Showing results by narrator "Macat" in All Categories

Even as recently as the 1920s the historical lack of great female writers was often considered as evidence of women's inferiority. Virginia Woolf disagreed. In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, she argues that creativity is impossible without privacy and freedom from financial worries - and that throughout history women have had neither. As a result, no tradition of great female writing existed to inspire women. Woolf's focus on the everyday suppression of women was a turning point.

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856, in Vienna, Austria, and died in London in 1939, but his reputation as "the father of psychoanalysis" lives on. The theories he introduced in his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, revolutionized the treatment of mental illness in the late 19th century. Based on his success in using new techniques he had developed with his patients, and on conclusions he drew from analyzing his own dreams, Freud said that dreams offered a window into the workings of the unconscious mind.

In her original and controversial 2005 book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject Saba Mahmood examines the women's mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt as part of a wider turn to religious fervor integral to the broader Islamic revival of the twenty-first century. Mahmood's research suggests that in choosing to embrace the norms of their faith, these pious Muslim women are not limiting, but rather affirming, themselves.

English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The idea of evolution and that all earth's species have descended from a common ancestor had already been around for some time. What was new about Darwin's work was that it found a way to explain evolution using a theory called natural selection. This claimed that species change in small ways, gradually, over long periods of time; the individuals who happen to be best suited to their environment survive.

Philosopher Judith Butler's 1990 work, Gender Trouble, shook the foundations of feminist theory and changed the conversation about gender. While many thinkers already accepted that "gender" was a category constructed by society rather than defined by one's genitalia, Butler went further and argued that gender is performative - it exists only in the acts that express it. Society determines that wearing makeup is "feminine" - but some men wear makeup. Are they "women"?

In his 1997 work Theology of Discontent, American Iranian Hamid Dabashi suggests that the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979 would not have happened had it not been for the influential ideas of eight Iranian Islamic thinkers in the four decades before it occurred. Dabashi surveys these thinkers' contributions to the development of Iran's system of Islamic beliefs. He says this ideology was shaped both according to Iranians' perception of themselves and according to their perception of the West.

First published in 1651, Leviathan drove important discussions about where kings get their authority to rule and what those kings must, in turn, do for their people. This is known as the "social contract". Thomas Hobbes wrote the book while exiled from his native England following the English Civil War that unseated King Charles I. In the face of England's radical - if temporary - rejection of its monarchy, Hobbes wanted to explain why it was important to have a strong central government, which in his time meant having a sovereign at its head.

Iranian American writer and scholar Hamid Dabashi wrote Iran: A People Interrupted amid the political fallout following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York - his adopted city - in 2001. As US President George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" and named Iran as part of an "axis of evil" that supported terrorism, Dabashi offered an insider's insight into the Iranian psyche.

Economist Amartya Sen's 1997 work Development as Freedom presents a "middle way" approach to how we should look at international development, based on the idea that its success or failure cannot be measured by income alone. Having grown up in India, Sen brings his own understanding of what poverty really means to the issue, arguing that above all, the process and goal of development must be human freedom. He backs up this idea through his concept of "capabilities."

Traditionally, managers assumed people were lazy and would not work unless strictly controlled. McGregor, however, believed this form of management to be based on faulty assumptions about human nature, and felt that managers should reflect on their assumptions about what motivates people. He proposed they draw on research in psychology and the other social sciences to create working conditions that allow all employees to realize their full human potential.

In her 1958 work, political theorist Hannah Arendt asks two fundamental questions: "Under what conditions do politics emerge?" and "Under what conditions can politics be eliminated?" In searching for answers she turns some long-established thinking on its head. Ancient political philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle believed that a life spent thinking was more important than an active life of labor, work, and action. But Arendt argues that political action is every bit as important as political thinking.

Some people think nationhood is as old as civilization itself. But for anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Benedict Anderson, nation and nationalism are products of the communication technology of the era known as the modern age, which began in 1500. After the invention of the printing press around 1440, common local languages gradually replaced Latin as the language of print. Ordinary people could now share ideas of their own.

Søren Kierkegaard has long been considered the father of the philosophical movement known as Christian existentialism, which focuses on the living human being. In his major 1849 work, The Sickness unto Death, he takes listeners on a journey from the human self, its spirit, despair and sin, through to faith.

Meditations is a remarkable work, a unique insight into the thinking of one of the most conscientious and able Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who ruled at the apex of Roman might in the late second century CE. It was never intended to be widely circulated. Indeed, it was almost unknown until the 16th century. The work is like a series of jottings, written for its author's own improvement; it has no formal structure and its arguments follow no obvious pattern.

Do people always act rationally and in their own best interests? US economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein did not believe so, and were convinced that psychological factors often stopped people from making the best decisions. Their 2008 work Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness argues that governments should "nudge" citizens to make better choices in all sorts of areas, from eating habits, to health, to financial planning.

Clifford Geertz's first collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), made him a leading voice of anthropology's "symbolic" movement, which believed scholars should read the signs and symbols of a culture from the perspective of its natives. Geertz's approach helped anthropology reinvent itself as a scientific discipline that is still relevant today, making him - in the words of one critic - "a true giant of social and cultural theory."

Democracy and Its Critics is a modern classic that integrates Robert A. Dahl's democratic thinking as it developed over the course of his academic career. It makes an important contribution to theories about democracy and remains widely cited and debated. Dahl offers an interpretation of democratic theory and practice that is relevant to the modern world and that pays special attention to the problems highlighted by people who criticize democracy.

William worked on The Principles of Psychology throughout the 1880s, while teaching psychology and philosophy at Harvard University. He drew together various styles of science to create a unified whole, and to establish psychology as a valid discipline. Not only did he achieve this, but he also created concepts - such as thought being a "stream of consciousness" - that have found their way into both the arts, and popular conversation.

Published in 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a gloriously optimistic book. In it, well-known cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker put forward an argument that contradicted what most people believed at the time. Pinker said that despite humanity's biological tendency toward violence, we are, in fact, less violent today than ever before. To prove it, he laid out pages of detailed statistical evidence.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - and the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature - novelist, orator, and outspoken public intellectual Toni Morrison is best known for her novels. In Playing in the Dark, however, she enters the realm of literary criticism. Morrison, an African American, draws attention to the often-overlooked significance of race in literature, demonstrating "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it". Reading the racial language between the lines of classic American fiction, Morrison shows that literature is never raceless.