BiblioVault - Books about Social

Taken by Storm, 1938

A Social and Meteorological History of the Great New England Hurricane

Lourdes B. Avilés

American Meteorological Society, 2018

On September 21, 1938, one of the most powerful storms of the twentieth century came unannounced into the lives of New Yorkers and New Englanders, leaving utter devastation in its wake. The Great Hurricane, as it came to be known, changed everything from the landscape and its inhabitants’ lives, to Weather Bureau practices and the measure of relief New Englanders would receive in the final years of the Great Depression.

The storm formed near the Cape Verde Islands on September 10, but was not spotted until several days later, and was predicted by the understaffed Weather Bureau to head toward Florida. Junior forecaster Charlie Pierce correctly projected the northerly storm track, but senior meteorologists ignored his forecast, a mistake that cost many lives—including those of immigrants who had arrived to the Northeast in waves in the preceding decades. Updated for the 80th anniversary of the hurricane, this compelling history successfully weaves science, historical accounts, and social analyses to create a comprehensive picture of the most powerful and devastating hurricane to hit New England to date.

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Taken by Storm, 1938

A Social and Meteorological History of the Great New England Hurricane

Lourdes B. Avilés

American Meteorological Society, 2013

On September 21, 1938 one of the most powerful storms of the twentieth century came unannounced into the lives of New Yorkers and New Englanders, leaving utter devastation in its wake. The Great Hurricane, as it came to be known, changed everything, from the landscape and its inhabitants’ lives, to Weather Bureau practices, to the measure and kind of relief New Englanders would receive during the Great Depression and the resulting pace of regional economic recovery.

The storm formed near the Cape Verde Islands on September 10 but was not spotted until several days later, and was predicted by the understaffed Weather Bureau to head toward Florida. Junior forecaster Charlie Pierce correctly projected the northerly storm track, but senior meteorologists ignored his forecast, a mistake that cost many lives—including those of immigrants who had arrived to the Northeast in waves in the preceding decades. To be published on the storm’s 75th anniversary, this compelling history successfully weaves science, historical accounts, and social analyses to create a comprehensive picture of the most powerful and devastating hurricane to hit New England to date.

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Technosystem

The Social Life of Reason

Andrew Feenberg

Harvard University Press, 2017

We live in a world of technical systems designed in accordance with technical disciplines and operated by personnel trained in those disciplines. This is a unique form of social organization that largely determines our way of life, but the actions of individuals and social protest still play a role in developing and purposing these rational systems. In Technosystem, Andrew Feenberg builds a theory of both the threats of technocratic modernity and the potential for democratic change.

Feenberg draws on the tradition of radical social criticism represented by Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, which recognized the social effects of instrumental rationality but did not advance a convincing alternative to the new forms of domination imposed by rational systems. That is where the fine-grained analyses of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies can contribute. Feenberg uses these approaches to reconcile the claims of rationality with the agency of a public increasingly mobilized to intervene in technically based decisions. The resulting social theory recognizes emerging forms of resistance, such as protests and hacking, as essential expressions of public life in the “rational society.”

Combining the most salient insights from critical theory with the empirical findings of STS, Technosystem advances the philosophical debate over the nature and practice of reason in modern society.

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Telemorphosis

Theory in the Era of Climate Change

Tom Cohen

Michigan Publishing Services, 2012

This volume gathers notable critics and philosophers to engage the predominant impasse of an emerging era of climate change and ecocatastrophic acceleration: that is, how to conceptual and critical practices inherited from 20th century master-thinkers—who took no account of these emergences and logics—alter, adapt, mutate, or undergo translation at the current moment. Rather than assume that the humanities and philosophic practices of the past routed in the rethinking of language and power are suspended as irrelevant before mutations of the biosphere itself, Telemorphosis asks how, in fact, the latter have always been imbricated in these cognitive and linguistic practices and remain so, which is also to ask how a certain violence returns, today, to entirely different fields of reference. The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of “humanistic” thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge on contemporary “life as we know it.”

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The Things That Really Matter

Philosophical Conversations on the Cornerstones of Life

Michael Hauskeller

University College London, 2022

A comprehensive exploration of the most fundamental aspects of human life through accessible conversations with contemporary philosophers.

While rooted in academic discourse, The Things That Really Matter comprehensively explores the most fundamental aspects of human life in approachable, non-technical language, adding fresh perspectives and new arguments and considerations that are designed to stimulate further debate. It features a series of conversations about the things in our life that we all, in one way or another, wrestle with if we are at all concerned about what kind of world we live in and what our role in it is: things like birth, age, and death, good and evil, the meaning of life, the nature of the self and the role the body plays for our identity, our gendered existence, love and faith, free will, beauty, and our experience of the sacred.

