Цель этой книги — доступным и увлекательным образом познакомить читателя с психологией. Здесь объясняется 101 ключевой термин, часто встречающийся в литературе по данной отрасли знаний. Для удобства статьи идут в алфавитном порядке. Причем от читателя почти не требуется никаких специальных знаний или подготовки. Книга будет полезна для всех: и для широкого круга читателей, и для тех, кто готовится к поступлению в высшие учебные заведения, и для тех, кто уже в них учится.

Т. 1. - 2009. - 494 с.

Эта уникальная книга представляет 40 наиболее известных и влиятельных исследований, кардинально изменивших лицо психологии и наши знания о природе поведения человека. Книга заставляет испытать волнение первооткрывателя, приглашая в творческие лаборатории Розенцвейга и Гибсона, Скиннера и Бандуры, Пиаже и Аша, Экмана и Фестингера, Мастерса и Джонсон, Роршаха, Милгрема и многих других мастеров психологии. Для самого широкого круга читателей, интересующихся современными знаниями о поведении человека.

A Higher Form of Killing opens with the first devastating battlefield use of lethal gas in World War I, and then investigates the stockpiling of biological weapons during World War II and in the decades afterward as well as the inhuman experiments con-ducted to test their effectiveness. This updated edition includes a new Introduction and a new final chapter exposing frightening developments in recent years, including the black market that emerged in chemical and biological weapons following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the acquisition of these weapons by various Third World states, the attempts of countries such as Iraq to build up arsenals, and--particularly and most recently--the use of these weapons in terrorist attacks.

This book is a result of my increasing irritation at the colonization of our life-world by fear. Books motivated by irritation have a tendency to be polemical, and this book is no exception. It is an attack on the tendency to consider practically all phenomena from a perspective of fear. A paradoxical trait of the culture of fear is that it emerges at a time when, by all accounts, we are living more securely than ever before in human history. One of my most important arguments against the culture of fear is that it undermines our freedom. It might seem strange to be writing a book about our living in a culture of fear after having previously written a book about our living in a culture of boredom. The two diagnoses of our present culture as being one of fear and one of boredom respectively would seem on the face of it to be contradictory. If one is consumed by fear, one is not bored. But every life will contain both elements. In the poem ‘Dockery and Son’ (1963), Philip Larkin seems to imply that these two emotions, broadly speaking, sum up human existence: ‘Life is first boredom, then fear.’ Every society – and not least postmodern ones – is characterized by many contrasting movements and phenomena. Two phenomena such as boredom and fear, however, do not simply oppose each other but can also build up under each other. Fear is not simply something we are exposed to against our will; it is often also something we voluntarily expose ourselves to in an attempt to transcend a banal, boring everyday existence. I attempt in this book to unravel what kind of an emotion fear is, what role it plays in present-day culture and, not least, what political use is made of it. The book consists of seven chapters. In chapter One I give a brief account of ‘the culture of fear’, that is, how fear has become a kind of culturally determined magnifying glass through which we consider the world. Chapter Two is an attempt to describe what kind of a phenomenon fear is, and adopts a number of different approaches, ranging from neurobiology to phenomenology. In chapter Three I examine the role of fear in ‘the risk society’ and demonstrate how our attempts to minimize risk contain many irrational aspects. Chapter Four deals with the fact that we often voluntarily seek what is frightening – in extreme sports and entertainment, for example – something that is paradoxical, taking into consideration that we normally try to avoid sources of fear. In chapter Five I take a look at the concept of trust and point out that the culture of fear has an undermining effect on trust – something that in turn increases the scope of fear. When general trust decreases, this has a disintegrating effect on social relations, although fear for its part can also have an integrating effect. This integrating role of fear is central in a number of political philosophies, not least those of Machiavelli and Hobbes, and in chapter Six I look at the role of fear as a basis for political philosophy as well as the political use that has been made of fear in the ‘war against terror’ of recent years. Finally, the concluding chapter asks if there is any way out of fear, if we can break down the climate of fear that surrounds us today. A theme that will only be dealt with to a slight extent is the fear of death in general, as this is such a wide-ranging theme – because it calls for a thorough thematization of our conceptions of death – and must therefore be dealt with elsewhere. Anxiety – or Angst – will also be dealt with just as briefly. An obvious question is: Why write a ‘philosophy of fear’ when it is not so much fear as anxiety that has been traditionally dealt with in philosophy? Since anxiety is in addition ascribed major metaphysical implications, fear would seem to be trivial by comparison. Anxiety is ‘deep’, whereas fear is ‘shallow’. In Roland Barthes’ words we can say that fear would appear to be a ‘mediocre and unworthy emotion’.1 Nevertheless, fear would seem today to have greater cultural and political consequences than anxiety. Furthermore, it is basically rather pleasant to do away with all the ‘metaphysical hand-luggage’ that accompanies the concept of anxiety.

Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work. The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.

Nowhere is there another lab like Dr. Bill Bass's: On a hillside in Tennessee, human bodies decompose in the open air, aided by insects, bacteria, and birds, unhindered by coffins or mausoleums. At the "Body Farm," nature takes its course, with corpses buried in shallow graves, submerged in water, concealed beneath slabs of concrete, locked in trunks of cars. As stand-ins for murder victims, they serve the needs of science - and the cause of justice. For thirty years, Dr. Bass's research has revolutionized the field of forensic science, particularly by pinpointing "time since death" in murder cases. In this riveting book, he investigates real cases and leads readers on an unprecedented journey behind the locked gates of the Body Farm. A master scientist and an engaging storyteller, Bass shares his most intriguing work: his revisit of the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder, fifty years after the fact; the mystery of a headless corpse whose identity astonished the police; the telltale bugs that finally sent a murderous grandfather to death row; and many more.