Ethnography

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Edith Turner

"In this seminal work, Edith Turner extends the concept of communitas that Victor Turner developed nearly four decades ago. Communitas is inspired fellowship, a group's unexpected joy in sharing common experiences, the sense felt by a group when their life together takes on full meaning. Turner shows how communitas is a driving force in history as it operates personally, in religion, in revolution, in all domains of human life. It is grounded in lived events, and may occur as the climax to a process that takes people from violence to shared intimate transcendence. Turner establishes by narration and multicultural case studies the fundamental importance of communitas to human personal, social, and spiritual well-being. She even follows the instinctive response that humanity makes to the overall natural world, thus including the spiritual bonding of the human and the non-human. Then the book shows exactly how we align ourselves to recognize communitas in action. This is--its 'key.' At heart, this is a very religious book, or as Turner writes, a connection among 'nature, spirit-energy, and soul.'"--Publisher's website.

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Alister E. McGrath

In this new book, Alister McGrath explores the relation of religion and the natural sciences, focusing specifically on Christianity as a case study. The book explores the way in which religions and the natural sciences differ from each other, yet converge on matters of considerable interest in a number of areas. This book will be of great interest to those researching and studying in the areas of science and religion, Christian theology and history, and the philosophy of science.

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Harald Atmanspacher, Gerhard J. Dalenoort

This book discusses a fundamental problem of the natural sciences, namely, the observation of physical and biological systems and the principles by which we gain information about these systems. Is it relevant whether the human observer is himself a part of the system in question? What difference does this make to our representation of the physical world? These difficult questions have occupied scientists and philosophers from Decartes to Bell. In the light of recent advances in quantum mechanics and the theory of dynamical systems, there is good reason to tackle these problems afresh. This book will provide stimulating reading for scientists and philosophers interested in the fundamentals of their trade.

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Richard Double

Why is debate over the free will problem so intractable? This question forms the starting point for Richard Double's ground-breaking account of the way metaphilosophical views - our differing conceptions of the philosophical enterprise - condition competing theories of free will. Double holds that any argument for or against a specific free will position - such as compatibilism, incompatibilism, or the author's own subjectivism - will be persuasive only if one adopts supporting meta-level views of what philosophy is. He argues further that since metaphilosophical considerations are not provable (and are not even true or false, if subjectivism is true), there can be no hope of showing one free will theory to be more reasonable than the rest. Rather, the most philosophers can do is make a desire-based case for preferring their package of metaphilosophy and substantive free will theories. These means that argument in the free will problem must be radically reinterpreted. Double begins by elaborating the connection between metaphilosophy and free will. He identifies four distinct meta-level viewpoints that drive different answers to the free will problem: Philosophy as Conversation; Philosophy as Praxis; Philosophy as Underpinnings; and Philosophy as World View Construction. From there, he discusses intermediate-level principles that work in combination with the meta-philosophies, then provides ten applications from recent free will debates that demonstrate how differences in meta-philosophy make the free will problem unsolvable. In the second half of the book Double makes the strongest case he can - consistent with his own metaphilosophical view - for accepting free will subjectivism.