Can your ultimate desire ever be fulfilled? Everywhere you look, every time you listen, with each click and tap, there's something you desire. How do you know if what you desire will satisfy, or if you are seeing a "desire mirage"? The global village presents countless ways to connect to all kinds of information. We think we can scarcely live without these connections. Do we realize, however, that these connections often block or slow down connections to God, self, and others? Divided Desire is a journey along the road of desire--a road everyone travels. Along the journey, Kenny Damara explores why we desire what we desire in the global village today. What role does God have in fulfilling the ultimate desire of the heart? And how should we respond?

The data behind a distinct form of racism in online dating The Dating Divide is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, Lundquist, and Lin illustrate how the seemingly open space of the internet interacts with the loss of social inhibition in cyberspace contexts, fostering openly expressed forms of sexual racism that are rarely exposed in face-to-face encounters. The Dating Divide is a fascinating look at how a contemporary conflux of individualization, consumerism, and the proliferation of digital technologies has given rise to a unique form of gendered racism in the era of swiping right—or left. The internet is often heralded as an equalizer, a seemingly level playing field, but the digital world also acts as an extension of and platform for the insidious prejudices and divisive impulses that affect social politics in the "real" world. Shedding light on how every click, swipe, or message can be linked to the history of racism and courtship in the United States, this compelling study uses data to show the racial biases at play in digital dating spaces.

Plato's Moral Psychology is concerned with Plato's account of the soul and its impact on our living well or badly, virtuously or viciously. The core of Plato's moral psychology is his account of human motivation, and Rachana Kamtekar argues that throughout the dialogues Plato maintains that human beings have a natural desire for our own good, and that actions and conditions contrary to this desire are involuntary (from which follows the 'Socratic paradox' that wrongdoing is involuntary). Our natural desire for our own good may be manifested in different ways: by our pursuit of what we calculate is best, but also by our pursuit of pleasant or fine things - pursuits which Plato assigns to distinct parts of the soul. Kamtekar develops a very different interpretation of Plato's moral psychology from the mainstream interpretation, according to which Plato first proposes that human beings only do what we believe to be the best of the things we can do ('Socratic intellectualism') and then in the middle dialogues rejects this in favour of the view that the soul is divided into parts with some good-dependent and some good-independent motivations ('the divided soul').

The Split Subject of Narration in Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction analyzes a number of Elizabeth Gaskell's first-person works through a post-modern perspective employing such theoretical frameworks as psychoanalytic theory, narratology, and gender theory. It attempts to explore the problematics of Victorian subjectivity, bringing into focus the ways in which both her realistic and Gothic texts undercut and interrogate post-Romantic assumptions about an autonomous and coherent speaking and/or narrating subject. The essential argument of the book is that the mid-nineteenth-century narrating “I”, in its communal, voyeuristic, and Gothic manifestations emerges as painfully divided, lacking, unstable, ailing, and hence unreliable, pre-figuring, at the same time, later forms of self-conscious narration in fiction. Furthermore, it is also exposed as performative, one that can be seen as a simulacrum without an original, and, consequently, at odds with post-Romantic, empiricist assumptions about the factuality, centrality, and rationality of the human subject, while at the same time, clinging to illusions of autonomy. Plagued by its own self-awareness, the narrating “I” is alienated both from itself as well as from those it attempts to represent, including its own narrated counterpart. To this effect, it argues that throughout a trajectory of configurations, psychic investments and imaginary identifications, embedded in and conditioned by the workings of desire and ideology, both of which underpin discursive and representational practices, narrative subjectivity in Gaskell’s first-person fiction manifests itself as the product of a misrecognized encounter between the subject who narrates and that which is being narrated. Both are essentially unable to see their split character and the alienating chasm opened up between them, for the former, on the level of narration, and, for the latter, on a thematic level.

What, if anything, does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, ethical values, or even the meaning and purpose of life? The Moral Meaning of Nature sheds new light on these enduring questions by examining the significance of an earlier—and unjustly neglected—discussion of Darwin in late nineteenth-century Germany. We start with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings staged one of the first confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. The lebensphilosophie, or “life-philosophy,” that arose from his engagement with evolutionary ideas drew responses from other influential thinkers, including Franz Overbeck, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert. These critics all offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the newly transforming biological sciences, his negotiation between science and religion, and his interpretation of the implications of Darwinian thought. They also each proposed alternative ways of making sense of Nietzsche’s unique question concerning the meaning of biological evolution “for life.” At the heart of the discussion were debates about the relation of facts and values, the place of divine purpose in the understanding of nonhuman and human agency, the concept of life, and the question of whether the sciences could offer resources to satisfy the human urge to discover sources of value in biological processes. The Moral Meaning of Nature focuses on the historical background of these questions, exposing the complex ways in which they recur in contemporary philosophical debate.

Delivered as a series of lectures at Stanford University in the spring of 1918, the pragmatist John Dewey introduces a theory of morals that draws upon the observation that social environment plays a prominent role in the development of human thought and society. Dewey takes issue with the then-popular religious view that morality is an internal quality that can be separated from personal conduct and its effects on society. But, in classic pragmatic tradition, he also takes issue with the opposite extreme viewpoint: that observable outcomes are the only way to judge human conduct—or in other words, that “the end justifies the means.” Mechanically following instructions to produce a desired outcome misses something vitally human. These extreme views can be reconciled with the claim that while concrete material ends are important, the separation from intention is artificial. There is a constant evolution of the material environment, which leads to an evolution in the psychological environment and new desires. A society creates an environment, and this environment creates new feelings which lead to new customs and a new society. Thus, in a very real sense we are all connected to everyone else, not through feelings but though actions and their impacts—whether intentional, or much more often, unintentional and unobserved. This motivates us to take much more responsibility for our actions than their immediately observable effects. Dewey maintains that understanding how society, habits, impulses, and customs co-exist and evolve is the challenge for anyone who wants to create a fairer society. There may be ways to control these various factors to create that society, but those controls will not be static and must be updated based on observation. Touching upon his work in Democracy and Education he stresses again the importance of education in shaping how society functions. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Reason, History, and Politics shows that certain conceptions of rationality in current theories of science, technology, and law can account for neither the legitimacy of paradigm shifts nor the communitarian integrity of rational decision and learning internal to paradigms generally. Ingram proposes an alternative conception of reality that does. Drawing on a rich literature that encompasses classical German Idealism, pragmatism, poststructuralism, and hermeneutics, Ingram shows how a specific model of art criticism and aesthetic judgment illuminates the kind of discursive rationality found in all domains of rational undertaking. The book synthesizes debates in law, political science, philosophy of science and history, and social philosophy, and covers Anglo-American, French, and German schools of philosophy, discussing topics such as critical legal studies, the logic of scientific discovery and explanation, and subjectivity, hegemony, and totalitarianism.