Books published by Lexington Books

The main premise of Philosophical Perspective on Cinema is simple: Can a visual medium such as cinema put in greater perspective diverse aspects of human experience? Films are usually sorted by genres, but by applying metaphysical/existential categories to cinema, the author enables readers to reflect on the nature and essence of existence by making life appear less transparent to itself. Undoubtedly, the connection between sensual reality and philosophical reflection is often glossed over when the emphasis is placed on theoretical abstractions, and not life itself. While this work is a reflection on the philosophy of existence, the author embraces a practical approach to the metaphysical/existential foundation of human existence.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the impoverished areas of Manila, Philippines, Fuyuki Makino examines how experimental methods in modern architecture have helped form micro-relationships, social networks, and social structures among the inhabitants and considers whether the architects' aim to promote certain social behaviors was successful or not.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores internal and external precarities in the lives of children. The goal of the book is to illuminate, promote, and help situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society.

The expansion of Western education overseas has been both an economic success, if the numbers of American, European, and Australian universities setting up campuses in Asia and the Middle East is a measure -- and a source of consternation for academics concerned with norms of free inquiry and intellectual freedom. Faculty at Western campuses have resisted the new satellite campuses, fearing that colleagues on those campuses would be less free to teach and engage in intellectual inquiry, and that students could be denied the free inquiry normally associated with liberal arts education. Critics point to the denial of visas to academics wishing to carry out research on foreign campuses, the sudden termination of employment at schools in both the Middle East and Asia, or the last-minute cancellation of courses at those schools, as evidence that they were correctly suspicious of the possibility that liberal arts programs could exist in those regions. Supporters of the project have argued that opening up foreign campuses brings free inquiry to closed societies, improves educational opportunities for students who would otherwise be denied them, or, perhaps less frequently, that free inquiry will be no more pressured than in the United States or Western Europe. Normative Tensions examines the consequences not only of expansion overseas, but the increased opening of universities to foreign students.

Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze describes the ideas that defined the movement and struggle to be free by Black people in the United States during their Modern Era. Using a historical perspective, this work engages the question of how the historical experience of oppression and the denial of humanity created space for the development of a certain consciousness. The existence and demonstration of agency within the ideas of the African diaspora and the creation of an intentional community with the aim of defining and attaining freedom are dissected in order to understand the Black community as a whole during the modern era.

Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence (AI) acknowledges that human destiny is intimately tied to artificial intelligence. AI already outperforms a person on most tasks. Our ever-deepening relationship with an AI that is increasingly autonomous mirrors our relationship to what is perceived as Sacred or Divine. Like God, AI awakens hope and fear in people, while giving life to some and taking livelihood, especially in the form of jobs, from others. AI, built around values of convenience, productivity, speed, efficiency, and cost reduction, serve humanity poorly, especially in moments that demand care and wisdom. This book explores the pastoral virtues of hope, patience, play, wisdom, and compassion as foundational to personal flourishing, communal thriving, and building a robust AI. Biases of determinism, speed, objectivity, ignorance, and apathy within AIs algorithms are identified. These biases can be minimized through the incorporation of pastoral virtues as values guiding AI.

In Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, Hugo Moreno argues that in Ficciones, Claros del bosque, and El mono gramtico, Jorge Luis Borges, Mara Zambrano, and Octavio Paz practice a literary way of philosophizinga way of seeking and communicating knowledge of reality that takes up analogical procedures. They deploy analogy as an indispensable and irreplaceable heuristic tool and literary device to convey their insight and perplexities on the nature of existence. Borges' ironic approach involves reading and writing philosophy as fiction. Zambrano's poetic reason is a mode of writing and thinking based on an imaginative sort of recollection that is ultimately a visionary's poetizing technique. Paz's poetic thinking relies on analogy to correlate and harmonize an array of worldviews, ideas, and discourses.In the appendix, Moreno shows that Platos Republic is a forerunner of this way of philosophizing in literature. Moreno suggests that in the Republic, Plato reconciles philosophy and poetry and creates a rational prose poetry that fuses argumentation and narration, dialectical and analogical reasoning, and abstract concepts and poetic images.

