Theory category: 79975 books

An anarchist critique of John Rawls' 'A Theory of Justice'. Since its publication in 1971 the political ideas expounded by philosopher John Rawls in A Theory of Justice have provided the justifiers and apologists (i.e., the informers and the regulators who, respectively, mould opinion and behaviour...

A century ago, Georg Cantor demonstrated the possibility of a series of transfinite infinite numbers. His methods, unorthodox for the time, enabled him to derive theorems that established a mathematical reality for a hierarchy of infinities. Cantor's innovation was opposed, and ignored, by the establishment;...

Education and knowledge have never been more important to society, yet research is segmented by approach, methodology or topic. Legitimation Code Theory or ‘LCT’ extends and integrates insights from Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein to offer a framework for research and practice that overcomes...

What is poststructuralist theory, and what difference does it make to literary criticism? Where do we find the meaning of the text: in the author's head? in the reader's? Or do we, instead, make meaning in the practice of reading itself? If so, what part do our own values play in the process of interpretation?...

This book presents and argues for a moral theory which draws on most of the major theoretical positions to some degree, but it also spells out the limits and boundaries of a moral theory. In doing so, it exposes a number of common confusions and misunderstandings about morality, and presents a strong...

In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures like Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, and Locke, William Penn remains in many ways a man apart. Yet despite being widely neglected by scholars, he was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed...

This book is an attempt to save “the sexual” from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to...

For courses in ethnomusicological theory. This book covers ethnomusicological theory, exploring some of the underpinnings of different approaches and analyzing differences and commonalities in these orientations. This text addresses how ethnomusicologists have used and applied these theories in ethnographic research.

This volume sheds light on debates about personalised learning in teacher education by exploring the popular emergence of personalising learning in education and hence its significance in teacher education in the 21st century. It examines personalising learning theory and explores the tenets of this...

This book explores combinatorial problems and insights in quantum field theory. It is not comprehensive, but rather takes a tour, shaped by the author’s biases, through some of the important ways that a combinatorial perspective can be brought to bear on quantum field theory.  Among the outcomes...

This book is centered around higher algebraic structures stemming from the work of Murray Gerstenhaber and Jim Stasheff that are now ubiquitous in various areas of mathematics— such as algebra, algebraic topology, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, mathematical physics— and in theoretical...

The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the “what” of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks...

Are Shakespeare's plays dramatizations of patriarchy or representations of assertive and eloquent women? Or are they sometimes both? And is it relevant, and if so how, that his women were first played by boys? This book shows how many kinds of feminist theory help analyze the dynamics of Shakespeare's...

How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed...