This book contains six works that each reflect the different styles of the author in each period of his work, paying attention to men of low status, memories of childhood, campus life, and the living conditions of Beijing’s drifters. Told in a straightforward manner, all the stories in this book are told in the first person and can be regarded together as a spiritual autobiography. Xu Zechen won the sixth Lu Xun Literature Award for short stories, and short stories have always been the focus and intention of his creation.

In Jesse Lee Kercheval’s sixth collection, I Want to Tell You, her searching, incantatory poems speak directly and forcefully to the reader in a voice that is by turns angry, elegiac, wry, or witty but always sharply alive. Crossing through the bewildering territory of grief, Kercheval argues with god and the universe about the deaths of people she loves. She also writes movingly about the complications of family life and love, the messy puzzle of life itself.

The brutality of war and abuse is juxtaposed with the banal in this story of two women who spend their days transcribing the testimonies of Abu Ghraib prisoners. The prisoners' gruesome accounts of physical and sexual abuse, torture, sodomy, and murder interrupt the ordinary lives and concerns of the typists, and reveal deeper – and more troubling – truths. Sylvia is a single mother, haunted by the words of the prisoners' testimonies. Her job strains her already-fragmented relationship with her capricious teenage son. Marina's submissive ignorance allows her to become involved in a disturbing relationship with a man who engages her in humiliating and abusive sexual acts and indirectly involves her six-year-old daughter, causing the child to suffer troubling effects from bearing witness to the trauma. Interjected within the lyrical prose is commentary about the history, development, and qualities of ink, as well as of other objects and elements (such as urine and water) that are part of the accounts of tortured prisoners as well as the lives of Sylvia and Marina. Taken together, this illuminating and meditative work reveals how correlations between the abuse of women, domestic violence, rape, and the abuse and torture of prisoners of war are not as disparate or detached as they might first appear.

What do we mean by moral freedom? What are the necessary conditions required for it? Do the exponential advances and pervasive applications of artificial intelligence (AI) promote it, or do they undermine it? Are we dealing with a new ethical challenge? If this is the case, how should we respond? These are a few of the compelling questions addressed in the current volume. These concerns are increasingly unavoidable in our contemporary computerized society, in which people increasingly depend on AI-based technology, inevitably exposed to its invisible but powerful algorithmic design. Providing a basis for the field of Ethics of AI, the volume helps us understand the new questions raised by AI systems, with particular attention to the challenge that machine-learning algorithms represents for moral freedom. Tiribelli provides both conceptual and practical tools to address these issues, producing a moral compass for navigating our complex world, increasingly structured and shaped by algorithmic technology.

One of the fundamental aspects of the cultural landscape of the last century has been the revival of philosophical anthropology, in the form of a radical examination of the humanum: an examination that has attempted to meet the primary challenge of an era which, in an increasingly radical way, doubts the very possibility of a semantics of humanism. This book argues that MacIntyrean thought can provide an important contribution towards rethinking a new semantics of humanism, on the basis that MacIntyre's contribution stands up to dialogue with and rational competition from perspectives belonging to rival research traditions. The volume emerged from the 2021 conference at the University of Bergamo, in collaboration with the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry.

The current volume provides an interpretation of American pragmatism according to which pragmatism is not opposed to metaphysics but instead represents a vital, non-dismissive, non-deflationary attempt to respond to classical questions of philosophy concerning the nature of reality, truth, goodness, beauty, ideality, etc. American pragmatism has been often interpreted as a form of crass utilitarianism applied to all areas of philosophy – a precipitation of the “industrialist” spirit of the United States. This book demonstrates how such an interpretation is misguided. The chapters focus on different topics in the philosophies of Peirce and Dewey – what is ‘meaning,’ what is the human self, what is truth, what is consciousness, what ‘semiotics’ can add to realism – that articulate the unitary view that the ‘real’ is always inhabited by and open to the ‘ideal.’

As Is gathers everyday poems written over time and mostly at the poet’s home in the Ridge and Valley province of northern Appalachia. This work pays attention to the world as it is with curiosity, candor, and delight. Seeking connection with others and the earth and savoring the fine details of a messy life, these poems reckon with the demands of family, pandemic, aging, and loss even as they witness injustice, violence, environmental degradation, and climate crisis.

The Anxiety Workbook is a full-length manuscript that explores contemporary anxiety, grief in its multitude of forms, and complicated familial dynamics via the lens of science and history while utilizing the language of therapy. These poems grapple with the ever-evolving collective and individual trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as seek answers and lessons from the natural world. The termination of a pregnancy, a distant father, the untimely death of a friend, our society’s obsession with Dateline and missing white girls, the estivation of the West African lungfish - The Anxiety Workbook covers these topics and much more in poems ranging from the hyper-narrative to the highly lyrical, rich in voice and description.

In three volumes, historian Jole Shackelford delineates the history of the study of biological rhythms – now widely known as chronobiology – from antiquity into the twentieth century. Perhaps the most well-known biological rhythm is the circadian rhythm, tied to the cycles of day and night and often referred to as the “body clock.” But there are many other biological rhythms, and although scientists and the natural philosophers who preceded them have long known about them, only in the past thirty years have a handful of pioneering scientists begun to study such rhythms in plants and animals seriously. Tracing the intellectual and institutional development of biological rhythm studies, Shackelford offers a meaningful, evidence-based account of a field that today holds great promise for applications in agriculture, health care, and public health. Volume 1 follows early biological observations and research, chiefly on plants; volume 2 turns to animal and human rhythms and the disciplinary contexts for chronobiological investigation; and volume 3 focuses primarily on twentieth-century researchers who modeled biological clocks and sought them out, including three molecular biologists whose work in determining clock mechanisms earned them a Nobel Prize in 2017.

