Trading communities in the Roman world : a micro-economic and institutional perspective /
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Ancient Roman trade was severely hampered by slow transportation and by the absence of a state that helped traders enforce their contracts. In Trading Communities in the Roman World: A Micro-Economic and Institutional Perspective Taco Terpstra offers a new explanation of how traders in the Roman Empire overcame these difficulties. Previous theories have focused heavily on dependent labor, arguing that transactions overseas were conducted through slaves and freedmen. Taco Terpstra shows that this approach is unsatisfactory. Employing economic theory, he convincingly argues that the key to understanding long-distance trade in the Roman Empire is not patron-client or master-slave relationships, but the social bonds between ethnic groups of foreign traders living overseas and the local communities they joined.
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1 online resource (xiii, c, 244 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004245136 :
0166-1302 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Eine Kritik der kommunitaristischen Moralphilosophie : offene Gesellschaft - geschlossene Gemeinschaft /
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\'Gegenstand dieses Buches ist die Analyse und Kritik der Moralphilosophie des Kommunitarismus, deren grundlegende Fragestellungen nach wie vor von hoher Aktualität sind. Führt das liberalistische Verständnis von Mensch und Gesellschaft zur Auflösung sozialer Bindungen? Benötigen wir eine Revitalisierung der Gemeinschaften mit ihren jeweiligen Werten? Muss das Ideal der Neutralität des Staates aufgegeben werden? Der Autor zeigt in umfassender Weise, dass einige Annahmen des Kommunitarismus durchaus plausibel sind, dass sich seine zentralen Thesen aber nicht aufrechterhalten lassen. Der Kommunitarismus unterschätzt die potentiellen Gefahren zu enger Gemeinschaftsbindungen. Die ihm zugrunde liegende Philosophie erweist sich als relativistisch und darüber hinaus als widersprüchlich. In der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Kommunitarismus entwickelt der Autor eine Theorie der Normbegründung, die auf dem Verfahren des Überlegungsgleichgewichts sowie dem Fallibilismus beruht. Damit leistet er nicht nur einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Liberalismus-Kommunitarismus-Debatte, sondern darüber hinaus zur Weiterentwicklung einer problemlösungsorientieren Ethik, die in ihren Grundlagen auf die Politische Philosophie, Wissenschaftstheorie und evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie Karl Poppers verweist.\' Volker Gadenne, University of Linz In Eine Kritik der kommunitaristischen Moralphilosophie. Offene Gesellschaft - Geschlossene Gemeinschaft analysiert Harald Stelzer die grundlegenden Aspekte der normativen Theorien von kommunitaristischen Autoren wie MacIntryre, Sandel, Taylor und Walzer. Basierend auf einer Rekonstruktion ihrer Kritik am Liberalismus und ihrer Sehnsucht nach der Gemeinschaft geht Stelzer auf die staatliche Neutralität ebenso ein wie auf die Reichweite der gemeinschaftlichen Einbettung des Individuums. Weiter diskutiert der Autor den Nah- und Fernhorizont der Ethik wie auch die relativistischen Konsequenzen eines auf der Annahme der Inkommensurabilität von Moralsystemen beruhenden kommunitaristischen Partikularismus. Das Buch endet mit einem Aufriss von Stelzers eigener Position, die beruhend auf dem Fallibilismus von Karl Popper und dem weiten Überlegungsgleichgewicht von John Rawls Moral als Problemlösungsprozess auffasst. In A Critique of the Moral Philosophy of Communitarianism. Open Society - Closed Community Harald Stelzer challenges communitarian authors like MacIntryre, Sandel, Taylor, and Walzer by analysing main aspects of their moral theories. Based on the reconstruction of their critique of liberalism and alternative communitarian accounts, Stelzer looks on state neutrality as well as on the scope of the social embeddedness of the individual. He then proceeds to discuss the far and near horizon of ethics as well as the relativistic consequences of a communitarian particularism based on the underlying assumption of incommensurability. In the last chapter, Stelzer provides his own account of a problem solving ethics by combining Karl Popper's fallibilism with the wide reflective equilibrium of John Rawls.
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Revised post-doctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift). :
1 online resource (305 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-296) and index. :
9789004319356 :
0925-2657 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The very idea of organization : social ontology today : Kantian and Hegelian reconsiderations /
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The Very Idea of Organization presents a philosophical account of the phenomenon of organization. It takes as its starting point a debate in organization studies about the foundations of organizational research. This debate, however, is running into difficulties regarding the basic concept of the reality that organization studies deal with, that is regarding the ontology of organization. A convincing organizational ontology is not in sight. Therefore, Krijnen introduces a new meta-perspective, offering a more comprehensive and more fundamental social ontology in general as well as an organizational ontology in particular. Exploring the Kantian and Hegelian tradition of philosophy, he convincingly shows that a rejuvenated type of German idealism contains intriguing possibilities for developing a present-day social and organizational philosophy.
