Books published by EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Jurist Ebu's-su`ud (c1490-1574) occupies a key position in the history of Islamic Law. He was a scholar who, for forty years, occupied successfully the senior judicial positions in the Ottoman Empire. Confronting the problem of reconciling classical Islamic jurisprudence with the day-to-day legal needs of an empire, he earned an enduring reputation as the jurist who harmonised the Holy Law of Islam with secular practice. The book examines the substance of this reputation by showing, through Ebu's-su`ud's writings, how he adapted classical Islamic legal doctrine to contemporary needs.

This book provides the first comprehensive description and critique of the six most important historical interpretations of US Cold War foreign policy: Traditionalism, Revisionism, Post-Revisionism, Corporatism, World Systems Theory, and Post-Structuralism.The author uses the 'levels of analysis' approach to demonstrate how each of these perspectives can be understood as an explanatory framework combining different types of factors located at different levels of the international system. This original way of explaining the work of the historians discussed helps the reader to see past the narrative and empirical elements of their writings and to grasp more clearly the underlying theoretical assumptions.In each chapter a description of the perspective's underlying theoretical framework and how it explains US foreign policy is followed by a critique of that theory and explanation. A central theme, developed throughout the book, is the difficulty of managing the constant tension between the explanatory power of theory and the historian's desire to encompass the complex totality of historical events.This critical companion can be read alongside the works of the historians themselves, showing how they have sought to explain US Cold War foreign policy and the key differences between their perspectives.Key Features* 1st complete discussion of the 6 schools of thought in one volume* Discusses current issues such as corporatism, world systems theory and post-structuralim in an accessible manner* original use of the 'levels of analysis' framework in studying this subject* demonstrates in practical terms how each theory explains US Cold War foreign policy

The moral and political arguments, judgements and commitments of Britain's outstanding radical philosopher.What society ought we to have, and what can we do to try to get it? This book sets out to answer these questions beginning with a new essay on the foundation of a liberalism of means and ends, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. It goes on to consider the culmination of liberal thinking in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. It argues that liberalism is good intentions not carried forward into rational commitment. Conservatism, in its past and its present guises, is also made clear in its reality. So too is the leftism of the past, including G. A. Cohen's attempt to save Karl Marx's theory of history. Both are discarded. The book argues for another political and social morality - the generosity and fellow-feeling of the Principle of Humanity. It is a consequentialist rather than a mysterious morality, and its essential idea is that we should take rational steps to rescue the badly-off from lives of wretchedness and other distress. This is the commitment that led to Ted Honderich's human and passionate response to 9/11, After the Terror - the most controversial book of serious philosophy published in Britain since A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic in 1936. A further chapter considers hierarchic democracy - the democracy we have as distinct from the democracy we think we have - and the necessity of mass civil disobedience. The book ends with an essay that adds to the thinking of After the Terror, particularly on the moral right of the Palestinians to their resistance.

The most recalcitrant problem of philosophy, free will, laid out and taken beyond unsatisfactory standard solutions by Britain's foremost working philosopher.Determinism comes in many forms, some confused, some inconsistent, some incomplete. Some philosophers maintain that determinism is incompatible with true freedom. And others, that determinism is no threat to our freedom. But are these philosophers really assigning an 'unfreedom' to us and merely pretending that we are responsible for our choices and acts of love and violence?Ted Honderich argues that there are strong reasons to think both positions wrong. Developing from where his earlier work left off, he considers there is a new and more difficult problem of determinism. It too can lead to the thought that we are unfree but morally responsible. As he demonstrates, the hardest and deepest question in philosophy needs a really different answer.