White ignorance is a form of collective denial that aggressively resists acknowledging the role of race and racism. It dominates our political landscape, warps white moral frameworks and affective responses, intervenes in white self-conceptions, and organizes white identities. In this way, white ignorance poses a problem for conceptions of responsibility that rely on individuals' intentions, causal contributions, or knowledge of the facts. As Eva Boodman shows, our moral concepts for responding to racism are implicated in the process of racialization when they understand responsibility as the attribution of blame or absolution, innocence or guilt. White Ignorance and Complicit Responsibility challenges these binary, punitive moralities, arguing that they reproduce racial harm by encouraging white people to seek innocence and the purification of moral taint instead of addressing the material conditions of racial harm. Instead, Boodman claims the space of complicity as a place of anti-racist possibility. Linking the construction of whiteness to a racist punishment paradigm, this book makes the case for a different way of responding to harm as necessary for dismantling the moral, racial, political, and affective constructs that keep racial capitalism in place.

In this three-part book-length study of the work of Gregg Toland, Philip Cowan explores approaches to co-authorship in collaborative filmmaking to propose new ways of identifying, attributing, and evaluating the creative work of cinematographers. In the first part of the study, Cowan challenges the dominant, director-centered auteur approach to film studies, critiquing the historical development of authorship theory and providing a contemporary analysis of the cinematographer's authorial role in creating images that communicate meaning through content and construction. By synthesizing and updating the work of previous film theorists to define the complexities of composition, movement, and lighting in the second part of the study, Cowan develops a new, comprehensive taxonomy of functional and aesthetic elements of the moving image. Finally, by using the co-author approach and the analytical tools developed in part two of the book, Cowan provides an in-depth re-examination of Toland's work, highlighting the historical neglect of the cinematographer's artistic contribution to filmmaking and developing a fresh approach to the analysis of contemporary cinematography in film.

The question of whether the existence of evil in the world is compatible with the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God has been debated for centuries. Many have addressed classical arguments from evil, and while recent scholarship in analytic philosophy of religion has produced newer formulations of the problem, most of these newer formulations rely on a conception of God that is not held by all theists. In Bringing Good Even Out of Evil: Thomism and the Problem of Evil, B. Kyle Keltz defends classical theism against contemporary problems of evil through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his interpreters. Keltz discusses Aquinas's thought on God, evil, and what kind of world God would make, then turns to contemporary problems of evil and shows how they miss the mark when it comes to classical theism. Some of the newer formulations that the book considers include James Sterba's argument from the Pauline principle, J. L. Schellenberg's divine hiddenness argument, Stephen Law's evil-god challenge, and Nick Trakakis's anti-theodicy.

This book highlights hidden unintentional biases, emotional defense mechanisms, and responses in haste. By revealing these preconceived notions present in message choices, Xiaowei Shi and Steve Mortenson demonstrate techniques to help prevent communication from becoming problematic. In a conversational style, the authors extend their interdisciplinary theoretic perspectives by introducing concepts and practices of supportive confrontation and argumentative interaction management. Through examining those automatic responses and reactions in our everyday conversation with friends, coworkers, and loved ones, this book engages the readers to confront their own hidden preferences and underlying beliefs about gender, relationships, and themselves with a new eye. The book moves beyond prior work on rational choice model in strategic communication by considering actual human attributes. Shi and Mortenson offer new insights into communication ';noises' and how to engage in communication during a difficult life event or on a difficult subject in a more skillful manner. Scholars of social psychology, interpersonal communication, and communication training and development will find this book of particular interest.

