Human Creatures

Human Creatures PDF Author: Fred Howard
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1462827160
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
A broad, but easy reading, world-view of realities behind the anciently permanent traits of human behavior which cause simple societies to grow, to flourish in great civilizations throughout the world, and to collapse repeatedly, usually with much loss of the expanded populations. Both democracies and tyrannies follow that universal pattern into autocratic decay of civilized empires. This view leads to a search for critical factors that determine the beginning and course of the typical decays (which have already begun in modern democracies.) Invariably, all those great nations had strong religious and moral practices during their early growth to large numbers of vigorous people, up to the points of beginning the slide into collapse. All had strong leaders who escaped reasonable limits beyond their necessary uses. This book was written before the authors previously published, Headlong Into Quicksand - The Tale of Today in America -, and provided its basis and starting point. Viewing human natures overall adaptations for life-survival necessities in a real world also includes: Family, love, play, arts, psychology, dominances, politics, governments, imperial disasters, death, philosophy, world history, science/knowledges, religion, morality, and balanced democracy. (An alternative evolutionary sociobiology.)

Human Creatures

Human Creatures PDF Author: Fred Howard
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1462827160
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 567

Get Book Here

Book Description
A broad, but easy reading, world-view of realities behind the anciently permanent traits of human behavior which cause simple societies to grow, to flourish in great civilizations throughout the world, and to collapse repeatedly, usually with much loss of the expanded populations. Both democracies and tyrannies follow that universal pattern into autocratic decay of civilized empires. This view leads to a search for critical factors that determine the beginning and course of the typical decays (which have already begun in modern democracies.) Invariably, all those great nations had strong religious and moral practices during their early growth to large numbers of vigorous people, up to the points of beginning the slide into collapse. All had strong leaders who escaped reasonable limits beyond their necessary uses. This book was written before the authors previously published, Headlong Into Quicksand - The Tale of Today in America -, and provided its basis and starting point. Viewing human natures overall adaptations for life-survival necessities in a real world also includes: Family, love, play, arts, psychology, dominances, politics, governments, imperial disasters, death, philosophy, world history, science/knowledges, religion, morality, and balanced democracy. (An alternative evolutionary sociobiology.)

Social Creatures

Social Creatures PDF Author: Clifton P. Flynn
Publisher: Lantern Books
ISBN: 1590561236
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
In more than thirty essays, Social Animals examines the role of animals in human society. Collected from a wide range of periodicals and books, these important works of scholarship examine such issues as how animal shelter workers view the pets in their care, why some people hoard animals, animals and women who experience domestic abuse, philosophical and feminist analyses of our moral obligations toward animals, and many other topics.

Biocultural Creatures

Biocultural Creatures PDF Author: Samantha Frost
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In Biocultural Creatures, Samantha Frost brings feminist and political theory together with findings in the life sciences to recuperate the category of the human for politics. Challenging the idea of human exceptionalism as well as other theories of subjectivity that rest on a distinction between biology and culture, Frost proposes that humans are biocultural creatures who quite literally are cultured within the material, social, and symbolic worlds they inhabit. Through discussions about carbon, the functions of cell membranes, the activity of genes and proteins, the work of oxygen, and the passage of time, Frost recasts questions about the nature of matter, identity, and embodiment. In doing so, she elucidates the imbrication of the biological and cultural within the corporeal self. In remapping the relation of humans to their habitats and arriving at the idea that humans are biocultural creatures, Frost provides new theoretical resources for responding to political and environmental crises and for thinking about how to transform the ways we live.

Creatures

Creatures PDF Author: Crissy Van Meter
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616208597
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A Belletrist Book Club Selection “Van Meter’s debut is an unwavering triumph . . . A coming-of-age that’s as human as it is wild.” —The New York Times Book Review On the eve of Evangeline’s wedding, on the shore of Winter Island, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, the narrative flows back and forth through time as Evie reckons with her complicated upbringing in this lush, wild land off the coast of Southern California. Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island’s world-famous strain of weed, Winter Wonderland. Although her father raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself. With wit, love, and bracing flashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of love and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief—and the ways in which our childhoods can threaten our ability to love if we are not brave enough to conquer the past. Lyrical, darkly funny, and ultimately cathartic, Creatures exerts a pull as strong as the tides.

Animals Make Us Human

Animals Make Us Human PDF Author: Temple Grandin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0151014892
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The author of "Animals in Translation" employs her own experience with autism and her background as an animal scientist to show how to give animals the best and happiest life.

Creatures of Cain

Creatures of Cain PDF Author: Erika Lorraine Milam
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
How Cold War America came to attribute human evolutionary success to our species' unique capacity for murder After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man’s evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials and in-depth interviews, Erika Lorraine Milam reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity’s problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, Milam shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee-human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, Creatures of Cain argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

The Soul of All Living Creatures

The Soul of All Living Creatures PDF Author: Vint Virga, D.V.M.
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307718875
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
As profiled in the New York Times Magazine… Based on the author’s twenty-five years of experience as a veterinarian and veterinary behaviorist, The Soul of All Living Creatures delves into the inner lives of animals – from whales, wolves, and leopards to mice, dogs, and cats – and explores the relationships we forge with them. As an emergency room clinician four years out of veterinary school, Dr. Vint Virga had a life-changing experience: he witnessed the power of simple human contact and compassion to affect the recovery of a dog struggling to survive after being hit by a car. Observing firsthand the remarkably strong connection between humans and animals inspired him to explore the world from the viewpoint of animals and taught him to respect the kinship that connects us. With The Soul of All Living Creatures, Virga draws from his decades in veterinary practice to reveal how, by striving to perceive the world as animals do, we can enrich our own appreciation of life, enhance our character, nurture our relationships, improve our communication with others, reorder our values, and deepen our grasp of spirituality. Virga discerningly illuminates basic traits shared by both humans and animals and makes animal behavior meaningful, relevant, and easy to understand. Insightful and eloquent, The Soul of All Living Creatures offers an intimate journey into the lives of our fellow creatures and a thought-provoking promise of what we can learn from spending time with them.

A Midsummer-night's Dream

A Midsummer-night's Dream PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Athens (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description


Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa PDF Author: Saheed Aderinto
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821447688
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species, habitat, material value, threat, and biological and psychological characteristics (among other traits) shaped imperial perspectives on animal Nigerians. Conceptually sophisticated and intellectually engaging, Aderinto’s thesis challenges readers to rethink what constitutes history and to recognize that human agency and narrative are not the only makers of the past.

What Kind of Creatures Are We?

What Kind of Creatures Are We? PDF Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540922
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The renowned philosopher and political theorist presents a summation of his influential work in this series of Columbia University lectures. A pioneer in the fields of modern linguistics and cognitive science, Noam Chomsky is also one of the most avidly read political theorist of our time. In this series of lectures, Chomsky presents more than half a century of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas. In precise yet accessible language, Chomsky elaborates on the scientific study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language bears to thought, its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as those that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of human cognitive capacities. Moving from language and mind to society and politics, Chomsky concludes with a philosophical defense of a position he describes as "libertarian socialism," tracing its links to anarchism and the ideas of John Dewey, and even briefly to the ideas of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. Demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our historical past, he also shows its urgent relation to our present moment.