With an Essay on Hogg's Literary Friendships by Janette Currie and an Appendix on the Popular Context by Suzanne GilbertScottish popular tradition includes a group of stories about a King who has adventures - amorous and otherwise - as he wanders in disguise among his people. Many of these stories focus on James V and in Walter Scott's long narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) the King encounters a mysterious lady while he is wandering alone and unrecognised in the Highlands. At first sight Scott's heroine seems to be a simple country girl, but she turns out to be a daughter of the great aristocratic house of Douglas, living for the time being in a rural exile.Scott's romantic and aristocratic version of the old 'wandering King' stories was hugely popular in its day, but Hogg subverts and questions this tale in Mador of the Moor (1816). The name 'Mador' suggests 'made o'er', 'made over', and Mador of the Moor is in effect a makeover of The Lady of the Lake. Hogg's poem, like Scott's, tells how a deer-hunt in the Highlands leads a disguised King of Scots into a love-adventure with a young woman. However Hogg's heroine, Ila Moore, is not a chaste aristocrat but a girl of low social standing who is made pregnant by the wandering King. Ila's inherent resourcefulness and strength of character suggest that a peasant girl pregnant out of wedlock can be a heroine fully worthy of respect, and Mador (rejected as shocking and ridiculous by its original readership), now re-emerges as a flowing and immensely readable narrative that eloquently challenges the deeply-ingrained class and gender prejudices of Hogg's society.

Winner of the American Publishers Association's Award for an outstanding Professional and Scholarly title and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 1996 from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.In a dazzling display of erudition, Robert Hillenbrand surveys the major building-types of the Islamic World: religious architecture (the mosque, the minaret, the madrasa), the mausoleum 'between Heaven and Earth', and the caravansarai and the palace representing the secular side.All the building-types are discussed in art-historical terms, with the interplay of form and function taken as the underlying theme of the analysis. All are comprehensively illustrated with a full range of colour and black-and-white photographs, analytical drawings, thumbnail comparative assemblies and ground plans.This major reference work, covering from Spain to Afghanistan and c. 700 to c. 1700, is a source of fascination for all seeking to appreciate the rich heritage of the Islamic World. Recurrent themes and patterns take on a wider significance - a persistent reminder that the Islamic faith and the particular type of society which it engendered makes light of vast gulfs of time and space.Features:*24 colour plates*300 black-and-white photographs*1246 line drawings*Section of composite drawings and ground plansAvailable in Hardback (originally published in 1994) and a revised paperback edition published in 2000.This new paperback edition includes a previously unpublished index, designed to make the book more user-friendly.

David Harvey is unquestionably the most influential, as well as the most cited, geographer of his generation. His reputation extends well beyond geography to sociology, planning, architecture, anthropology, literary studies and political science. This book brings together for the first time seminal articles published over three decades on the tensions between geographical knowledges and political power and on the capitalist production of space. Classic essays reprinted here include 'On the history and present condition of geography', 'The geography of capitalist accumulation' and 'The spatial fix: Hegel, von Thunen, and Marx'. Two new chapters represent the author's most recent thinking on cartographic identities and social movements. David Harvey's persistent challenge to the claims of ethical neutrality on behalf of science and geography runs like a thread throughout the book. He seeks to explain the geopolitics of capitalism and to ground spatial theory in social justice. In the process he engages with overlooked or misrepresented figures in the history of geography, placing them in the context of intellectual history. The presence here of Kant, Von Thunen, Humboldt, Lattimore, Leopold alongside Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Darwin, Malthus, Foucault and many others shows the deep roots and significance of geographical thought. At the same time David Harvey's telling observations of current social, environmental, and political trends show just how vital that thought is to the understanding of the world as it is and as it might be.

This is a book about identity, about how the ancient Greeks saw themselves and others, and what this tells us in turn about Greek mentality and culture. It looks at voyagers and explorers, at travels in reality and in the mind, and shows what these reveal at key points in Greek history from the creation of Homer's monumental epic around 700 BC to the high Roman imperial period some eight hundred years later. The author takes us first to the journeyings of Odysseus, considering the returning warrior's concerns of witness and memory and finding in the epic the themes that will preoccupy the Greeks over the centuries. He then travels to Egypt with Herodotus, to the problematically 'barbarian' world of Persia and the Near East with Alexander the Great, to old Greece with the fictional Scythian Anacharsis, to the new Greek world under Roman domination with Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassos and Strabo, and finally to the Asia Minor of the first-century AD sage Apollonius of Tyana in the company of Philostratos. He examines both what their representations of these lands meant in their own day and how they were received in later times. He looks in particular at the importance of the invention of the barbarian and the "e;other"e;, first in the theoretical process of desribing and accounting for the outside world, and secondly at the justification it gives for the practical reshaping of alien space through conquest and assimilation - themes which have had, as he points out, a more recent resonance. Francois Hartog draws widely on ancient and modern authors to create a cultural history of ancient Greece that sheds a new and revealing light on the Greeks and the history of humankind more generally.

