Baars explores philosophers from Plato to Foucault as they consider the meaning of aging—and wisdom—in our society.In this deeply considered meditation on aging in Western culture, Jan Baars argues that, in today’s world, living longer does not necessarily mean living better. He contends that there has been an overall loss of respect for aging, to the point that understanding and “dealing with” aging people has become a process focused on the decline of potential a...

Long Lives Are for the Rich is the title of a silent ominous program that affects the lives of millions of people. In all developed countries disadvantaged and, especially, poor people die much earlier than the most advantaged. During these shorter lives they suffer ten to twenty years longer from disabilities or chronic disease. This does not happen accidentally: health inequalities – including those between healthy and unhealthy life styles – are mainly caused by social inequali...

The aim of this volume is to revitalise the debate about the concepts of time implicit in the study of aging. The many problems related to aging and the aged put an enormous pressure on the gerontological community to come up with practical applications and solutions. In considering research findings, we must keep in mind the basic assumptions that shape and influence even the most obvious statements about aging. In this multidisciplinary volume, the contributors take on the important task...

Ageing, meaning and social structure is a unique book advancing critical discourse in gerontology and makes a major contribution to understanding key social and ethical dilemmas facing ageing societies. It confronts and integrates approaches that have been relatively isolated from each other, and interrelates two major streams of thought within critical gerontology: analyses of structural issues in the context of political economy and humanistic perspectives on issues of existential meanin...

This book is a major reassessment of work in the field of critical gerontology, providing a comprehensive survey of issues by a team of contributors drawn from Europe and North America. The book focuses on the variety of ways in which age and ageing are socially constructed, and the extent to which growing old is being transformed through processes associated with globalisation. The collection offers a range of alternative views and visions about the nature of social ageing, making a major...

We live in an age dominated by the cult of efficiency. Efficiency in the raging debate about public goods is often used as a code word to advance political agendas. When it is used correctly, efficiency is important: it must always be part of the conversation when resources are scarce and citizens and governments have important choices to make among competing priorities.Even when the language of efficiency is used carefully, that language alone is not enough. Unilingualism will not...

A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation.While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero descr...

This groundbreaking book represents the most systematic examination to date of the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that "history matters." Most contemporary social scientists unconsciously take a "snapshot" view of the social world. Yet the meaning of social events or processes is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. Paul Pierson argues that placing politics in time--constructing "moving pictures" rather than snapshots--can vastly enrich our ...

How brain science answers the most intriguing questions about the meaning of lifeWhy is life worth living? What makes actions right or wrong? What is reality and how do we know it? The Brain and the Meaning of Life draws on research in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to answer some of the most pressing questions about life's nature and value. Paul Thagard argues that evidence requires the abandonment of many traditional ideas about the soul, free ...

In At Risk, Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan examine risk and risk assessment in the context of professional practice in child protection, social work, and other human services. They argue that the tools, technologies, and practices used to measure risk to the individual have gone unquestioned and unstudied and that current methods of risk assessment may be distorting the principles of social justice.Central to this study is an examination of the everyday experiences of...

How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life.Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than ha...

Many economists now accept that informal institutions and culture play a crucial role in economic outcomes. Driven by the work of economists like Nobel laureates Douglass North and Gary Becker, there is an important body of work that invokes cultural and institutional factors to build a more comprehensive and realistic theory of economic behavior. This book provides a comprehensive overview of research in this area, sketching the main premises and challenges faced by the field. The first p...