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1 online resource (x, 225 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004302914 :
1878-9986 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
For our children : the ethics of animal experimentation in the age of genetic engineering /
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This book provides an overview of different ethical views on animal experimentation. Special attention is given to the production and experimental use of genetically modified animals. It proposes a middle course between those positions that are very critical and those very positive. This middle course implies that animal experiments originating in vital human research interests are commonly justified, provided that animal welfare is taken seriously. Some animal experiments are not acceptable, since the expected human benefit is too low and the animal suffering too severe. This position is supported by an argument from species care according to which we have special obligations to our children and other humans due to special relations. The book tries to bridge the gap between animal ethics and animal welfare science by discussing various conceptions of animal welfare: function-centered, feeling-based, and those focusing on natural living. The theoretical starting-point is "imaginative casuistry." This approach stresses the role of moral imagination and metaphor in ethical deliberation, accepts a plurality of values, and recognizes the importance of case-by-case balancing. In the discussion of genetically modified animals, both intrinsic ethical concerns and animal welfare concerns are addressed.
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1 online resource (viii, 198 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789042028050 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The fabric of cities : aspects of urbanism, urban topography and society in Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome /
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The Fabric of Cities presents an interdisciplinary collection of articles on urbanism in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, which focuses on the social dimension of cities' topographical features. The contributions of this book offer investigations of neighbourhoods, city gates, streets, temples and palaces drawing on textual and archaeological sources as well as art. The topics treated in this work encompass the diverse functions of public and marginal spaces in Mesopotamian cities and Rome, the role of agency in the development of Babylonian neighbourhoods, the relationship between public and private in Assyrian palaces, the connection between political strategies and temple building in Sumerian literary texts, and the communicative uses of language in Classical Greek texts to talk about urban space.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004262348
The end of prisons : reflections from the decarceration movement /
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This book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault's concept of discipline and punishment to explain how prisons are constructed in society from nursing homes to zoos. This book expands the concept of prison to include any institution that dominates, oppresses, and controls. Criminologists and others, who have been concerned with reforming or dismantling the criminal justice system, have mostly avoided to look at larger carceral structures in society. In this book, for example, scholars and activists question the way patriarchy has incapacitated women and imagine the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities. In a time when popular sentiment critiques the dominant role of the elites (the "one percenters"), the state's role in policing dissenting voices, school children, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and American Indian Nations, needs to be investigated. A prison, as defined in this book, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of nonhuman animals and plants, which are too often overlooked.
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1 online resource (229 pages) : 1 illustration. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-214) and indexes. :
9789401209236 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Across the ocean : nine essays on Indo-Mediterranean trade /
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Across the Ocean contains nine essays, each dedicated to a key question in the history of the trade relations between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean from Antiquity to the Early Modern period: the role of the state in the Red Sea trade, Roman policy in the Red Sea, the function of Trajan's Canal, the pepper trade, the pearl trade, the Nabataean middlemen, the use of gold in ancient India, the constant renewal of the Indian Ocean ports of trade, and the rise and demise of the VOC.
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"This volume is a collection of papers delivered at the conference "A Tale of Two Worlds: Comparative Perspectives on Indo-Mediterranean Commerce (I-XVII c.)," held at the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, Columbia University, March 4th-5th, 2011"--Acknowledgment. :
1 online resource (ix, 204 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004289536 :
0166-1302 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Social justice, poverty and race : normative and empirical points of view /
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A clear understanding of social justice requires complex rather than simple answers. It requires comfort with ambiguity rather than absolute answers. This is counter to viewing right versus wrong, just vs. unjust, or good vs. evil as dichotomies. This book provides many examples of where and how to begin to view these as continuums rather than dichotomies.
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1 online resource (xviii, 222 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-214) and index. :
9789401206815 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Women and the Roman city in the Latin West /
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Roman Cities, as conventionally studied, seem to be dominated by men. Yet as the contributions to this volume-which deals with the Roman cities of Italy and the western provinces in the late Republic and early Empire-show, women occupied a wide range of civic roles. Women had key roles to play in urban economies, and a few were prominent public figures, celebrated for their generosity and for their priestly eminence, and commemorated with public statues and grand inscriptions. Drawing on archaeology and epigraphy, on law and art as well as on ancient texts, this multidisciplinary study offers a new and more nuanced view of the gendering of civic life. It asks how far the experience of women of the smaller Italian and provincial cities resembled that of women in the capital, how women were represented in sculptural art as well as in inscriptions, and what kinds of power or influence they exercised in the societies of the Latin West.
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1 online resource (430 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004255951 :
0169-8958 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Urban dreams and realities in antiquity : remains and representations of the ancient city /
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A unique variety of approaches to all aspects of urban culture in the ancient world can be found in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity , a collection of 19 essays addressing ancient cities from an interdisciplinary perspective. As the title indicates, the volume considers both how ancient people lived in their cities as physical structures and how they thought with them as ideas and symbols. Essays in this volume deal with texts and sites from Spain to South India, but there is a particular focus on the archaeology and epigraphy of Roman-era Italy, civic identity in the Roman provinces, the Hebrew Bible and Early Christian literature, Vergil and other imperial Latin authors.
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1 online resource (xiv, 533 pages) : illustrations, maps. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004283893 :
0169-8958 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Queer philosophy : presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy, 1998-2008 /
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The book is a collection of the presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy from 1998 to 2008. The essays are organized historically, starting in 1998. Their topics cover virtually every philosophical field, and such that each is connected to gay and lesbian studies. Topics include how we are to understand sexual orientation, whether same-sex leads to polygamy, teaching gay studies to undergraduates, promiscuity and virtue, the "war on terror" and gay oppression, the rationality of coming out, the ethics of outing, connections between being gay and being happy, and last, but not least, dignity and being gay.
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1 online resource (xix, 412 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789401208352 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.