What can motivate citizens in divided societies to engage in free, open, and reasoned dialogue? Attempts by philosophers to answer this question focus largely on elucidating what citizens owe to one another as free and equal citizens, as members of a shared social context, or as agents who are mutually dependent on one another for our well-being. In The Deliberative Impulse: Motivating Discourse in Divided Societies, Andrew F. Smith suggests that that a better answer can be offered in terms of what we owe to our convictions. Given the defining role they play in how we live our lives and regard ourselves, among the highest-order interests that we maintain is being in a position to do right by our convictions—to abide by conscience. By developing a clear understanding of how best to act on this interest, we see that we are well served by engaging in public deliberation. Particularly for citizens in societies that are fragmented along ethnic, cultural, ideological, and religious lines, our interest in abiding by conscience should give us clear moral, epistemic, and religious incentives to deliberatively engage with allies and adversaries alike. Scholars who focus on issues in political philosophy, ethics, and political theory will value this book for how it suggests we can overcome the motivational roadblocks to active political participation and robust deliberation.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a diagnosis given to a significant number of people in the Western world. Yet many of the core concepts & symptoms that go with this diagnosis are questionable. This book presents a compelling analysis of BPD, arguing that it needs to be approached in a new light- one that will benefit patients.

Will some form of direct democracy supplant representative, deliberative government in the twenty-first century United States? That question is at the heart of Donald R. Wolfensberger's history of Congress and congressional reform, which runs back to the Constitution's creation of a popularly elected House of Representatives and forward to the surreal ending of the 105th Congress, featuring barrels of pork, resignation of the speaker, and impeachment of the president. The author's expertise comes from twenty-eight years as a staff member in the House, culminating in service as chief of staff of the powerful House Rules Committee. He was a top parliamentary expert and a principal Republican procedural strategist. Sensitive to the power of process, Wolfensberger is an authoritative guide to reform efforts of earlier eras. And as a participant in reforms since the 1960s, he offers a unique perspective on forging the "1970s sunshine coalition," televising House proceedings, debating term limits, and coping with democracy in an electronic age.

Citizen participation in such complex issues as the quality of the environment, neighborhood housing, urban design, and economic development often brings with it suspicion of government, anger between stakeholders, and power plays by many--as well as appeals to rational argument. Deliberative planning practice in these contexts takes political vision and pragmatic skill. Working from the accounts of practitioners in urban and rural settings, North and South, John Forester shows how skillful deliberative practices can facilitate practical and timely participatory planning processes. In so doing, he provides a window onto the wider world of democratic governance, participation, and practical decision-making. Integrating interpretation and theoretical insight with diverse accounts of practice, Forester draws on political science, law, philosophy, literature, and planning to explore the challenges and possibilities of deliberative practice.

This volume explores interdependencies between knowledge, action, and space from different interdisciplinary perspectives. Some of the contributors discuss knowledge as a social construct based on collective action, while others look at knowledge as an individual capacity for action. The chapters contain theoretical frameworks as well as experimental outcomes. Readers will gain insight into key questions such as: How does knowledge function as a prerequisite for action? Why are knowledge gaps growing and not diminishing in a knowledge society? How much knowledge is necessary for action? How do various types of knowledge influence the steps from cognition to action? How do different representations of knowledge shape action? What impact have spatial conditions for the formation of knowledge? What is the relationship between social and geographical space? The contributors consider rationality in social and economic theories as well as in everyday life. Attention is also given to action theoretic approaches and rationality from the viewpoints of psychology, post-structuralism, and human geography, making this an attractive book for students, researchers and academics of various backgrounds. This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.

Despite the modem recovery of virtue theory in ethics, conceptions of temperance remain largely unexamined. In this study I offer an examination ofcertain interpretive threads oftemperance as a virtue beginning in classical philosophy and moving through early to medieval Christian conceptions. I find contemporary notions oftemperance to be sorely lacking when compared and contrasted to these historical conceptions. Aristotelian and Thomistic accounts of temperance are particularly important to the normative statement of temperance I offer here. To fully understand temperance one must recognize its place among the moral virtues, in particular phronesis or practical judgment. Though I place temperance within practical judgment, this study stops short ofoffering a full account of virtue theory and how it mayor may not relate to other theories ofthe moral life. While contemporary views of temperance occasionally note its general relevance to the experience of emotion, I elaborate upon the work of temperance as an essential part of the effort to include emotion in the moral life. In present-day studies of the psychology of emotion, cognitive theories have reasserted the classical conception of emotion as consisting of both physiological and psychological elements ofhuman personhood. Temperance is the primary virtue in the moral agent's effort to appropriately include the entirety ofthe emotional experience in moral deliberation. I find it relevant to a moral response to both the physiological and psychological elements of emotion.

Sex offender laws include residency restrictions, registration and notification requirements, and post-conviction civil commitment. These laws and regulations impose serious restrictions on the movements of convicted sex offenders. This is controversial because these laws and regulations occur after the sex offender has completed his time in prison. These laws and regulations are intended to have both a deterrent and therapeutic effect. Residency restrictions seek to prevent sex offenders from recommitting their crimes and civil commitment provides psychological services while incarcerated in a forensic facility. Most works on this subject are deeply critical of these laws. Cary Federman takes a more sympathetic approach to sex offender legislation. He focuses on the deliberative intentions of legislators, exploring the limits of judicial review and the rights of interested parties to influence lawmaking. Leaders of these interested parties are usually the parents of children who have been sexually violated and murdered. Critics of sex offender legislation tend to focus on the convicted parties, arguing that their rights have been violated. Democracy and Deliberation asserts that these laws are expressions of the deliberative intentions of lawmakers concerned about public safety—they are thus constitutional, if not always wise.

This book changes the narrative regarding democratic deliberation. It does so by bringing to bear insights into the nature of morality and discourse associated with one of the twentieth century's foremost philosophers of history, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Tradition and the Deliberative Turn thus reframes the discussion about deliberative democracy with a robust historical sensibility, which has largely been missing from this conversation. Gadamer's "rehabilitation" of tradition shows how the concrete ethical life does not merely occlude but also facilitates moral understanding, providing a particular vantage point from which we perceive the world. What other scholars have overlooked is that such a perspective is therefore always limited. Drawing on Gadamer's practical philosophy, an underappreciated element in his corpus, Ryan R. Holston argues for the need to cultivate these historically-rooted and local relationships and the shared meanings to which they give life.