Author: Brian Leiter File Type: pdf Brian Leiter defends a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts and reasoning play almost no significant role in our actions and how our lives unfold. Leiter presents a new interpretation of main themes of Nietzsches moral psychology, including his anti-realism about value (including epistemic value), his account of moral judgment and itsrelationship to the emotions, his conception of the will and agency, his scepticism about free will and moral responsibility, his epiphenomenalism about certain kinds of conscious mental states, and his views about the heritability of psychological traits. In combining exegesis with argument, Leiter engagesthe views of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, T. M. Scanlon, and Gary Watson, and psychologists including Daniel Wegner, Benjamin Libet, and Stanley Milgram. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventionalwisdom in both philosophy and psychology.About the Author bBrian Leiterb is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago, where he teaches and writes about moral, political, and legal philosophy in both the Anglophone and Continental European traditions. His many publications include Nietzsche on Morality (2002 2015), which has been called the most important book on Nietzsches philosophy in the last twenty years (Journal of Nietzsche Studies , 2010).

Author: Stephen Kurkjian File Type: pdf In a secret meeting in 1981, a master thief named Louis Royce gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime. As a kid, Royce had visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made a habit of sneaking in at night to find a good place to sleep. He knew the Museum's security was lax, and he gave this information to a boss of the Boston criminal underworld.It took years before the Museum was hit. But when it finally happened, it quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history 13 works of art valued at up to $500 millionincluding Rembrandt's "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee." The identity of the thieves were a mystery, the paintings were never found.What happened in those intervening years? Which Boston crew landed the big score? And why, more than 20 years later, did the FBI issue a press conference stating that they knew who had pulled off the heist and what had happened to the artwork, but provided no identities and scant details?These mysteries are the story of Kurkjian's revealing book. The best and longest-tenured reporter on this case, and one of the most decorated investigative reporters in America, Kurkjian will reveal the identities of this who plotted the heist, the motive for the crime, and the details that the FBI refused to reveal. He will take the reader deep into the Boston mob, and paint the most complete and compelling picture of this story ever told.

Author: Reiland Rabaka File Type: pdf Hip Hops Inheritance arguably offers the first book-length treatment of what hip hop culture has, literally, inherited from the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, the Feminist Art movement, and 1980s and 1990s postmodern aesthetics. By comparing and contrasting the major motifs of the aforementioned cultural aesthetic traditions with those of hip hop culture, all the while critically exploring the origins and evolution of black popular culture from antebellum America through to Obamas America, Hip Hops Inheritance demonstrates that the hip hop generation is not the first generation of young black (and white) folk preoccupied with spirituality and sexuality, race and religion, entertainment and athletics, or ghetto culture and bourgeois culture. Taking interdisciplinarity and intersectionality seriously, Hip Hops Inheritance employs the epistemologies and methodologies from a wide range of academic and organic intellectualactivist communities in its efforts to advance an intellectual history and critical theory of hip hop culture. Drawing from academic and organic intellectualactivist communities as diverse as African American studies and womens studies, postcolonial studies and sexuality studies, history and philosophy, politics and economics, and sociology and ethnomusicology, Hip Hops Inheritance calls into question one-dimensional and monodisciplinary interpretations or, rather, misinterpretations, of a multidimensional and multivalent form of popular culture that has increasingly come to include cultural criticism, social commentary, and political analysis. **Review Rabaka (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) offers a sweeping historical assessment of cultural ideologies connecting hip-hop to artistic innovations of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movements. He mobilizes cultural theorists Baraka, Foucault, DuBois, Jameson, Said, Fanon, Hurston to describe the evolution of African American intellectual and cultural history via radical humanism, and democratic socialism. Sprawling overviews of Africana critical theory, feminist theory, and queer theory imagine, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and sexual orientation-sensitive critical theory of contemporary society. The author provides interesting, if diffuse, discussion of gay literary voices in the Harlem Renaissance in relation to the contemporary homo-hop movement Black Arts Movement members perception of the aesthetic radicalism of the Harlem Renaissance and the black aesthetic sensibility that authentic black art was always historically grounded, politically engaged, socially uplifting, and consciousness-raising. In exploring the relationships between the black womens liberation, feminist art, and hip-hop feminist movements, Rabaka mines work by Patricia Collins. In a final chapter, he considers postmodernist approaches to popular culture while asserting that rap music re-Africanizes and reanimates African American music, all the while continuing the African Americanization of mainstream American music and popular culture.... Summing Up Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students. (CHOICE) You remember when you fell in love with hip-hop. Now, be reminded why. (SoulTrain.com) Reiland Rabaka demonstrates, with great agility, that hip-hop has wide-reaching artistic and intellectual roots in the history of African American cultural production. This book is an essential addition to an expanding corpus of rich scholarship on hip-hop. It is a welcome contribution with fresh perspectives on the dynamics of gender, class and race in the context of hip-hop-beyond beats and rhymes. (Jeffrey Ogbar, University of Connecticut) Hip-Hops Inheritance is an extraordinary journey through the last decade of hip-hop criticism that situates the contemporary hip-hop moment into the historical continuum of black political, cultural and gender struggles in the US. With unflinching compassion, piercing intellect and unwavering scholarship,Reiland Rabaka advances a long overdue critical theory of hip-hop culture. (Bakari Kitwana, author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America) About the Author Reiland Rabaka is an associate professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is also an affiliate professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He is the author of several books, including Du Boiss Dialectics (2008) Africana Critical Theory (2009) Forms of Fanonism (2010) and, Against Epistemic Apartheid (2010). He is also the recipient of the Cheikh Anta Diop Distinguished Career Award.

Author: Sherry Johnson File Type: pdf From 1750 to 1800, a critical period that saw the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution, the Atlantic world experienced a series of environmental crises, including more frequent and severe hurricanes and extended drought. Drawing on historical climatology, environmental history, and Cuban and American colonial history, Sherry Johnson innovatively integrates the regions experience with extreme weather events and patterns into the history of the Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world.By superimposing this history of natural disasters over the conventional timeline of sociopolitical and economic events in Caribbean colonial history, Johnson presents an alternative analysis in which some of the signal events of the Age of Revolution are seen as consequences of ecological crisis and of the resulting measures for disaster relief. For example, Johnson finds that the general adoption in 1778 of free trade in the Americas was catalyzed by recognition of the harsh realities of food scarcity and the needs of local colonists reeling from a series of natural disasters. Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the eighteenth-century Caribbean.ReviewSherry Johnson provides a novel, sophisticated, and powerfully persuasive argument that many of the significant political changes in the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolution cannot be fully understood without reference to the environmental history. This highly original book is elegantly written and full of excellent and prodigious research.--Franklin W. Knight, The Johns Hopkins UniversityFrom the Inside FlapFrom 1750 to 1800, a critical period that saw the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution, the Atlantic world experienced a series of environmental crises, including more frequent and severe hurricanes and extended drought. Drawing on historical climatology, environmental history, and Cuban and American colonial history, Sherry Johnson innovatively integrates the regions experience with extreme weather events and patterns into the history of the Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world.