Situating abstract ideas in concrete experience, The Things That Really Matter encourages the reader to participate in an open-ended dialogue involving a variety of thinkers with different backgrounds and orientations. Lively and accessible, it shows thinking as a process and a collaborative endeavor that benefits from our talking to each other rather than against each other, featuring real conversations, where ideas are explored, tested, changed, and occasionally dropped. It is thinking in motion, personal yet universal.

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Thinking Through Television

Lorenz Engell

Amsterdam University Press, 2019

Media philosophy can only be found and revealed in media themselves. The essays collected in this volume thus approach television as a medium both of thought and of action in its own right. Through its specific forms and practices, television implements and reflects on aspects of time, such as synchronicity and succession, seriality and event, history and memory. Additionally, television stages new forms of thinking causality and agency, subject-object relations, tactility, choice, and other founding concepts of everyday experience as well as of outstanding philosophical relevance. In the course of media evolution, television organizes the transition from the analogue to the digital. Last not least, by conceiving of itself, television offers a source of finally thinking through television.

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The Thinking Woman

Julienne van Loon

Rutgers University Press, 2021

While women have struggled to gain recognition in the discipline of philosophy, there is no shortage of brilliant female thinkers. What can these women teach us about ethics, politics, and the nature of existence, and how might we relate these big ideas back to the smaller everyday concerns of domestic life, work, play, love, and relationships?
Australian novelist Julienne van Loon goes on a worldwide quest to answer these questions, by engaging with eight world-renowned thinkers who have deep insights on humanity and society: media scholar Laura Kipnis, novelist Siri Hustvedt, political philosopher Nancy Holmstrom, psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva, domestic violence reformer Rosie Batty, peace activist Helen Caldicott, historian Marina Warner, and feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti. As she speaks to these women, she reflects on her own experiences. Combining the intimacy of a memoir with the intellectual stimulation of a theoretical text, The Thinking Woman draws novel connections between the philosophical, personal, and political. Giving readers a new appreciation for both the ethical complexities and wonder of everyday life, this book is inspiration to all thinking people.

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Thought under Threat

On Superstition, Spite, and Stupidity

Miguel de Beistegui

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Thought under Threat reveals and combats the forces diminishing the power and role of critical thinking, whether in our individual lives or collectively.

Thought under Threat is an attempt to understand the tendencies that threaten thinking from within. These tendencies have always existed. But today they are on the rise and frequently encouraged, even in our democracies. People “disagree” with science and distrust experts. Political leaders appeal to the hearts and guts of “the people,” rather than their critical faculties. Stupidity has become a right, if not a badge of honor; superstition is on the rise; and spite is a major political force. Thinking is considered “elitist.”

To see those obstacles as vices of thought, Miguel de Beistegui argues, we need to understand stupidity not as a lack of intelligence or judgment, but as the tendency to raise false problems and trivial questions. Similarly, we need to see spite not as a moral vice, but as a poison that blurs and distorts our critical faculties. Finally, superstition is best described not as a set of false beliefs, but as a system that neutralizes one’s ability to think for oneself.

For de Beistegui, thinking is intrinsically democratic and a necessary condition for the exercise of freedom. Thought under Threat shows how a training of thought itself can be used to ward off those vices, lead to productive deliberation, and, ultimately, create a thinking community.

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The Three Axial Ages

Moral, Material, Mental

Torpey, John

Rutgers University Press, 2017

How should we think about the “shape” of human history since the birth of cities, and where are we headed? Sociologist and historian John Torpey proposes that the “Axial Age” of the first millennium BCE, when some of the world’s major religious and intellectual developments first emerged, was only one of three such decisive periods that can be used to directly affect present social problems, from economic inequality to ecological destruction.

Torpey’s argument advances the idea that there are in fact three “Axial Ages,” instead of one original Axial Age and several subsequent, smaller developments. Each of the three ages contributed decisively to how humanity lives, and the difficulties it faces. The earliest, or original, Axial Age was a moral one; the second was material, and revolved around the creation and use of physical objects; and the third is chiefly mental, and focused on the technological. While there are profound risks and challenges, Torpey shows how a worldview that combines the strengths of all three ages has the potential to usher in a period of exceptional human freedom and possibility.

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Transition & Development in Algeria

Economic, Social and Cultural Challenges

Mohammed Saad

Intellect Books, 2013

The Tribal Imagination

Civilization and the Savage Mind

Robin Fox

Harvard University Press, 2011

We began as savages, and savagery has served us well—it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to Lévi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main—and urgent—task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril.

Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human “right” to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end—or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bartók to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs—needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.

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Twentieth-Century Texas

A Social and Cultural History

John W. Storey

University of North Texas Press, 2008