Columbia Books

Subaltern Studies moves out of history, with essay by literary critics, anthropologists and most importantly, feminists. Some essays are just very good, but those by Jeganathan and Menon are brilliant. You must read this, if you are interested in any kind of post-colonial studies.

A real help for those in a northern european climate, but for me in Spain, difficult!

Like everything else I've read by Dr. Cavarnos, this little book is excellent (the part in English is 38 pages, while the whole book is only 62 pages.) Its a very easy read on a topic that is so central to Christianity: LOVE. Its so easy to get bogged down by life in the world and to forget that our basic calling is to love, this book reinforces that by describing love in various ways.

After a brief introduction, Dr. Cavarnos discusses the following topics: 1) The General Nature of Love, 2) Kinds of Love, 3) Christian Love and Other Virtues, and 4) Faith & Love.

There are ample quotes from the Holy Scriptures as well as quotes from the likes of great mystics like St. Symeon the New Theologian.

I highly recommend this book. Its so simple and powerful that it is astounding. This book can still be found through many Orthodox booksellers.

This book is a wonderful resource for the casual reader, or memorizer, of lyric poetry.

By design, it's a "greatest hits" anthology, so you're not going to find any surprises here. But it's great to have "To His Coy Mistress," "Prufrock," "Fern Hill," "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners," and 96 more poems worth memorizing at your fingertips.

The layout deserves special praise. Every poem gets a one- or two-page display to itself, with lots of white space around the poem -- an attractive display that's restful on the eye, and somehow very modern-looking. Every poem also gets an informative and sometimes quirky introductory paragraph.

Ernest Gellner was one of the great interdisciplinary thinkers of this Century. He was equally at home in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. He was a fiercely independent thinker, full of original ideas and a healthy scepticism for the prevailing orthodoxies in all of these fields. His prose style was refreshingly free of cant, and he eschewed the desiccated prose style of the typical academic. Gellner was witty, irreverent, and more likely to use an apt colloquialism than technical jargon. The intellectual world suffered a great loss with his passing in 1995.

Gellner's "Conditions of Liberty" first attempts to define the essential features of civil society -- that is, Western-style liberal democracies -- and then attempts to explain its origins. (Gellner's use of the term "civil society" may have been inspired by Michael Oakeshott's use of the term in his book, "On Human Conduct," but the analytical approaches of these two thinkers could not be more different.) Gellner contrasts civil society with the Islamic system, and with the system that was in place in the former Soviet Union.

This short book is rich in insights too numerous to mention here. Among other things, Gellner explains the relationship between the emergence of nationalism and the development of civil society. He draws on Max Weber's ideas to show how changing conceptions of religion affected the evolution of civil society. And he offers some fascinating observations about why the Soviet system collapsed with so little resistance.

This short book is so packed with fascinating ideas that I am willing to rate it as outstanding despite some uncharacteristic lapses in Gellner's writing. The usual wit and irreverence are there, but the editing and organization could have been better.

Choksy does a great job of researching the history of Zoroastrian Persia in its first two centuries under Arab rule. He thoroughly covers the subject of how a Zoroastrian nation was converted to Islam during those early centuries. A remarkable research and a classic.

I just want to mention the poets under discussion in this good book of essays: Walt Whitman. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. Herman Melville. Emily Dickinson. Edwin Arlington Robinson. J.V. Cunningham. Robert Lowell. Robert Frost. Wallace Stevens. Theodore Roethke. Elizabeth Bishop. How the "ideas of order" bind these American poets together. Very readable, understandable literary criticism.

Ably translated into English by Charles David, The Conquest Of Lisbon (De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi) is an eyewitness account of the capture of Lisbon in 1147 by the combined forces of King Alfonso Henriques of Portugal and a fleet of crusaders from the Anglo-Norman kingdoms. More than a dry historical narrative, the author vividly conveys the tensions and rivalries between the secular and spiritual factors of a twelfth century crusade, as well as tremendous and descriptive insights into medieval warfare, the development of crusading ideology and the concept of a Christian "holy war"; as well as Muslim views of the invading crusaders. An informative foreword by Jonathan Phillips provides an update on the scholarship regarding the integral place of the Lisbon expedition in the Second Crusade, the identity of the text's author, and the author's intent for his compelling history. The Conquest Of Lisbon is also available in hardcover (0231121229) and is an essential addition to any Medieval Studies collection.

There have been quite a few books written within the past decade about - well, about CONSCIOUSNESS AND MENTAL LIFE, the title chosen by Oxford scholar Daniel Robinson for his recent contribution to the subject. The title is simple, but the book is anything but. Professor Robinson claims in the preface that his aims for this book are quite modest. First, he seeks to find acknowledgment of the basic issues discussed today regarding the mind within the writings of the ancients, mostly Aristotle and Plato (with a touch of Augustine). Those same issues, per Robinson, would be revived at the dawn of modern science in the works of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Reid and William James. Robinson next seeks to question the confident assertions of certain living scientists and philosophers regarding the ability of modern cognitive neuroscience to answer those venerable inquiries. We're not the first generation to ponder the mysteries of the mind and won't be the last.

