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In The Possible Form of an Interlocution, Nahum Dimitri Chandler provides an epistemological and theoretical elaboration of the correspondence between W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in 1904 and 1905. Their interlocution took place under the heading of Du Bois’s famous formulation “the problem of the color line.” This study takes as its incipient reference Weber’s statement to Du Bois that “I am absolutely convinced that the ‘color-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.” Chandler provides a concise statement of Du Bois’s thought of “the problem of the color line” as a general formulation for understanding African American matters within modern historicity on a worldwide scale. He then examines Weber’s earliest writings to understand in just what way “the ‘color-line’ problem", served as a problematization for Weber in both his thought and itinerary, across the 1890s and through the time of their interlocution.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

This book presents a roadmap for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also be an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hardwired components frozen in the evolutionary past, this book presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with it. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be adaptively plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the longstanding divide between nativist approaches to development, based on innateness, and empiricist approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

This book examines the 20-year aftermath of the 1989 assaults on established, state-sponsored socialism in the former Soviet bloc and in China. It brings together prominent experts on Eastern Europe and China to examine the respective trajectories of political, economic and social transformations that unfolded in these two areas, while also comparing the changes that ensued within the two regions. The volume features paired comparisons, with one chapter on the countries from the former Soviet bloc and one on China for each of the following themes: the reinstitutionalization of politics, the recasting of state-society relations, the reform of economic systems, changes in economic behavior, and transformations of social institutions. Even if they differ in their specific substantive focus and in their disciplinary grounding, the chapters share a concern with the fate of the state in postsocialism. They elaborate on topics such as the transformations of the old socialist state and its nature, activities and roles; civil society before and after 1989; the ways in which the state has, or has not acted to encourage new forms of economic behavior; and the state's responsibility for novel societal trends, whether in family formation, in protest or in inequality. The volume challenges claims of the unfeasibility of comparing across these divergent contexts by uncovering insights about political models and economic patterns that have emerged in the grand project of the transition from socialism.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

American Pentimento traces the history of colonization and exploitation in the Americas coming to demonstrate how contemporary native struggles are decisively limited by embedded cultural assumptions this history has incorporated into the very constitution of the Americas. As Seed writes, “the most enduring popular images of native Americans originated in common economic ambition shared by Anglo-Saxon or Iberian colonizers.” This book focuses on the European colonies whose rules for acquiring riches have most profoundly influenced the present-day options of most natives of the Americas: England, Spain, and Portugal. Seed brings her argument into the present by warning of the continuity in economic motives between our colonial past and our national present. Throughout the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand today, native communities’s rights to wealth are governed by a host of modern regulations that seem to have deleted traces of the earlier colonial rules. But underneath more recently imposed standards can often be seen traces of earlier ones.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

This book presents the most comprehensive study yet of a problem that has puzzled physicists and philosophers since the 1930s. The standard theory of quantum mechanics is in one sense the most successful physical theory ever, predicting the behaviour of the basic constituents of all physical things; no other theory has ever made such accurate empirical predictions. However, if one tries to understand the theory as providing a complete and accurate framework for the description of the behaviour of all physical interactions, it becomes evident that the theory is ambiguous, or even logically inconsistent. The most notable attempt to formulate the theory so as to deal with this problem, the quantum measurement problem, was initiated by Hugh Everett III in the 1950s. This book gives a careful and challenging examination and evaluation of the work of Everett and those who have followed him. The informal approach, minimizing technicality, makes the book accessible and illuminating for philosophers and physicists alike.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.