Over the course of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, an interior private notion of religion gained wide public recognition. It then spread through settler colonial contexts around the world. It has since been criticized for its abstract, immaterial nature as well as its irrelevance to traditions beyond the European context. However, such critiques obscure the contradiction between religion's definition as a matter of interior privacy and its public visibility in various printed publications. Timothy Stanley responds by re-evaluating the cultural impact of the exterior forms in which religious texts were printed, such as pamphlets, broadsheets, books, and journals. He also applies that evidence to critical studies of religion shaped by the crisis of representation in the human sciences. While Jacques Derrida is oft-cited as a progenitor of that crisis, the opposite case is made. Additionally, Stanley draws on Derrida's thought to reframe the relation between a religious text's internal hermeneutic interests and its external forms. In sum, this book provides a new model of how people printed religion in ways that can be compared to other material cultures around the world.

There are many answers to the question of why life is worth living, but they all presuppose that good lives are sensuously enjoyable. Time seems to stand still in the moment when we enjoy food and drink, peaceful, laughing relationships with friends, or lay quietly, allowing the beauty of nature and human creations to unfold before us. Embodied Humanism: Toward Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment explores ways that enjoyment is also political. The history of political struggle is a history of fighting back against silencing, hunger, and violent domination, but also fighting for social peace, need-satisfaction, voice, and democratic power. Tracing the values of embodied humanism across history and across cultures and identities, the book finds a more comprehensive universal humanist ethic around which old and emerging struggles can be unified. Ultimately, Jeff Noonan argues, these struggles can be directed towards creating institutional structure and individual dispositions that will secure the social conditions in which our capacities for receptive openness and delight are satisfied for each and all.

Cameroon-Nigeria Relations: Trends and Perspectives, edited by Osita Agbu and C. Nna-Emeka Okereke, examines various aspects of Cameroon-Nigeria relations since the countries attained independence in 1960. The Cameroonian and Nigerian contributors contextualize core topical issues that have featured prominently in the course of bilateral relations between both countries, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings required to understand the dynamics of Cameroon-Nigeria relations to contending issues and areas of mutual interests driving diplomatic relations between them. This book reveals trends and dynamics while also accommodating divergent perspectives that demonstrate how theories can be applied to achieve real results. Of significant import is the prognosis that stimulates concerns for the future of Cameroon-Nigeria relations bearing in mind the strategic positions of both countries in West and Central Africa. Cameroon-Nigeria Relations is an indispensable resource for scholars, diplomats, and foreign policy actors that will enrich understanding and inform opinions on charting future courses for healthy bilateral relations between Cameroon and Nigeria.

Over the course of the past two decades, horror cinema around the globe has become increasingly preoccupied with the concept of loss. Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss examines the theme of grief as it is represented in both indie and mainstream films, including works such as Jennifer Kents watershed film The Babadook, Juan Antonio Bayonas award-sweeping El orfanato, Ari Asters genre-straddling Midsommar, and Lars von Triers visually stunning Melancholia. Analyzing depictions of grief ranging from the intimate grief of a small family to the collective grief of an entire nation, the essays illustrate how these works serve to provide unity, catharsis, andsometimeshealing.

In this book, Cynthia A. Davidson argues that tweeting, especially political tweeting among Democratic women, is an inherently optimistic act. Davidson's analysis draws on Lauren Berlant's assertion in Cruel Optimism (2011) that what we most desire is also an impediment to our thriving, whether or not the subject of specific conversations is negative. Narratives created by members of the Democratic BlueWave Resistance either support the primary purpose of the group--to uphold support of liberal democratic conventions and the issues, policies, and personalities related to them--or take place more or less comfortably within the zone of the community that supports these things. Using specific examples, empirical data, and analysis framed by Berlant's theories as well as primary and secondary sources from current journalism and scholarship, Davidson explores Twitter as a problematic object of desire and attachment, examines the rhetorical underpinnings of its discourse, and shows how women of this group use storytelling via Twitter as a way to make connections, be heard, and stay afloat in a status quo that perpetuates un-ease and precarious existence. Scholars of media studies, gender studies, and political science will find this book of particular interest.