A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz's A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: "[Klepfisz's] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless."

On the precipice of the Sixth Extinction, we face a frightening fate - ongoing ecological crises that may result in not only the extinction of a million species within decades but another mass extinction event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. In Kairotic Inspiration: Imagining the Future in the Sixth Extinction, Sarah Allen suggests that humans face this future, whatever it brings, by attending to the ways in which all beings are caught in the entangled processes of becoming. But change is often painful and requires inspiration. Allen explores a theory that shifts the concept of inspiration away from the unique genius of the individual and instead situates it within conceptual, human and nonhuman animal relations that can disrupt the state of being. To expand the understanding of change beyond the polarized binary that defines difference, the author builds on Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the Dionysian, which explains how the self is unmade through immersive experiences. This unmaking creates room for a different experience of becoming, one which Donna Haraway calls “becoming-with” and “producing-with.” In the end, Allen demonstrates how deepening kairotic connections can transform us as beings, thrusting us further into the processes of becoming and embracing the change that is possible in this living, changing, endangered world.

Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions benefit from casting a wider net: Is most scientific change gradual or revolutionary? What are the key sources of scientific novelty? Over the past several decades, a massive effort to digitize the academic literature and equip computers with algorithms that can distantly read and analyze a digital database has taken us one step closer to answering these questions. The Dynamics of Science brings together a diverse array of contributors to examine the largely unexplored computational frontiers of history and philosophy of science. Together, they reveal how tools and data from automated textual analysis, or machine “reading,” combined with methods and models from game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, can begin to answer fundamental questions about the nature and history of science.

Disability and literacy are often understood as incompatible. Disability is taken to be a sign of illiteracy, and illiteracy to be a sign of disability. These oppositions generate damaging consequences for disabled students (and those labeled as such) who are denied full literacy education and for nonliterate adults who are perceived as lacking intelligence, knowledge, and ability. What It Means to Be Literate turns attention to disabled writers themselves, exposing how the cultural oppositions between disability and literacy affect how people understand themselves as literate and even as fully human. Drawing on interviews with individuals who have experienced strokes and brain injuries causing the language disability aphasia, Elisabeth L. Miller argues for the importance of taking a disability materiality approach to literacy that accounts for the embodied, material experiences of disabled people writing and reading. This approach reveals how aphasic writers’ literate practices may reinscribe, challenge, or even exceed scripts around the body in literacy (how brains, hands, eyes, mouths, voice boxes, and more operate to make reading and writing happen) as well as what and how spaces, activities, tools, and materials matter in literate practice. Miller pushes for a deeper understanding of how individuals’ specific bodies always matter for literate practice and identity, enabling researchers to better account for, and counter, ableist literate norms.

This book is an inquiry into the mystical thought of Gregory Barhebraeus (1226-1286CE) and its contemporary relevance, to offer a reading of Barhebraeus’ mystical texts by bringing them into conversation with critical religious studies and the hermeneutical tradition of philosophy. The methodological focus of my thesis has led me to pay particular attention to the language used for the study of mysticism, and I lay emphasis on finding a new language that avoids the phenomenological assumptions concerning ‘mysticism’ to attend to the particularity of ‘mystic’ traditions, such as that of the Syriac mystic tradition inherited by Barhebraeus.

Is it possible for two combatants who possess equally strong air forces to conduct limited warfare by restraining air operations? In Restraining Air Power, Robert C. Owen asks this question and allows contributing authors to provide theoretical and empirical assessments of restrained air warfare through five historical case studies since 1945. Through an objective analysis of the past, this collection evaluates the principles of escalation and escalation management in conventional warfare scenarios to better understand when, why, and how peer opponents in past conflicts have expanded or restrained air operations. The surge in cyber warfare, the development of artificially intelligent weaponry, and the founding of the US Space Force in 2019 means that analysts and military planners must be prepared to think about escalation management and peer conflict in increasingly complicated and challenging ways. This comprehensive study provides readers with refined theoretical visions of the possibilities and challenges of managing escalation as a powerful mode of warfare between opponents who believe they must choose between sacrificing their own national interests or risking escalated destruction of their economies, military forces, and governing authority. The analysis within the pages of this volume is an attempt to update our understanding of air warfare within a world of unprecedented military complexity and, as such, will hold immense value for specialists in advanced military studies as well as those studying international relations and history.

The volume considers the theories of the passions in Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza. Particular attention is given to the passion of fear, highlighting how these three writers considered fear as both an individual and a collective affect. Cerrato underlines the characteristics, relevance and usefulness of these affects, together with the strategies of control used to prevent their transformation into passions that can inhibit rational action. He then demonstrates the divergence of views between Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza in terms of how they delineate these conditions. The second part of the volume focuses on analogies concerning rational strategies that a human being can assume in order to manage fear. Together Descartes e Spinoza, it is necessary to recall Hobbes’s Leviathan, since this work is a consistent and relevant source for Spinoza, as far as the conception of fear as a peculiar perception of past and present is concerned.