In the autumn of his days, a distinguished privy councillor contemplates his past and looks back at the key moments of his life. A reluctant and indolent student, he recalls a chance meeting with a reclusive professor and his frustrated wife, with whom he ends up sharing lodgings. His thirst for knowledge leads him to form an ambiguous and close relationship with the professor. But the professor harbours a secret which changes and scars both men for ever.

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph L. Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language can be classified as valid or invalid. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science.

Allusions to the relation between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are common in philosophy, but there has been little serious commentary on the relationship of their ideas. Genia Schönbaumsfeld closes this gap and offers new readings of Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's intriguing and influential conceptions of philosophy and religious belief.

Despite all the hoopla about Pope John Paul II, some believe he has been an unparalleled disaster in the history of the papacy and of the Church. In Crossing the Threshold of Confusion, author Andrew J. McCauley examines the record of this pope and discusses the harm he has done or has allowed to have happened not only to the Church but to Western civilization. McCauley uncovers countless faults many Catholic leaders have overlooked, including: - Pope John Paul II's failure to enforce discipline in the Church, especially against widespread sexual abuse by priests; - his statements alleging and implying universal salvation; - the destabilization of marriage caused by his theology of the body; - the conflicting messages that confuse the Church's position on capital punishment; - his stance on the nature of the Church as a result of Vatican II. This exploration of recent Catholic history studies the ideas, writings, and policies of Pope John Paul II, from his life a young priest to his final days as pope, and examines their compatibility with traditional Catholic doctrine and practice. Crossing the Threshold of Confusion presents a case against the canonization of Pope John Paul II and demonstrates how his record warrants condemnation.

The United States government thought it could make Indians "vanish." After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into the mainstream, and tribal identities remained intact. This revisionist history reveals how Native Americans' sense of identity and "peoplehood" helped them resist and eventually defeat the U.S. government's attempts to assimilate them into white society during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Tom Holm discusses how Native Americans, though effectively colonial subjects without political power, nonetheless maintained their group identity through their native languages, religious practices, works of art, and sense of homeland and sacred history. He also describes how Euro-Americans became increasingly fascinated by and supportive of Native American culture, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. In the face of such Native resiliency and non-Native advocacy, the government's assimilation policy became irrelevant and inevitably collapsed. The great confusion in Indian affairs during the Progressive Era, Holm concludes, ultimately paved the way for Native American tribes to be recognized as nations with certain sovereign rights.

We all are humans, living all over the planet Earth. Sometimes, we wonder what we are and what this world is. How did we come into existence? In today's materialist world, how can we achieve profit and avoid loss in whatever we do? We all love comfort and happiness, but we all hate pain and sorrow. How can we avoid the stress and miseries of today's world? Nobody of us wants to die. How can we live long and happy lives? What should be the path of our lives? Is there God, Bhagwaan, or Allah? This book attempts to discover ourselves and come out of confusion towards clarity regarding the above curiosities.

Departing from a concern with certain ‘hard’ problems in social theory and focusing instead on the theoretical strategies employed in their solution, especially on how these strategies depend on what the author calls the theoretical attitude towards language, this book considers whether these strategies, far from being indispensable guides to thinking, might in fact lead social theorists to misunderstand the concepts constitutive of social life. Making use of the insights and practice of Ordinary Language Philosophy, understood as encompassing the work of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and their followers, Clarity and Confusion in Social Theory reveals the profound logical flaws in some of the central methodological procedures often employed in social theory for dealing with concepts, offering alternative approaches to social scientists and philosophers for tackling the conceptual issues that have so bedevilled social science from its inception. A lucid explication of Ordinary Language Philosophy and the potential that it offers for deepening and re-orienting theoretical work in the social sciences, this volume, apart from being a challenge to the influential Critical Realist paradigm, constitutes a radical critique of social theoretical reason. As such, it will appeal to social theorists and philosophers of social science, those with interests in research methods and theory construction, and anyone interested in thinking clearly about society.