This book explores how online therapy communities offer an accessible space that is not confined by economic abilities, geographical barriers, or familial restraints. Will Henderson and Mary Jackson Pitts use mixed methodologies of self-administered surveys and in-depth interviews to explore how online therapy communities can be used as a tool in the overall care of individuals who are in crisis and dealing with self-harming thoughts and behaviors. Faced with monetary constraints, lack of insurance coverage, and close connections who have no experience in addressing self-harming behaviors, this book highlights online therapy community members' experiences and insight into how online therapy communities have been helpful and may be helpful for others who choose to be a part of these communities. Scholars of communication, sociology, and psychology will find this book of particular interest.

In Decolonizing Patagonia: Mapuche Peoples and State Formation in Argentina, Lucas Savino examines Indigenous efforts for self-determination, territorial autonomy, and decolonization in Northern Patagonia, Argentina. Through an analysis of the ways in which Mapuche activists organize in particular localities in the province of Neuquen, this book contributes to broader theoretical understandings of collective identity formation and Indigenous activism under multicultural neoliberal regimes of citizenship. Building on interdisciplinary contributions on state formation, citizenship, and collective identity formation, Savino demonstrates that territorial struggles and the importance of the local political level are crucial for understanding how collective identities are configured.

The nineteenth century was an exciting and dynamic era of rapid progress in industry and technology. One of the most vigorous of the new industries was petroleum. It first transformed the way people lit their houses, displacing whale oil and other substitutes, and then revolutionized the entire field of energy and helped create the modern world. During the nineteenth century, oil was overwhelmingly dominated by the United States and the Russian Empire, together responsible for 97% of the world's production; and over the course of the century, nearly all the Russian Empire's oil came from the territory that is now the independent state of Azerbaijan. Many people don't know that the world's first industrial oil well was drilled in Azerbaijan in 1846, thirteen years before Drake's celebrated well in Pennsylvania. This book covers oil in the United States and Azerbaijan, in all its dynamism, from its earliest beginnings to the turn of the twentieth century. It treats both business and technology, from the early wildcatters to Standard Oil and the Nobel Brothers (yes, that remarkable family created more than a famous prize!). The book echoes into the present day; for good or ill, oil still moves the world.

In Understanding the Boundary between Disability Studies and Special Education through Consilience, Self-Study, and Radical Love, the authors explore what it means to engage in boundary work at the intersection of traditional special education systems and critical disability studies in education. The book consists of fifteen groundbreaking accounts that challenge dominant medicalized discourses about what it means to exist within and around special education systems that create space for new conceptions of what it means to teach, lead, learn, and exist within a conciliatory space driven by radical love and disability justice principles. The book pushes readers to consider how their own personal, professional and programmatic future transformational actions can be driven by disruption and the desire for freedom from the hegemony of traditional special education and White and Ability supremacy.

Passionate Animals: Emotions, Animal Ethics, and Moral Pragmatics draws on the theoretical achievements made in ethics, political philosophy, and human-animal studies, addressing the problem that these advancements have not resulted in practical change toward significantly improved human-animal-relations. Mara-Daria Cojocaru argues that this gap between theory and action can close only if humans live up to the task of becoming passionate animals themselvesand passionate about animals as well. In the tradition of philosophical pragmatism and with reference to congenial thinkers like Mary Midgley, Cojocaru develops a moral pragmatics that highlights the role of emotions in moral and political life and focuses on the institutions necessary to make tangible progress on the problems posed by animal experimentation and factory farming.

