Author: Yvan LamondePublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773541063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577
Book Description
The first synthesis of the history of ideas over a century in Quebec.
The Social History of Ideas in Quebec, 1760-1896
Author: Yvan LamondePublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773541063
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577
Book Description
The first synthesis of the history of ideas over a century in Quebec.
Network Democracy
Author: Jared GiesbrechtPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773548548
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Network Democracy uses the contemporary tools of ecology and network thinking to unearth the ancient, intellectual ruins of traditional conservative thought. Questioning the West’s veneration of freedom, equality, contractual citizenship, economic progress, cosmopolitanism, secular institutionalism, and reason, Jared Giesbrecht illuminates how these ideals fuel violence and insecurity in our high-speed lives. While the modern age witnesses the rise of a violent conservatism in the form of revolutionary movements enacting terror and vengeance for the interventions of the liberal West, this study reveals a different kind of conservatism - one that has emerged in direct conversation with liberal thought. Giesbrecht highlights the need for intermediate institutions and civil enterprises that form relations and traditions independent of the state in order to develop resistance to the insecurity of the liberal age. This book offers not only a poignant critique, but a constructive and peaceable alternative to the violence of both liberalism and reactionary anti-liberalism. Attuned to the new realities of globalization, advanced technology, and social acceleration, Network Democracy is a masterful hybrid of ancient and cutting-edge political philosophy that casts a new light on the values underlying western civilization.
Before Copernicus
Author: Rivka FeldhayPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773550127
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
In 1984, Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer argued that Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) explained planetary motion by using mathematical devices and astronomical models originally developed by Islamic astronomers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Was this a parallel development, or did Copernicus somehow learn of the work of his predecessors, and if so, how? And if Copernicus did use material from the Islamic world, how then should we understand the European context of his innovative cosmology? Although Copernicus’s work has been subject to a number of excellent studies, there has been little attention paid to the sources and diverse cultures that might have inspired him. Foregrounding the importance of interactions between Islamic and European astronomers and philosophers, Before Copernicus explores the multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual context of learning on the eve of the Copernican revolution, determining the relationship between Copernicus and his predecessors. Essays by Christopher Celenza and Nancy Bisaha delve into the European cultural and intellectual contexts of the fifteenth century, revealing both the profound differences between “them” and “us,” and the nascent attitudes that would mark the turn to modernity. Michael Shank, F. Jamil Ragep, Sally Ragep, and Robert Morrison depict the vibrant and creative work of astronomers in the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish worlds. In other essays, Rivka Feldhay, Raz Chen-Morris, and Edith Sylla demonstrate the importance of shifting outlooks that were critical for the emergence of a new worldview. Highlighting the often-neglected intercultural exchange between Islam and early modern Europe, Before Copernicus reimagines the scientific revolution in a global context.
War as Paradox
Author: Youri CormierPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773548505
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
Two centuries after Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, it lines the shelves of military colleges around the world and even showed up in an Al Qaeda hideout. Though it has shaped much of the common parlance on the subject, On War is perceived by many as a “metaphysical fog,” widely known but hardly read. In War as Paradox, Youri Cormier lifts the fog on this iconic work by explaining its philosophical underpinnings. Building up a genealogy of dialectical war theory and integrating Hegel with Clausewitz as a co-founders of the method, Cormier uncovers a common logic that shaped the fighting doctrines and ethics of modern war. He explains how Hegel and Clausewitz converged on method, but nonetheless arrived at opposite ethics and military doctrines. Ultimately, Cormier seeks out the limits to dialectical war theory and explores the greater paradoxes the method reveals: can so-called “rational” theories of war hold up under the pressures of irrational propositions, such as lone-wolf attacks, the circular logic of a “war to end all wars,” or the apparent folly of mutually assured destruction? Since the Second World War, commentators have described war as obsolete. War as Paradox argues that dialectical war theory may be the key to understanding why, despite this, it continues.
Form of Politics
Author: John von HeykingPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773599290
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
For statesmen, friendship is the lingua franca of politics. Considering the connections between personal and political friendship, John von Heyking’s The Form of Politics interprets the texts of Plato and Aristotle and emphasizes the role that friendship has in enduring philosophical and contemporary political contexts. Beginning with a discussion on virtue-friendship, described by Aristotle and Plato as an agreement on what qualifies as the pursuit of good, The Form of Politics demonstrates that virtue and political friendship form a paradoxical relationship in which political friendships need to be nourished by virtue-friendships that transcend the moral and intellectual horizons of the political society. Von Heyking then examines Aristotle’s ethical and political writings – which are set within the boundaries of political life – and Plato’s dialogues on friendship in Lysis and the Laws, which characterize political friendship as festivity. Ultimately, arguing that friendship is the high point of a virtuous political life, von Heyking presents a fresh interpretation of Aristotle and Plato’s political thought, and a new take on the most essential goals in politics. Inviting reassessment of the relationship between friendship and politics by returning to the origins of Western philosophy, The Form of Politics is a lucid work on the foundations of political cooperation.