The task of the historian would be impossible without verbal resources for dating and describing past events. Historians from Herodotus onwards traditionally relied uncritically on their own native languages (including Greek, Latin and English) to provide all they needed. In so doing, they also took over a traditional Western view of the relationship between language, the world and the passage of time. This determined for them the rational limits of historical knowledge. Their 'histories' could not go beyond these limits without straying into the realms of myth or imagination. Their philosophy of history was circumscribed by their (often unstated) philosophy of language.This book is the first comprehensive attempt to trace the relationship between Western philosophy of history and Western philosophy of language. It spans the whole development of education from the ancient Greeks down to the present day. It examines the impact on history of modern movements, including structuralist and postmodern approaches, as well as the recent advent of television history.Features:*The first comprehensive attempt to relate Western philosophy of history to Western philosophy of language*The author is a leading authority on linguistics and the philosophy of language*The book is written in an accessible style for all levels of reader.

This book is the first major reassessment of the reception of Saussure's ideas throughout the twentieth century. That Saussure's work profoundly influenced developments in such diverse fields as linguistics, anthropology, psychology and literary studies is denied by no one. But what exactly Saussure's views were taken to be by his interpreters has not hitherto been subject to any comprehensive critical survey. How well were Saussure's ideas understood by those who took them up? Or how badly misunderstood? And why? The answers to these questions address central issues in the history of Western culture.Each chapter focuses on one particular interpreter of Saussure's work, but many others are mentioned in context for purposes of comparison, and attention is drawn to connections and disparities between their interpretations. Those whose interpretations are examined in detail include Bloomfield, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Chomsky, Barthes and Derrida.Features:* The author is acknowledged as an expert on Saussure's work* This is the first study of the reception of Saussure's ideas, and how well they were understood by those who took them up* The work of Saussure is a landmark in the history of linguistic thought

This new illustrated paperback edition examines the Scottish country house in all its guises - from great classical houses like Hopetoun, to familiar castles such as Glamis and Craigievar - as well as giving insights into the architects who designed them, including William and Robert Adam, Sir John James Burnet and Sir William Bruce.

Transnationalism in Practice brings together fourteen essays written by Paul Giles between 1994 and 2009 on the subjects of American studies, literature and religion. In an introduction written especially for the collection, Giles traces the evolution of critical transnationalism as it developed through the 1980s and 1990s. The volume includes "e;Reconstructing American Studies"e; (1994), one of the first articles to address the field from a transnational perspective, along with other pieces on methodological and practical issues surrounding the internationalization of American studies. The essays on American literature contain work on Theodore Dreiser, Henry James and the critic F. O. Matthiessen, along with a new study of Jamaica Kincaid in relation to postcolonialism. The section on religion traces the circulation of secularized forms of Catholicism in U.S. culture, from nineteenth-century slave narratives to the musical performances of Bruce Springsteen. Transnationalism in Practice ranges widely, from the culture of colonial America to the novels of Robert Coover and Kathy Acker, while also encompassing a broad range of interdisciplinary topics, from the presidency of George W. Bush to the role of religion in American society. This book will be of interest to all of those concerned with the place of U.S. culture in the world today.

A clear and lively introduction to current trends in the theory, method and tools of discourse studies, this book is a valuable guide for students and teachers of linguistics as well as for those with an interest in the linguistic methods of analysing discourse (media, rhetoric and stylistics, pragmatics, communication studies scholars etc).* Comprehensive, accessible, state-of-the-art textbook * Close analyses of a wide range of narrative and non-narrative texts, both spoken and written* Emphasis on practical text analysis: includes guided activities for self-study or use in a classroom* Suggestions for further reading in each chapter.This revised second edition registers key changes in a rapidly expanding area and thoroughly updates suggestions for further reading and the bibliography.

Introducing poetry, prose, songs and theatre from Nigeria, this engaging volume blends translated extracts with a rich commentary on the historical development and modern context of this hugely creative culture. Examining imaginative prose-writing, the tale tradition, popular song, Islamic religious poetry and modern TV drama amongst other topics, this is a clear and accessible book on a literary culture that has previously been little-known to the English-speaking readership.