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This study advances contemporary postmodern/poststructural critical theory, literary criticism in particular, with the help of Mahayanaespecially Ch'an/Seon (Chinese and Korean Zen)Buddhist thought. The quest for theinfinity of the Other (West) and Emptiness or the true I (East) contributes to the exploration of the contemporary critical issues of ethics and infinity. Such an approach will awaken our sense of unrepresented, genuine transcendence and immanence; The Buddhist Emptiness shows us the absolute Other illuminated on a vaster scale. The theory section explores and links Eastern and Western philosophies, switching between the two. While discussing in depth Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Lacan, Deleuze, and Nancy, this study gradually guides the reader from the contemporary Western thought on the Other and infinity to the Buddhist vision of Emptiness, the ultimate reality. To overcome the dualistic mode of thought inherent in tradition of Western metaphysics, this exploration follows the line that observes Nagarjuna and the imprint of Ch'an teachings that are most prevalent in South Korean Buddhism. The last three chapters demonstrate a Levinasian and Seon Buddhist approach to the book of Job, part of the Judeo-Christian Bible, as being a more literary than religious text, and the excess of the Gothic mood in the two most distinguished and widely celebrated novelsBram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The three texts compel readers to confront the infinity of the absolute Other or Emptiness.The Grand Prize Winner of the 7th Wonhyo Academic Awards from the Korean Buddhism Promotion Foundation.

Sinclair Lewis was one of the most astute observers of American social and political life. Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy is a highly readable analysis of his novels. The book examines each of Lewis's novels on key themes in the history of political thought and democracy including freedom and purpose, success and materialism, and nationalism and race. Lewis is revealed to be an unapologetic individualist and a fierce humanitarian.

In recent years, political theorists have increasingly focused on the question of legitimacy rather than on justice. The question of legitimacy asks: even if legal coercion falls short of being perfectly just, what nonetheless makes it morally legitimate? Yet legitimacy remains poorly understood. According to the regnant theory of justificatory liberalism, legitimate legal coercion is based on reasons all reasonable persons can accept and is conceived in terms of a hypothetical procedure. Philip Shadd argues that this view would effectively de-legitimize all laws given its requirement of unanimity; it wrongly suggests that basic rights are outcomes of political procedures rather than checks on such procedures; and it is paternalistic as it substitutes hypothetical persons for actual persons.Where should theorists turn? Shadds perhaps surprising proposal is that they turn to neo-Calvinism. Founded by the Dutch politician, theologian, and social theorist, Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), neo-Calvinism is a specific variant of Reformed social thought unique for its emphasis on institutional pluralism. It has long theorized themes such as church-state separation, religious diversity, and both individual and institutional liberty. Out of this tradition Shadd reconstructs an alternative framework for legitimacy. The central neo-Calvinist insight is this: legitimacy is a function of preventing basic wrongs. The book develops this insight in terms of three ideas. First, the wrongs that legitimate regimes must prevent are violations of objective natural rights. Second, these rights and wrongs presuppose some or another view of basic human flourishing. Third, Shadd suggests we understand these rights and wrongs as being exogenous. That is, they are not social constructions, but arise outside of human societies even while applying to them. While based in a religious tradition of thought, religious intolerance is no part of this neo-Calvinist theory of legitimacy and, in fact, runs contrary to neo-Calvinism's distinctive institutional pluralism. But only by theorizing legitimacy along the lines Shadd suggests can we make sense of convictions such as that some legal coercion is legitimate even amidst disagreement and that paternalistic coercion is illegitimate. Neo-Calvinism offers a better framework for understanding legitimacy.This book will be of particular interest to secular theorists focusing on themes of political legitimacy, public reason, justificatory (or political) liberalism, or the work of John Rawls, and to religious theorists focused on theories of church-state separation, institutional pluralism, and religious diversity.