In actuality, this book goes farther. Robinson fires intellectual volleys in defense of an unfashionable position regarding consciousness, i.e. substance dualism (quite bravely, given the scientistic sympathies within academic philosophy and psychology today). In a nutshell, substance dualism contends that consciousness is fundamentally different in nature from matter and energy; it exists as a separate realm that mysteriously interacts with the atoms and quarks and photons whizzing around in our bodies and brains. "Mental substance" would be OF but not IN our bodies; it couldn't be directly perceived in terms of four-dimensional timespace.

Obviously this view is seen by many of today's teachers and scientists as superstition and unenlightened "folk psychology", despite the handful of 20th Century intellectual luminaries (such as Eccles and Popper) who sought to critically develop this position. Eccles and Beck, and perhaps physicist David Bohm, had pondered the strangeness of quantum mechanics, wondering whether it might provide a bridge to an unknown mental order. Robinson implies that their torch should be picked up, if gingerly as not to inspire abuse by gurus and religious fundamentalists.

This book is not easy to read. There are no drawings, diagrams or pictures. Most of the eight chapters don't even have sub-headings! You hardly have time to breathe -- although the author's examples of human experience admittedly have their charm, including steaming coffee, cold cranberry juice, and men in tuxedos. Professor Robinson appears to have written for an academic and specialist audience, not for the generally educated reader interested in consciousness issues (who are obviously needed to support the continuing wave of new book titles regarding brain and mind). Robinson's thoughts are in fact available in a more accessible format through his Teaching Company lectures. I have listened to his consciousness course, and although it shares much with C&ML, it is not as tendentious in questioning the faults of the physicalist/reductionist perspective and in suggesting the possible merits of a dualist alternative.

It's unfortunate for the generally interested reader that this book is so little known and so obscurely written. Its multifarious arguments are dense and terse, and I had to re-read many paragraphs to properly digest them. But most points turned out to be extremely valuable and convincing. There are areas where I didn't entirely agree with Robinson; he seemed too quick to dismiss arguments raised by the physicalists regarding the increasingly close connection between subjective phenomenon and what is known about the brain. For example, neuroscientists such as Ramachandran and Damasio frequently cite brain conditions such as aphasia and prosopognosia in their analysis of consciousness. Against this, Robinson argues that disease can't describe normal body functioning, and is likewise of limited relevance with regard to the mind. However, if the mental world is non-objective and epistemologically unique, as Robinson repeatedly states, how can we ultimately set a standard for it?

Nonetheless, I soon found myself reviewing Popper's thoughts regarding "World 2", where conscious substance would flourish. While I'm not quite ready for ghosts in the machine, I feel that certain aspects of 'robust dualism' (versus the timid 'property' version popularized by David Chalmers) could be valuably integrated into a sophisticated if speculative mental paradigm. Scientific triumphalism should not prevent bigger thinking when a problem confounds the standard paradigms, despite their great success in many other venues. That is, so long as the confounding problem is legitimate; the physicalists have argued that consciousness is a pseudo-mystery postulated by uncritical folk thought. Robinson convincingly argues otherwise. He also considers the moral-ethical implications of how we think about our conscious selves, something the physicalists have mostly overlooked.

Much of this book pivots around what Descartes did and did not say, and how modern thinkers set him up as a straw man to be tackled in the name of scientific enlightenment. While Robinson seeks not to rehabilitate Cartesian dualism, with its transcendent rational thought and earthy realms of feeling (current perspectives regarding the cognitive brain and the inscrutable nature of qualia suggest that it might be the opposite!), his careful analysis indicates that Descartes wasn't entirely wrong. Descartes was addressing quandaries that remain unsolved today, and certain modern views unintentionally co-opt various aspects of his thought (e.g., higher-order thought theories as putting a "machine into the ghost").

This book is not for the reader seeking a general review of "consciousness and mental life". A better starting point would be Susan Blackmore's Consciousness: An Introduction, an undergraduate textbook which lays out the various dualist and physicalist positions regarding the nature of our minds. Blackmore's book also provides a good example of the intellectual bias that Robinson challenges. Despite the inherent purpose of a textbook to provide neutral ground for the introduction of a topic, Blackmore makes clear her personal physicalist sympathies. Is this acceptable? Daniel Robinson argues that consciousness studies are not the place for 'last words'. This reviewer, as one living beyond the gates of academia and yet interested in the maintenance of civilization, can only wish Professor Robinson well with regard to this difficult but important book.

Since the publication of the first edition this text has been the basis for all later works on the subject. This edition also includes an new preface in which Fisher argues against most of the criticism that this book has received. Nonetheless there is no more complete book that surveys the issue available