just and what is morally right.
Mill...
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Because the potential returns appear to be greater in poorer countries than in the developed world, modern economic theory implies that rich countries should continually invest in poor countries until returns balance out. In fact, this doesn't happen. Economist Robert E. Lucas Jr. asks why in his groundbreaking 1990 article, "Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?" The question has become known as the Lucas paradox. Lucas analyzes this,...
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Albert Hourani's 1991 work, A History of the Arab Peoples, is unsurpassed as an overview of Arab history, from the rise of Islam to the late twentieth century. Going far beyond the political history that had generally characterized previous examinations, Hourani integrates a wide range of scholarship to provide a deep analysis of social, cultural, and economic structures. His interest in the everyday lives of Arab people and his desire to understand...
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Originally written as 13 individual books around 397 b.c., Augustine of Hippo's Confessions is one of the most referenced works in the Western literary tradition. Augustine lived from 354—430 b.c., and the work is in part an autobiography. But it also tells us much about the period in which he lived. The first nine books draw a compelling narrative of the first 43 years of Augustine's life, which were spent in North Africa and Italy. In the tenth...
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Jared M. Diamond clearly identifies five major factors that he says determine the success or failure of all human societies in all periods of history.
Having first asked why societies collapse, Diamond explores various examples of failed societies, from the Norsemen of Scandinavia, who colonized Greenland in the early tenth century, to the eighteenth-century inhabitants of Easter Island. As a counterpoint, he shows how inhabitants of Highland New...
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Published in 1938, Cyril Lionel Robert (C. L. R.) James's The Black Jacobins is the little-known story of the only successful slave revolution known in history. It was this 12-year struggle of the African slaves in the French colony of San Domingo that led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804. The uprising was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution that had begun in 1789, just two years before, and in this work James goes...
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In his 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel, American geography professor and environmental historian Jared Diamond looks to answer the question of why human history unfolded differently on different continents, and why power and wealth became distributed as they are.
Drawing on evidence from a diverse range of disciplines, Diamond argues that the varying rates of human development over the past 13,000 years have had very little to do with genetic superiority....
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In Philosophical Investigations, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a radical approach to problems in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. In fact, he sets out a radically new conception of philosophy itself. Published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death, many still consider it one of the finest works of twentieth-century philosophy.
Wittgenstein begins from the insight that most philosophical problems...
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Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics in Greece in the fourth century b.c.e., a period of extraordinary all-round intellectual development. He was a student of Plato, who in turn was a student of Socrates. Aristotle went on to teach the warrior and empire builder, Alexander the Great. More than two millennia later, Aristotle's thorough exploration of virtue, reason, and the ultimate human good still forms the basis of the values that lie at the heart...
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In her 1958 work The Human Condition, German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt asks two fundamental questions: "Under what conditions do politics emerge?" and "Under what conditions can politics be eliminated?" In searching for answers she turns some long-established thinking on its head.
Ancient political philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle believed that a life spent thinking was more important than an active life of labor, work, and action....
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Economist Amartya Sen's 1997 work Development as Freedom presents a "middle way" approach to how we should look at international development, based on the idea that its success or failure cannot be measured by income alone. Having grown up in India, Sen brings his own understanding of what poverty really means to the issue, arguing that above all the process and goal of development must be human freedom. He backs up this idea through his concept of...
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What is justice? How should an individual and a society behave justly? And how do they learn how to do so? These are just some of the core questions that Plato's The Republic considers.
An extraordinarily ambitious work, Republic has made important contributions to many branches of modern philosophy. The work unfolds as a series of conversations in which participants set out a number of different theories of justice, and then imagine how these theories...
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Does capitalism have a natural tendency towards a just and reasonable distribution of wealth? The French economist Thomas Piketty thinks not.
In his bestselling 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty takes issue with the idea that-despite the odd bump along the way, not least the 2007—08 global financial crisis-inequality (the gaps in income and wealth between rich and poor) tends to decline as capitalism matures.
Piketty spent...
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