Since the release of The Exorcist in 1973, there has been a surge of movies depicting young women becoming possessed by a demonic force that only male religious figures can exorcise, thereby saving the women from eventual damnation. This book considers this history of exorcism cinema by analyzing how the traditional exorcism narrative, established in The Exorcist, recurs across the exorcism subgenre to represent the effects of demonic possession and ritual exorcism. This traditional exorcism narrative often functions as the central plot of the exorcism film, with only the rare film deviating from this structure. The analysis presented in this book considers how exorcism films reflect, reinforce or challenge this traditional exorcism narrative. Using various cultural and critical theories, this book examines how representations of possession and exorcism reflect, reinforce or challenge prevailing social, cultural, and historical views of women, minorities, and homosexuals. In particular, exorcism films appear to explore tensions or fears regarding empowered and sexually active women, and frequently reinforce the belief that such individuals need to be subjugated and disempowered so that they no longer pose a threat to those around them. Even more recent films, produced after the emergence of third wave feminism, typically reflect this concern about women. Very rarely do exorcism films present empowered women and feminine sexuality as non-threatening. In examining this subgenre of horror films, this book looks at films that have not received much critical scrutiny regarding the messages they contain and how they relate to and comment upon the historical periods in which they were produced and initially received. Given the results of this analysis, this book concludes on the necessity to examine how possession and exorcism are portrayed in popular culture.

In this new age of social media, the role of online ethnic networks is as important as offline ethnic networksfamilies, friends, etc.in helping immigrants adjust to their new country. This is something that has received very little attention in the academic field of international immigration which Oh hopes to rectify through this book. He focuses on the five American social institutions (immigration, welfare, education, housing, and finance) to explore this topic through the lens of married Korean-American women. In their online MissyUSA community, the largest Korean-American womens online community in North America, they share a wide range of information about the rules of each of these social institutions as they work together to navigate American society. Oh explores how the ';MissyUSA' community creates two distinctive forms of social capital: social resources and social support. For some of its members (inquirers or information seekers), the ';MissyUSA' community functions as an important source of their information (social resources) about the rules of the American social institutions. Likewise, it also functions as a network of social supporters (respondents or information providers) for those information seekers. Here, what makes this book a significant one is the fact that these social supporters are distinctively identified as instrumental guiders (information describers, expositors, confirmers, and advisors) and emotional supporters (companions, encouragers, and critics). By researching the lives of Korean-American women who are members of the MissyUSA community, Ohs book works to understand how a sub-set of the Korean-American community shares information about American institutions and uses the internet to do so.

Childlike Peace in Merleau-Ponty and Levinas argues that the primordial structure of our personal encounters with others should be understood as a dialectical spiral. Drawing on the work of twentieth-century philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, and informed by recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and child development, Brock Bahler develops a phenomenological description of the parent-child relationship in order to articulate an account of intersubjectivity that is fundamentally ethically oriented, dialogical, and mutually dynamic. This dialectical spiralin contrast to Cartesian tradition of the subject and the Hegelian master-slave dialecticsuggests that our lives are equiprimordially interwoven with both the richness of mutual engagement and the responsibility to be for-the-other. The parent-child relationship provides the basis for a theoretical account of intersubjectivity that is marked by a creative interaction between self and other that cannot be reduced to an economic exchange, a totalizing structure, or a unilateral asymmetrical responsibility. In conversation with the philosophical thought of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Hegel, Sartre, and Freud, as well as recent research in cognitive neuroscience and child development, this work will be of interest for those working in the fields of continental philosophy, embodied cognition, philosophy of childhood, psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy for children (P4C), and education.

Ibadan market women were active in political mobilization and they engaged in eclectic political actions during the decolonization process. Their leaders significantly swayed the electorate both in and beyond the market places. This study examines the historical development of the roles of Ibadan market women in politics between 1900 and 1995 with a view to establishing their contributions. By a thorough historical analysis, Ibadan Divisional and Provincial papers, and newspapers of the nationalists' era (1945-1960)-Nigerian Tribune and Southern Nigerian Defender from the National Archives Ibadan were consulted for information on the activities of Ibadan market women. Secondary data were obtained from the Women Research and Documentation Centre and other resource centres. Simultaneously, Ibadan market women were involved in party politics of the National Council for Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC); Action Group (AG); and traditional power politics.

Euripides and the Boundaries of the Human presents the first single-volume reading in nearly fifty years of all of Euripides' surviving plays. Rather than examining one or a handful of dramas in monograph or article form, Mark Ringer insists on the thematic and stylistic parallels that unite a diverse canon of works. Euripides is often referred to as the most modern of the three Ancient Greek tragedians, but in what way can the work of this fifth-century B.C. artist be claimed as modern? The multi-layered presentation of character is new within the context of Athenian Tragedy. The plays also reveal equal concern with the preservation and re-vitalization of tradition, especially with respect to the portrayal of the Olympian gods. Euripidean drama upholds tradition just as vigorously as it posits a new kind of realism in character portrayal in the Ancient Theatre. Euripidean drama fuses what was old with what was new in order to revitalize and perpetuate the art of tragedy.This book will be of interest to professionals and students in the fields of classics, Greek drama in translation or in the original Greek, theater studies, comparative literature, tragedy, and religion.

