You Are Being Lied To

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Michael Ignatieff

Since the early 1990s, Michael Ignatieff has traveled the world's war zones, from Bosnia to the West Bank, from Afghanistan to central Africa. The Warrior's Honor is a report and a reflection on what he has seen in the places where ethnic war has become a way of life. In a series of vivid portraits, Ignatieff charts the rise of the new moral interventionists - the aid workers, reporters, peacekeepers, Red Cross delegates, and diplomats - who believe that other people's misery, no matter how far away, is of concern to us all. He brings us face-to-face with the new ethnic warriors - the warlords, gunmen, and paramilitary forces - who have escalated postmodern war to an unprecedented level of savagery. From the encounter of these two groups, he draws dramatic and startling realizations about the ambiguous ethics of engagement, the limited force of moral justice in a world of war, and the inevitable clash between those who defend tribal and national loyalties and those who speak the universal language of human rights.

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Rupert Read & Jerry Goodenough

A series of essays on film and philosophy whose authors - philosophers or film studies experts - write on a wide variety of films: classic Hollywood comedies, war films, Eastern European art films, science fiction, showing how film and watching it can not only illuminate philosophy but, in an important sense, be doing philosophy. The book is crowned with an interview with Wittgensteinian philosopher Stanley Cavell, discussing his interests in philosophy and in film and how they can come together.

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John Truby

"John Truby is one of the most respected and sought-after story consultants in the film industry, and his students have gone on to pen some of Hollywood's most successful films, including Sleepless in Seattle, Scream, and Shrek. The Anatomy of Story is his long-awaited first book, and in it he shares all his secrets for writing a compelling script. Based on the lessons in his class, Great Screenwriting, The Anatomy of Story draws on a broad range of concepts and archetypes from philosophy and mythology, offering techniques and anecdotes alongside Truby's own unique approach to building an effective, multifaceted narrative." "Truby's method of constructing a story is at once perceptive and practical, focusing on the hero's moral and emotional growth. Writers will dig deep within and explore their own values and worldview in order to create an effective story. They will come away with a precise set of tools to employ - specific techniques to make the audience care about their characters. They will learn how to make their characters grow in meaningful ways, how to construct surprising plots that are unique to their particular concepts, and how to express a moral vision that can move an audience." "The foundations of story that Truby lays out are so fundamental that they are applicable - and essential - to all writers, from novelists and short story writers to journalists, memoirists, and writers of narrative nonfiction."--Jacket.

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Nicos Stavropoulos

The question of objectivity in legal interpretation has emerged in recent years as a highly important topic in contemporary jurisprudence. This original book addresses the issue of how and in what sense legal interpretation can be objective. The author supports the possibility of objectivity in law and spells out the content of objectivity involved. He then provides a comprehensive defence against the classical, as well as less well-known, objections to the possibility of objectivity in legal interpretation. The discussion is firmly grounded in metaphysics, which sets the book apart from other similar discussions in jurisprudence. Stavropoulos identifies an important source of resistance to acceptance of the possibility of objectivity in legal interpretation: a widely-held but faulty semantic. He then develops an alternative semantic framework which draws on influential theories in contemporary philosophy. The book shows that objectivism is a natural, commonsensical position, and rejects the currently popular notion that objectivism requires extravagant or bizarre metaphysics. Furthermore, the discussion presents the opportunity to reinterpret major debates in jurisprudence and to show how influential theories, notably H. L. A. Hart's and Ronald Dworkin's, bear on that central issue.