Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Society

Today, we are caught in a shame spiral—a vortex of mutual shaming that pervades everything from politics to social media. We are shamed for our looks, our culture, our ethnicity, our sexuality, our poverty, our wrongdoings, our politics. But what is the point of all this shaming and countershaming? Does it work? And if so, for whom? In Shame, David Keen explores the function of modern shaming, paying particular attention to how shame is instrumentalized and weaponized.

On a tenebrous winter morning in Denver, Colorado, Leo Jenkins felt the weight of the world crushing him. Leo has a decision to make - maintain a comfortable position in a career he's no longer passionate about - or take a massive leap of faith. Giving up everything he's ever known, Jenkins sells his business, purges every possession that won't fit into a single backpack, and sets off into the world in pursuit of answers.

Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction, and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn't we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. It's time we liberated love.

My character has been shaped by two opposing forces; the pressure to conform to social norms, and the pressure to be true to myself. To be honest with you, these forces have really torn me apart. They've pulled me one way and then the other. At times, they've left me questioning my entire existence. But please don't think that I'm angry or morose. I'm not. Because through adversity comes knowledge. I've suffered, it's true. But I've learned from my pain. I've become a better person.

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect - and demand - very little from it. In Why Grow Up?, she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence.

Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences-political, social, ecological, economic-have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood.

Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today's democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society's benefit, Just Giving reveals how such generosity not only isn't the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice.

Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you swipe left before considering the human being whose face you just summarily rejected? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? If so, this book is the philosophical lifeline you have been waiting for. Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, also known as the Interface, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analysis of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues such as screen addiction....

In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we grieve, and how grief can ultimately lead us to a richer self-understanding and a fuller realization of our humanity.

Moral Articulation outlines an ethical framework that allows us to embrace a version of the latter, transformative view without sacrificing notions of moral truth, objectivity, and knowledge. The book presents a view of moral meaningfulness as extending beyond what we can presently put into words, urging that expansions in our moral vocabularies often begin in dissonant experiences of conceptual and linguistic limits.

In Trust in a Polarized Age, political philosopher Kevin Vallier offers a powerful counter-narrative to the prevailing sense of hopelessness that dogs the American political landscape. In an unapologetic defense of liberalism that synthesizes political philosophy and empirical trust research, Vallier restores faith in our power to reduce polarization and rebuild social and political trust.

Connecting our speed-obsession with today's global capitalism, Taylor composes a grand narrative showing how commitments to economic growth and extreme competition, combined with accelerating technological innovation, have brought us close to disaster. Psychologically, environmentally, economically, and culturally, speed is taking a profound toll on our lives.

Drawing on fascinating examples from diverse social contexts, Don't Take It Personally introduces a general framework to better understand the deeper connection between seemingly disparate phenomena, from racial profiling and hate crimes to "secret Santa" gifting.

An Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historical phenomenon.

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: "let there be a law that no deformed child shall live." This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy.

Through a rich discussion of literature and case studies, he shows that there are compelling reasons to think that the police's widespread use of proactive deception and dishonesty is inconsistent with fundamental norms of political morality—especially norms regarding fraud and the rule of law. Although there are times and places for dishonesty and deception in policing, Hunt evocatively illustrates why those times and places should be much more limited than current practices suggest.