Roads to Confederation
Author: Jacqueline D. KrikorianPublisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487515022
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 507
Book Description
Roads to Confederation surveys the way in which scholars from different disciplines, writing in different periods, viewed the Confederation process and the making of Canada. Recognizing that Confederation has been traditionally defined as a process affecting only British North America’s Anglophone and Francophone communities, Roads to Confederation offers a broader approach to the making of Canada, and includes scholarship written over 145 years. Volume 2 of this collection focuses on three major themes. It presents research from the perspective of Canada’s regions, with one chapter focusing exclusively on the competing understandings of 1867 from the perspective of Quebec. Next, it includes material pertaining to the geopolitical underpinnings of 1867 that addresses the relationship between Confederation, the U.S. Civil War and American expansionism, Great Britain and war in the European theatre. Also included is leading scholarship by Stanley B. Ryerson, Adele Perry, Fernand Dumond, Ian McKay and James W. Daschuk that questions whether Confederation itself was a formative event. Together with its companion volume, this is an invaluable resource for those who wish to deepen their understanding of the historical foundations on which Canada rests.
Emancipatory Thinking
Author: Elaine StavroPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773553916
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Most scholars have focused on The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction, concentrating on gender issues but ignoring her broader emancipatory vision. Though Beauvoir’s political thinking is not as closely studied as her feminist works, it underpinned her activism and helped her navigate the dilemmas raised by revolutionary thought in the postwar period. In Emancipatory Thinking Elaine Stavro brings together Beauvoir’s philosophy and her political interventions to produce complex ideas on emancipation. Drawing from a range of work, including novels, essays, autobiographical writings, and philosophic texts, Stavro explains that for Beauvoir freedom is a movement that requires both personal and collective transformation. Freedom is not guaranteed by world historical systems, material structures, wilful action, or discursive practices, but requires engaged subjects who are able to take creative risks as well as synchronize with existing forces to work towards collective change. Beauvoir, Stavro asserts, resisted the trend of anti-humanism that has dominated French thinking since the 1960s and also managed to avoid the pitfalls of voluntarism and individualism. In fact, Stavro argues, Beauvoir appreciated the impact of material, socio-economic, institutional forces, without forgoing the capacity to initiate. Applying Beauvoir’s existential insights and understanding of embodied and situated subjectivity to recent debates within gender, literary, sociological, cultural, and political studies, Emancipatory Thinking provides a lens to explore the current political and theoretical landscape.
Connected Struggles
Author: Maurice DemersPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773591990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Nationalists from Quebec and Catholic militants from Mexico once shared a common cause, one that influenced international relations between their two countries. At a time when the Revolution and its aftermath in Mexico and world wars marginalized voices of political dissent in Canada, Catholics in both nations saw their cultural struggles as interconnected and worked to build transnational alliances as meaningful discourses of cultural identity. In Connected Struggles, Maurice Demers considers how and why groups from Mexico and Quebec actively sought to establish close cultural and political links. Drawing on extensive research in government, religious, and university archives in Mexico and Canada, Demers delves into the actors, their rationales, and the processes and meanings of such alliances. He proposes a reinterpretation of North-South collaboration in the Americas by analysing how the bonds created by Quebec's and Mexico's civil societies and religious communities influenced diplomatic relations, showing not only the Catholic origins of this solidarity, but its conservative - even reactionary - roots. Demers explains how the foreign ministries in Canada and Mexico both used and denounced these linkages, depending on the political gains to be made. Documenting the emergence of solidarity between French Canadians and Mexicans, Connected Struggles contributes to the understanding of the influence of civil societies in the history of international relations.
God and Government
Author: Jarrett A. CartyPublisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773551972
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Martin Luther (1483–1546) famously began the Reformation, a movement that shook Europe with religious schism and social upheaval. While his Ninety-Five Theses and other theological works have received centuries of scrutiny and recognition, his political writings have traditionally been dismissed as inconsistent or incoherent. God and Government focuses on Luther’s interpretations of theology and the Bible, the historical context of the Reformation, and a wide range of writings that have been misread or misappropriated. Re-contextualizing and clarifying Luther’s political ideas, Jarrett Carty contends that the political writings are best understood through Luther’s “two kingdoms” teaching, in which human beings are at once subjects of a spiritual inner kingdom, and another temporal outer kingdom. Focusing on Luther’s interpretations of theology and the Bible, the historical context of the Reformation, and a wide range of writings that have been misread or ignored, Carty traces how Luther applied political theories to the most difficult challenges of the Reformation, such as the Peasants’ War of 1525 and the Protestant resistance against the Holy Roman Empire, as well as social changes and educational reforms. The book further compares Luther’s political thought to that of Protestant and Catholic political reformers of the sixteenth century. Intersecting scholarship from political theory, religious studies, history, and theology, God and Government offers a comprehensive look at Martin Luther’s political thought across his career and writings.
The Famine Irish
Author: Ciaran ReillyPublisher: The History Press
ISBN: 075096880X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Book Description
From a range of leading academics and historians, this collection of essays examines Irish emigration during the Great Famine of the 1840s. From the mechanics of how this was arranged to the fate of the men, women and children who landed on the shores of the nations of the world, this work provides a remarkable insight into one of the most traumatic and transformative periods of Ireland's history. More importantly, this collection of essays demonstrates how the Famine Irish influenced and shaped the worlds in which they settled, while also examining some of the difficulties they faced in doing so.