The Untruth of Reality, Jure Simoniti, in contrast, points out the necessary realist side of modern philosophy, arguing that the possibility of realism has always been there. The epistemological self-inauguration of the subject goes hand in hand with his anthropological dethronement, the god-like centrality of the ';ego' is constantly counterbalanced with his creatural marginality, the activity of the constitutive subject is juxtaposed with the growing indifference of the world, and the linguistic appropriation of the world simultaneously performs operations of the de-symbolization of reality. However, with these precarious equilibria, the conditions of possibility of realism have become more complex and intricate. It is therefore the goal of this book to demonstrate how the paradigms of consciousness and language are not necessarily incompatible with realism, but rather open new and broader possibilities for the world behind and beyond consciousness and language to disclose itself.This book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars in the fields of German idealism, continental philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.

In The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society, John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji has two main goals. The first is to provide an exploration of aspects of indigenous Yoruba philosophy of law. The second is to relate this philosophy of law to the Yoruba indigenous traditions of governance, with a view to appreciating the relevance of the Yoruba traditions of law and governance to contemporary African experiments with imported Western democracy in the 21st century. This book is devoted to what can be described as a juridical forensic investigation of Nigeria's predicament of developmental deficit, leading to gross and unconscionable impoverishment of large segments of the population, in the midst of so much natural resources and abundant human capital, using Yoruba indigenous legal traditions as reflective template. Bewaji urges that Africa has to take seriously the necessity of obedience, observance, enforcement and operation of law as no respecter of persons, groups, affiliations and pedigrees as was in the case in the societies founded by our ancestors, rather than the present scenario whereby the highest bidder procures semblances of justice from a crooked system of common law which was never designed to be fair, equitable and just to the disadvantaged in society.

This book explores new fiscal rules introduced in OECD countries and the relevance of fiscal rules for the unique fiscal policies and institutions in the United States. The rules in different countries are compared, with a more in depth analysis of two countries with arguably the most successful fiscal rulesSwitzerland and Sweden. The study compares the challenge of fiscal consolidation facing the U.S. with that in other OECD countries. The centerpiece of the study is analysis of fiscal rules using a dynamic simulation model. A Swiss style fiscal rule is compared to an alternative fiscal rule proposed by Representative Amash, H.J.Res 24.The authors propose a new fiscal rule designed for the unique fiscal institutions in the U.S. Dynamic scoring is used to measure the impact of different fiscal rules on the federal budget, economic growth, and revenue. The effectiveness of the different fiscal rules is analyzed with respect to several criteria. A major objective of the rules is fiscal stabilization in the long run to bring debt/GDP ratios below tolerance levels. The fiscal rules are also designed for budget stabilization in the medium term, such that deficits in periods of recession are offset by surplus revenue in periods of economic expansion. The concluding section of the study explores the political economy of enacting new fiscal rules in the U.S. The study proposes fundamental changes in budget process required for the proposed fiscal rule to be effective. The study concludes with a discussion of alternative routes to enacting new fiscal rules, and the prospects for new fiscal rules to be enacted in the U.S.

Philosophical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology describes the unique relationship between early schools of thought in Greek philosophy, modern psychology, and most recently evolutionary psychology. This volume provides the reader with a concise history and description of some of the most important theories used in understanding human behaviors (i.e., the mind-body duality, the essence of human nature, and how humans have evolved to cooperate with each other) and how the physical characteristics of communities have contributed to positive (i.e., prosocial) or destructive (i.e., antisocial) behavior. It explores human nature from the philosophical perspectives of Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau as contributing factors to the development of modern psychology (i.e., Structuralism, Functionalism, Behaviorism, and Biopsychology) that ultimately is combined with evolutionary psychology. Philosophical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology also incorporates various topics of psychology that support the development of evolutionary psychology such as language and communication, gender differences, aggression, cooperative behaviors, and natural selection.

