From an ontological point of view

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Kathleen Lundeen

"In Knight of the Living Dead, Kathleen Lundeen investigates Blake's work in the context of his spiritualistic practices, and shows how he attempts to create a discourse that circumvents the binary of natural and arbitrary signs. Her examination of his word-image art demonstrates that, in Blake's view, what we recognize as word or image depends upon our epistemological orientation, just as what we term "matter" or "spirit" is determined by our state of perception. It further shows how Blake critiques textual theory in both his songs and prophecies by stabilizing the two sets of parameters that are used to define and classify signs: the general and particular, and the literal and figurative. Moreover, she argues, Blake provides an epistemological alternative to empiricism and rationalism in his poetry and art. Through verbal and visual experiments he defies the logic that is rooted in sense perception and reason, and he attempts through those experiments to return textuality to a divinely literal condition. By treating spiritualism as an aesthetic practice and art as an otherworldly communication, he undermines the institutionalized boundaries in art and life, and presents a formidable challenge to the whole matter/spirit dualism upon which Western culture is based."--BOOK JACKET.

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Paavo T.I. Pylkkänen

"Quantum theory predicts experimental results brilliantly but simultaneously raises difficult conceptual issues. Paradoxes such as Schrodinger's cat, the EPR paradox, or the nonlocality demanded by Bell's inequalities have hampered philosophers in their attempts to include quantum-theory when discussing the relation between mind and matter. Pylkkanen proposes that Bohm's alternative interpretation of quantum theory resolves these paradoxes and thus enables one to base new philosophical theories upon quantum physics. He uses Bohm's concepts of "implicate order", active information" and "soma-significance" as tools to tackle several well-known problems in the philosophy of mind. These include mental causation, the hard problem of consciousness, time consciousness, and virtual reality. Pylkkanen's eclectic approach combines new physics-based insights with those of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience and he proposes a view in which the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally."--BOOK JACKET.

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James P. Carse

Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life, the games we play in business and politics, in the bedroom and on the battlefield — games with winners and losers, a beginning and an end. Infinite games are the more mysterious — and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom. -- from the back cover of the 1986 edition.

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Jason L. Powell

"Social Theory and Aging is a new work that explores both conceptual and theoretical issues that impinge on our understanding of aging in postmodern society. Jason L. Powell analyzes how knowledge formation of aging is socially constructed and positioned by powerful assumptions that are often taken for granted. He demonstrates how assumptions of aging have provided a power and knowledge base for bio-medical disciplines, the legitimacy of political economic discourses, and practices of professional experts, and questions these suppositions by introducing modernist scientific models and theories of gerontology as well as mapping out alternative postmodern deconstructions of aging."--Jacket.