Recent Acquisitions of the Ralph W. Tyler Collection

In From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion, Andrei Markovits and Katherine Crosby describe a “discourse of compassion” that actually alters the way we treat persons and ideas once scorned by the social mainstream. This “culture turn” has also affected our treatment of animals inaugurating an accompanying “animal turn.” In the case of dogs, this shift has increasingly transformed the discursive category of the animal from human companion to human family member. One of the new institutions created by this attitudinal and behavioral change towards dogs has been the breed specific canine rescue organization, examples of which have arisen all over the United States beginning in the early 1980s and massively proliferating in the 1990s and subsequent years.

The Making of Modern Liberalism is a deep and wide-ranging exploration of the origins and nature of liberalism from the Enlightenment through its triumphs and setbacks in the twentieth century and beyond. The book is the fruit of the more than four decades during which Alan Ryan, one of the world’s leading political thinkers, reflected on the past of the liberal tradition—and worried about its future.

This volume brings together the seminal contributions of the sociologist Professor A. M. Shah to the study of the household and family in India.The Household Dimension of the Family in India (Book One) was widely regarded as a landmark study when it first appeared in 1973. It combines micro and macro perspectives, and offers a rigorous critique of the stereotype of the ‘decline’ of the joint family under conditions of industrial modernisation. This book continues to be used as a principal text in many family and kinship courses in sociology departments across the country. It is reproduced here with the original foreword by M. N. Srinivas and the original Annotated Bibliography. The Family in India: Critical Essays (Book Two), first published in 1998, covers a wide range of theoretical, methodological, substantive and policy issues relating to the family.

Realizing Reason pursues three interrelated themes. First, it traces the essential moments in the historical unfolding--from the ancient Greeks, through Descartes, Kant, and developments in the nineteenth century, to the present--that culminates in the realization of pure reason as a power of knowing. Second, it provides a cogent account of mathematical practice as a mode of inquiry into objective truth. And finally, it develops and defends a new conception of our being in the world, one that builds on and transforms the now standard conception according to which our experience of reality arises out of brain activity due, in part, to merely causal impacts on our sense organs.