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Elizabeth Loftus's 1979 work, Eyewitness Testimony, explains why people sometimes remember events inaccurately, and how this simple fact has a profound impact on the criminal justice system. Eyewitness accounts, which are often used in criminal trials, can be very persuasive to both judges and juries. Yet these accounts are based on memories that are not always reliable, meaning that suspects may be misidentified or wrongfully convicted. Loftus recommends...
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Geneva-born thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous work of political philosophy from 1762 is based on a give-and-take theory of the relation between individual freedom and social order: the social contract that gives the work its name. Rousseau thinks about the issue by starting with what is known as the state of nature, a lawless condition where people are free to do what they like, governed only by their own instinctive sense of justice. People...
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Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text in the development of what we now know as feminism.
Written in the atmosphere created by the French Revolution, which made radical change seem possible, Wollstonecraft's work challenges the idea that society's oppression of women is entirely natural. While her male contemporaries happily argued for the fundamental freedoms of all men, few were interested...
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Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks offers a radical analysis of the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized. Born in 1925 on the island of Martinique-at the time a French colony-Fanon witnessed firsthand the abuses of white colonizers and the system's effects on his country. His revulsion was only confirmed later in life when he worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria, another French colony.
Black Skin, White Masks was written in 1952...
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Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's 1990 work, A General Theory of Crime, assessed contemporary work in criminology, while also introducing a new, comprehensive theory of crime.
At the time, researchers tended to focus on environmental factors that led to crime, not on the criminals themselves. Additionally, crime researchers came from different disciplines and inclined towards thinking about crime only from their particular academic perspective....
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When American sociologist C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination was first published in 1959, it provoked much hostile reaction. This was understandable: the book was a hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced-and on a number of leading sociologists. Mills was a fierce critic of both modern capitalism and Soviet-style authoritarianism, and argued that the sociology profession failed to look at how people's problems are connected to...
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American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926—2006) earned his PhD from the prestigious Harvard University, where he followed the interdisciplinary approach pioneered by the institution's Department of Social Relations.
Previous generations of anthropologists had imported their own value systems and culture, regardless of which part of the world they were studying. Native cultures were almost always judged to fall short in comparison to colonialists'...
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What we think of as the "mind" is little more than an illusion. That's the provocative thesis of British philosopher Gilbert Ryle's 1949 work The Concept of Mind.
Seventeenth-century French writer René Descartes, one of the fathers of philosophy, imagined the mind and body as two separate entities that combine to form a human being. This concept came to be called "mind-body dualism." Ryle set about ridiculing Descartes's idea of, as he put it, a...
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Most likely written between 170 and 180 c.e., Meditations is a remarkable work, a unique insight into the thinking of one of the most conscientious and able Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who ruled at the apex of Roman might in the late second century c.e. It was never intended to be widely circulated. Indeed, it was almost unknown until the sixteenth century. The work is like a series of jottings, written for its author's own improvement; it has...
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Even as recently as the 1920s the historical lack of great female writers was often considered as evidence of women's inferiority. Virginia Woolf disagreed. In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, she argues that creativity is impossible without privacy and freedom from financial worries-and that throughout history women have had neither. As a result, no tradition of great female writing existed to inspire women. Woolf's focus on the everyday suppression...
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In his 1641 work Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes poses questions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of being that philosophers still debate today.
Among the general public, Descartes is probably most famous for his pronouncement "I think, therefore I am." That statement first appeared in an earlier work, but he expands on it in Meditations as he considers the idea of the mind as a separate entity to the body-the "dualist" approach....
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Michel Foucault had already written extensively about medicine, madness, and prisons. But in the latter days of his career he turned to the subject of sexuality, planning six volumes on the subject. He completed three before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is a study of the evolution of cultural ideas about sex in the West since the end of the seventeenth century. Volume 2 looked at attitudes toward...
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In his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel introduced the world to his philosophical system. His most influential work-and the culmination of the German Idealist movement begun in the late eighteenth century as a response to the works of Immanuel Kant-the book remains one of the undisputed classics of Western thought.
The first major work of Western philosophy to introduce the idea that the truths of philosophy are inseparable not only...
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Social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande after 20 months' fieldwork with the Azande people of the South Sudan. It became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft, and has been hailed as a classic.
Although Witchcraft had little impact when it first appeared in 1937, its popularity grew after World War II. Alongside his subsequent work on the Nuer people, Witchcraft established Evans-Pritchard's...
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Published by sociologist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, this series of essays addresses the plight of African Americans facing everyday racism in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. It has become one of the most important works on race and identity across the world.
Du Bois sets out to explain how black interaction with a white world has caused psychological anguish and argues that blacks should demand total equality...
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The Better Angels of Our Nature is a gloriously optimistic book. In it, well-known cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker put forward an argument that contradicted what most people believed at the time. Pinker said that despite humanity's biological tendency toward violence, we are, in fact, less violent today than ever before. To prove it, he laid out pages of detailed statistical evidence. For him, much of the credit for the decline goes to the Enlightenment,...
17) A Macat Analysis of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
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In her original and controversial 2005 book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood examines the women's mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt, as part of a wider turn to religious fervor integral to the broader Islamic revival of the twenty-first century.
Mahmood's research suggests that in choosing to embrace the norms of their faith, these pious Muslim women are not limiting, but rather affirming, themselves. They...
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The Second Sex caused uproar when it appeared in 1949, as French writer and existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir set out her groundbreaking ideas on what it meant to be a woman.
De Beauvoir's book charted the oppression of "the second sex" in terms never before seen in the academic world. Her most startling theory became a rallying cry for the feminist movement: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She argued that gender identity...
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How many books can claim to be so influential as to inspire the development of a whole school of thought? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's Metaphysics did exactly that, laying the foundations for a new branch of philosophy-metaphysics-concerned with the cause and nature of being.
Aristotle questioned his teacher Plato's renowned Theory of Forms. Plato argued that everything in the world is nothing more than an imperfect representation of...
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How do those in power exercise that power over a state's citizens? French thinker Michel Foucault's 1975 work Discipline and Punish looks to answer this question by investigating the prison system. Foucault does not believe that the modern-day system developed out of reformers' humanitarian concerns. He argues that prison both created and then became part of a bigger system of surveillance that extends throughout society.
Power is no longer exerted...
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