This book traces W.E.B. Du Bois's fictionalization of history in his five major works of fiction and in his debut short story The Souls of Black Folk through a thematic framework of cosmopolitanism. In texts like The Negro and Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois argues that the human race originated from a single source, a claim authenticated by anthropologists and the Human Genome Project. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the fashion in which the variants of cosmopolitanism become a profound theme in Du Bois's contribution to fiction. In general, cosmopolitanism claims that people belong to a single community informed by common moral values, function through a shared economic nomenclature, and are part of political systems grounded in mutual respect. This book addresses Du Bois's works as important additions to the academy and makes a significant contribution to literature by first demonstrating the way in which fiction could be utilized in discussing historical accounts in order to reach a global audience. ';The Coming of John', The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dark Princess: A Romance, and The Black Flame, an important trilogy published sequentially as The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color are grounded in historical occurrences and administer as social histories providing commentary on Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, African American leadership, school desegregation, the Pan-African movement, imperialism, and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

The City and Sex examines American political sex scandals at the national level. Studying these events over time with an emphasis on the evolving responses of both statesmen and citizens reveals the republic's deteriorating moral health and illuminates the country's dangerous tendency toward servitude. Using scandals as a window through which to glimpse our deterioration, the book identifies a trajectory of decline beginning in the twentieth century, by which Americans became less tutored in virtue, less spirited in citizenship, less agreed on questions of moral significance, and ultimately less dexterous in exercising the skills of self-government. It seeks to show that the freedom from virtue won through the collapse of moral standards has produced an American citizenry increasingly prone to the kind of dependence and enslavement Alexis de Tocqueville cautioned against in the 1830s.

As the first and largest guestworker program, the U.S.Mexico Bracero Program (19421964) codified the unequal relations of labor migration between the two nations. This book interrogates the articulations of race and class in the making of the Bracero Program by introducing new syntheses of sociological theories and methods to center the experiences and recollections of former Braceros and their families.

Through detailed comparative case studies of civil society engagement with two major regional international organizations in Southeast Asia this book demonstrates the potentials and limitations of civil society actors as democratizing agents in governance beyond the nation-state. Drawing on previous research on civil society, social movements, transnational activism, and democratization, Uhlin develops an analytical framework focusing on a) how national and international political opportunities shapeand are shaped bycivil society advocacy; b) how civil society activists frequently combine inside and outside strategies when targeting international organizations; and c) how civil society advocacy can have a liberalizing impact on the targeted international organizations. Drawing on rich empirical data, including more than 100 qualitative interviews with civil society activists and representatives of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the study demonstrates how civil society actors have contributed to pushing ADBand to a much lesser extent ASEANin a political liberal direction, improving transparency, strengthening accountability, and introducing mechanisms protecting people from the abuse of power. With its innovative analytical framework, broad scope covering civil society activism across Southeast Asia, and in-depth analysis of civil society attempts to influence ADB and ASEAN the book makes important contributions to research on civil society activism in Southeast Asia as well as the more general field of civil society and governance beyond the nation-state.

If you've ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of sequel to Republic, or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or why he joined Critias to Timaeus, and whether or not that strange dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written critique of writing in Phaedrus, and of that dialogue's apparent lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the One in the second half of Parmenides, and how it relates to the objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus, and why its Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus takes place after Euthyphro, and whether its far-fetched etymologies accomplish any serious philosophical purpose; or why the philosopher Socrates describes in the central digression of Theaetetus is so different from Socrates himself; then you will enjoy reading the continuation of William H. F. Altman's Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012), where he considers the pedagogical connections behind ';the post-Republic dialogues' from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of ';the Reading Order of Plato's dialogues.'

This study examines the role of modern sports in constructing national identities and the way leaders have exploited sports to achieve domestic and foreign policy goals. The book focuses on the development of national sporting cultures in Great Britain and the United States, the particular processes by which the rest of Europe and the world adopted or rejected their games, and the impact of sports on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Teams competing in international sporting events provide people a shared national experience and a means to differentiate ';us' from ';them.' Particular attention is paid to the transnational influences on the construction of sporting communities, and why some areas resisted dominant sporting cultures while others adopted them and changed them to fit their particular political or societal needs. A recurrent theme of the book is that as much as they try, politicians have been frustrated in their attempts to achieve political ends through sport. The book provides a basis for understanding the political, economic, social, and diplomatic contexts in which these games were played, and to present issues that spur further discussion and research.

Putting Image Repair to the Test:Quantitative Applications of Image Restoration Theory examines content analytic, attitudinal, and behavioral claims to advance current assertions made about image repair discourse, its effects, and the surrounding discourse. The contributors provide empirical data to answer research questions and to test various hypotheses in one substantive volume that builds on prior research in this field. Recommended for scholars in communication studies, public relations, and journalism.

