Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interests, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions that ...

Could she, a professor of mathematics, follow the simple arithmetic of suicide, or would her courage fail her?A calculated terrorist attack on Australian soil raises alarm for the local police. Greater horrors lie behind the catastrophe of an imminent second action. The history of the early twenty-first century rests with three main characters: Josh, an ex-navy clearance diver; Jack, his Sydney Water Police Officer partner; and Inaya, a woman with a past.In making ...

A story of the effects of trauma across three generations of family. A boy dies and a boy is left to navigate an un-envisioned adulthood. Members of subsequent generations find their individual way to function, each driven by the enigma that is virtue.

First published in 2004 , this work is based on a collaborative research project, this trilogy considers the dynamics of demilitarisation and peace-building in southern Africa in the aftermath of major violent conflicts. The overall aim of the research is to support and facilitate the achievement of sustainable peace and human development in southern Africa, by analysing demilitarisation and peace-building processes in the region and identifying policy options and interventions for peace-b...

This edited volume takes stock of the state of research and policy on the issue of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW), ten years after the UN first agreed to deal with the problem.The end of the Cold War originated a series of phenomena that would subsequently come to dominate the political agenda. Perhaps most symptomatic of the ensuing environment is the marked escalation in the scale and dynamics of armed violence, driven by the proliferation of SALW. Events in Rwanda, Somalia ...

Pevear and Volokhonsky may be the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era. (The New Yorker)Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot...

"Pevear and Volokhonsky may be the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era." (The New Yorker)Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between 19th- and 20th-century fiction and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.In full retreat f...

Using, or rather mimicking, traditional forms of storytelling, Gogol created stories that are complete within themselves and only tangentially connected to a meaning or moral. His work belongs to the school of invention, where each twist and turn of the narrative is a surprise unfettered by obligation to an overarching theme.Selected from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, Mirgorod, and Petersburg Tales and arranged in order of composition, the 13 stories i...

Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interests, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions that ...

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive nineteen-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father's wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a myste...

The Double, written in Dostoevsky's youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, Poor Folk. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger—a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paran...

Why you are a different you at different times and how that’s both normal and healthy• Reveals that each of us is made up of multiple selves, any of which can come to the forefront in different situations• Offers examples of healthy multiple selves from psychology, neuroscience, pop culture, literature, and ancient cultures and traditions• Explores how to harmonize our selves and learn to access whichever one is best for a given situationOffering groundbreak...