This book brings into focus the perception of Muslim women in the United States, often overlooked in research literature and common media narratives, but at the same time facing increasing hate and aggression based on their religious and gendered identities. Guided by data from three original experiments and theories of priming and media effects, Alexis Tan and Anastasia Vishnevskaya discuss how stereotypes of Muslim women in the media influence public stereotypes, and how public stereotypes direct aggressions towards them. This book contributes to existing literature in the field by presenting evidence that both verbal and visual symbols in the media can activate implicit prejudices, and that activation can be controlled by people who self-identify as social liberals. Ultimately, Tan and Vishnevskaya suggest both media and intrapersonal interventions to mitigate harmful consequences of prejudice towards Muslim women in the United States. Scholars of media studies, communication, religious studies, gender studies, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

To the extent that we worry about the future, we tend to do so with the apprehension that something may go terribly wrong. Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity is animated more by the apprehension, what if everything should go terribly right? That foreboding indelibly colored the outlook of Friedrich Nietzsche and Alexis de Tocquevilletwo thinkers seldom paired. As David A. Eisenberg argues, each in his own way envisaged the terminus toward which modernity speeds. Examining their thought allows us not only to glimpse the future that filled them with dread, but to survey a road that stretches back millennia to Athens and Jerusalem, when ideas about the primacy of reason and inborn equality of souls took root. Armed with such revolutionary teachings, a particular human type, namely the democratic, gained ascendancy. The reign of this human type portends to be so total that all other human types will be precluded in the democratic future, so that what mankinds democratization augurs is not the diversification of the species but its homogenization. The questions raised in Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity are intended to broaden the horizons that historys democratizing forces conspire to contract.

Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity examines white masculinity in Poes fiction and the culture it represents. Poes men are tormented by chronic illness, deviant attachments, and ugly emotions. As it analyzes these afflictions, this book illuminates the pathologies of American masculinity that emerged in a terrible history of imperialism, capitalism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. One of its central contentions is that we can better understand a past and present American masculinity through a reckoning with its perverse feelings. More pointedly, this book asks: What does masculinity feel? What does white American masculinity feel in the first decades of nation formation? What does it feel in the crucible of its revolution, its slave system, its democracy, its nascent capitalism, and its pursuit of happiness? What feelings besiege and beleaguer Poes men? And what can they teach us about the antagonisms of contemporary white American masculinity?

Confucian and Stoic Perspectives on Forgiveness explores the absence of forgiveness in classical Confucianism and Roman Stoicism as well as the alternatives to forgiveness that these rich philosophical traditions offer. After discussing forgiveness as it is understood in contemporary philosophy, Sean McAleer explores Confucius' vocabulary for and attitude toward anger and resentment, arguing that Confucius does not object to anger but to its excesses. While Confucius does not make room for forgiveness, McAleer argues that Mencius cannot do so, given the distinctive twist he gives to self-examination in response to mistreatment. Xunzi, by contrast, leaves open a door to forgiveness that Mencius bolted shut. The book then proceeds to the Roman StoicsMusonius Rufus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Senecaarguing that their distinctive conceptions of value and wellbeing rule out forgiveness, though like the Confucians the Stoics offer alternatives to forgiveness well worth considering. The book ends by comparing the two traditions, arguing that while Stoicism helps us navigate many of the turbulent waters of everyday life, Confucianism enjoys advantages when we interact with those to whom we are bound by ties of affection and intimacy.

In Telling Animals, Jasmine Spencer offers a comparative yet personal approach to Dene/Athabaskan stories, both Northern and Southern. It examines the animating effects of animal stories, the transformative power of animacies in Dene stories, and the effects of narrative revitalization through animal grammar. It takes as its first premise the teachings of many Elders, who have shared that the stories are alive. Jasmine Spencers comparative approach combines literary, linguistic, anthropological, and philosophical theories and methods using a deictic framework for closely reading the stories in both their Dene languages and in English translation. The narrative epistemologies enacted by Dene stories counterbalance many of the ethical problems inherent within Euro-Western approaches to ontology and experience. These stories revive those who listen and read, offering hope.