This book analyzes the affect that government institutions have on whether or not microfinance contributes to poverty alleviation in the context of Latin America. It concludes that political and economic stability, as well as and law order, have a statistically significant impact on microfinance effectiveness. The conditions that promote poverty alleviation are not entirely the same as those upon which major microfinance investors base their funding decisions. The result is that much microfinance funding is going to the wrong places. This means that not only is microfinance not helping the poor, but under the wrong conditions it actually exacerbates poverty. The author arrives at these conclusions through a mixed methods approach, using both statistical analysis and case studies.

The philosophy of existentialism is undergoing an ecological renewal, as global warming, mass extinction, and other signs of the planetary scale of human actions are making it glaringly apparent that existence is always ecological coexistence. One of the most urgent problems in the current ecological emergency is that humans cannot bear to face the emergency. Its earth-shattering implications are ignored in favor of more solutions, fixes, and sustainability transitions. Solutions cannot solve much when they cannot face what it means to be human amidst unprecedented uncertainty and intimate interconnectedness. Attention to such uncertainty and interconnectedness is what ecological existentialism (Deborah Bird Rose) or coexistentialism (Timothy Morton) is all about. This book follows Rose, Morton, and many others (e.g., Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, and Luce Irigaray) who are currently taking up the styles of thinking conveyed in existentialism, renewing existentialist affirmations of experience, paradox, uncertainty, and ambiguity, and extending existentialism beyond humans to include attention to the uniqueness and strangeness of all beingsall humans and nonhumans woven into ecological coexistence. Along the way, coexistentialism finds productive alliances and tensions amidst many areas of inquiry, including ecocriticism, ecological humanities, object-oriented ontology, feminism, phenomenology, deconstruction, new materialism, and more. This is a book for anyone who seeks to refute cynicism and loneliness and affirm coexistence.

Collective efficacy is a neighborhood-level concept in which community members create a sense of agency and assume ownership for the state of their local community. This concept is one of several forms of formal and informal social control that predict the overall functioning of a community. In this book, the authors examine collective efficacy and crime in eight Miami-Dade County, Florida neighborhoods, based on data they collected from across the country and in the Miami-Dade neighborhoods themselves. They discuss findings relevant to the theory of collective efficacy itself, ramifications for its use within communities, and make recommendations for future research and for translating these results into actionable, crime prevention activities.

Building a Social Democracy offers an alternative intellectual history of American pragmatism, one that tries to reclaim the middle of the twentieth century in order to push neo-pragmatism beyond its philosophical limitations. Danisch argues that the major entailment of the invention of American pragmatism at the beginning of the twentieth century is that rhetorical practices are the rightful object of study and means of improving democratic life. Pragmatism entails a commitment to rhetoric. Rhetorical pragmatism is intended to be more faithful to the project of first generation pragmatism, to offer insight into the ways in which rhetoric operates in contemporary democratic cultures, to recommend practices, methods, and modes of action for improving contemporary democratic cultures, and to subordinate philosophy to rhetoric by reimagining appropriate ways for pragmatist scholarship and social research to advance.

Economic Impact or Contribution contributes to the applied regional economic literature by providing a framework for handling a diverse set of projects and providing detailed case studies of fieldwork regarding the health care industry, higher education institutions, the nonprofit sector, infrastructure investment, and a major musical entertainment event. Economic Impact or Contribution accomplishes three major tasks by answering the following questions: What are the differences between the economic concepts used in economic versus fiscal assessment studies? How can we structure an economic and business issue or challenge? How can we create a research product that helps the project's sponsors solve their problem? This book has emerged as an answer to many research-related questions in dealing with regional business and economic issues and challenges.

Centering Women of Color in Academic Counterspaces offers a rich critical race feminist analysis of teaching, learning, and classroom dynamics among diverse students in a classroom counterspace centered on women of color. Annemarie Vaccaro and Melissa J. Camba-Kelsay focus on an undergraduate course called Sister Stories, which used counter-storytelling to explore the historical and contemporary experiences of women of color in the United States. Rich student narratives offer insight into the process and products of transformational learning about complex social justice topics such as: oppression, microaggressions, identity, intersectionality, tokenism, objectification, inclusive leadership, aesthetic standards, and diversity dialogues.

