Cults and new religious movements

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Markus Knauff

"Many scholars believe that visual mental imagery plays a key role in reasoning. In Space to Reason, Markus Knauff argues against this view, proposing that visual images are not relevant for reasoning and can even impede the process. He also argues against the claim that human thinking is solely based on abstract symbols and is completely embedded in language. Knauff proposes a third way to think about human reasoning that relies on supramodal spatial layout models, which are more abstract than pictorial images and more concrete than linguistic representations. He argues that these spatial layout models are at the heart of human thought, even thought about nonspatial relations in the world. For Knauff the visual images that we so often associate with reasoning are only in the foreground of conscious experience. Behind the images, the actual logical work is carried out by reasoning-specific operations on these spatial layout models. Knauff also offers a solution to the problem of indeterminacy in human reasoning, introducing the notion of a preferred layout model, which is one layout model among others that has the best chance of being mentally constructed and thus guides the further process of thought. Knauff's "space to reason" theory covers the functional, the algorithmic, and the implementational level of analysis and is corroborated by psychological experiments, functional brain imaging, and computational modeling." -- Publisher's description.

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Charles O. Nussbaum

"How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals."--BOOK JACKET.

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Richard J. Callahan, Jr

"Exploring themes of work and labor in everyday life, Richard J. Callahan, Jr., offers a history of how coal miners and their families lived their religion in eastern Kentucky's coalfields during the early twentieth century. Callahan follows coal miners and their families from subsistence farming to industrial coal mining as they draw, upon religious idioms to negotiate changing patterns of life and work. He traces innovation and continuity in religious expression that emerged from the specific experiences of coal mining, including the spaces and social structures of coal towns, the working bodies of miners, the anxieties of their families, and the struggle toward organized labor. Building on oral histories, folklore, folksongs, and vernacular forms of spirituality, this rich and engaging narrative recovers a social history of ordinary working people through religion."--BOOK JACKET.

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Dolores Cannon

We are children of the stars. This is our legacy and our heritage. In the history of the cosmos, Earth is a young planet. Our souls, on the other hand, have been around forever and will continue to be around forever. Thus Earth is not our only home. We have lived many lives in unusual environments before deciding to journey here and learn the lessons of Earth. After our schooling is completed on this planet, we will journey onward to discover new worlds to explore. The memories of these soul journeys are recorded in our subconscious, and in Legacy from the Stars hypnotherapist Dolores Cannon shows that they can be retrieved through regressive hypnosis. She reports dramatic cases where the subjects relived other lifetimes in strange environments -- inhabitants of other planets. After reading her latest book, you may agree that "we are all extraterrestrials," and Earth is merely a stop-over in our long adventure.