Medicine on the Periphery examines the history of the public health of Yucatn, Mexico, from the 1870s through 1960. This book includes chapters on institutions, healers, changing patterns of disease, the biomedicalization of Yucatn, and the relationship between Yucatn and the Mexican Revolutionary government. Sowell analyzes Yucatec officials' establishment of public health programs as a strategy for the modernization of the region, using wealth from the production of henequen to create Mexico's most extensive public health system and subsequent tensions with the Revolutionary government. Public health programs situated the Yucatn into a complex position in the nexus of knowledge, power, and technologies of the Atlantic medical community. Medicine on the Periphery provides a comprehensive look at how Yucatn became a medical periphery, a status that made it increasingly dependent upon knowledge and technologies produced in the productive core of the North Atlantic and subject to the authority of the Mexican state. This book will be of interest to scholars in Mexican studies, history of medicine and public health in Latin America and in the Atlantic world.

The unique mission of a public education is to reproduce a civic public. For the most part this will not happen in a vacuum and requires specific institutions, the most prominent of which are the public schools. Publicly supported schools have other functions as well. They socialize, train, produce a workforce, and, hopefully, promote individual growth and autonomy. Walter Feinberg argues that while all of these functions may be carried on by private or religious schools as well, public schools should have the additional responsibility of reproducing a civic public for a diverse pluralistic society. As Feinberg demonstrates, the problem is that in the context of neoliberal ideology, where all the other educational functions are reduced to economic ones within a market context ruled by competitionnation to nation, state to state, community to community, school to school, teacher to teacher, student to studentthe public function becomes less and less central and more and more difficult to carry out. What Is a Public Education and Why We Need It suggests ways to change this by bringing the idea of a true public education back into focus.

Shinzo Abe returned to office as Prime Minister of Japan 2012, leading the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for a second time. This book examines how Abe has sought a restoration of Japanese primacy at three levels: political, through the restoration of the traditional postwar parliamentary dominance of the LDP; economic, through his signature policy known as ';Abenomics,' which aims to restore Japan's economic prosperity and end decades-long deflationary stagnation; and strategic, in which Abe wishes to restore Japan to a prominent role in regional and international security by reinterpreting and potentially altering or even abolishing Article 9 of the constitution, which would allow greater deployment of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. This study argues that Abe has achieved overall political dominance, being re-elected in 2014, and has passed controversial legislation allowing Japan to exercise collective self-defense, but it also contends that Abenomics has yet to lift the country out of its long-running deflationary stagnation.

Philosophical and Empirical Approaches to Psychology: Mentalism vs. Anti-Mentalism philosophically analyzes four different approaches to psychology: introspectionism, behaviourism, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to explore the concept of ';the mind,' which developed from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century up through present day psychology. The resulting ideas originating from these approaches are divided into two main groups in this book, mentalism (whose supporters assume that mind is not reducible to something else) and anti-mentalism (whose supporters assume that mind is indeed reducible to something else). This book argues that adopting one idea over another can have a profound influence in a psychologist's research. Further, the author shows that some controversial psychological notions like ';consciousness' pertain to a particular mentalistic approach. Many psychologists do not consider such notions scientific, but he argues that this depends upon their adherence to a certain anti-mentalistic approach or to a specific mentalistic perspective. The book examines these issues by assessing experimental psychology in relation to neurobiology and philosophy, offering an integration of philosophical and theoretical chapters along with empirical and experimental chapters. Theoretically, the arguments draw from philosophy of psychology and experimental psychology. Using empirical research, Philosophical and Empirical Approaches to Psychology examines the role of the various mentalistic and anti-mentalistic approaches to psychology by integrating epistemological analysis and empirical research.

Oil and the Kurdish Question critiques the conventional narrative of the Iran-Iraq War and the associated Anfal campaign. This narrative claims that in the last two years (1987-88) of the Iran-Iraq War the Ba'thists dominated the fighting using gas attacks. According to this narrative, the Ba'thists also used gas in a fearsome campaign of extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq. This book argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the Iraqis trained hard to turn the tables on Iran in the last months of the war and won by superior generalship without the use of gas. Further, it was only when the Iranians conceded defeat that the Iraqi army went north andin the space of nine days, using conventional armssuppressed pockets of Kurdish insurgent unrest.The book also examines how publicists exploited the myth of the Kurdish holocaust as justification for America to declare war on Iraq. It exposes a scheme laid out before the war that aimed to defeat Iraq, deconstruct it, and create an autonomous Kurdish Regional Government which would then let lucrative oil concessions to interests mainly in the west. The intrigue accomplished two things: it subverted Iraq's oil nationalization law which forbade granting concessions to foreigners, and it ended Iraq's existence as a sovereign nation-state.