Do traditional distinctions between "belief" and "knowledge" still make sense? How are differences between knowledge and belief understood in different cultural contexts? This book explores conflicts between various types of knowledge, especially between orthodox and heterodox knowledge systems, ranging from religious fundamentalism to heresies within the scientific community itself. Beyond addressing many fields in the academy, the book discusses learned individuals interested in the often puzzling spatial and cultural disparities of knowledge and clashes of knowledge.

The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in today’s geopolitical climate—with a foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication in 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations pose the greatest threat to world peace, but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia have changed global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify inter-civilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. In his incisive analysis, Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, multi-civilizational world.

As much as we would prefer otherwise, life includes its measure of unpleasant and unfavorable circumstances. In dealing with difficult people, facing unhealthy relationships, in family relationships, or in the midst of marriage problems, clashes occur. We might even say that some of our relationships are the very definition of conflict! We ask ourselves, how can we possibly avoid conflict in these emotionally-charged situations? In the book “Avoid Clashes”, Gnani Purush (embodiment of Self knowledge) Dada Bhagwan offers ultimate conflict resolution skills in the form of spiritual conflict resolution strategies. His spiritual teaching on how to resolve conflict - or to avoid it altogether - is offered in the context of common and everyday relationship challenges. Whether seeking relationship tips, marriage advice, or to learn how to deal with negative people and difficult people, this book will prove an invaluable resource.

Is unity of knowledge possible? Is it desirable? Two rival visions clash. One seeks a single way of explaining everything known and knowable about ourselves and the universe. The other champions diverse modes of understanding served by disparate kinds of evidence. Contrary views pit science against the arts and humanities. Scientists generally laud and seek convergence. Artists and humanists deplore amalgamation as a threat to humane values. These opposing perspectives flamed into hostility in the 1950s "Two Cultures" clash. They culminate today in new efforts to conjoin insights into physical nature and human culture, and new fears lest such syntheses submerge what the arts and humanities most value. This book, stemming from David Lowenthal’s inaugural Stockholm Archipelago Lectures, explores the Two Cultures quarrel’s underlying ideologies. Lowenthal shows how ingrained bias toward unity or diversity shapes major issues in education, religion, genetics, race relations, heritage governance, and environmental policy. Aimed at a general academic audience, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge especially targets those in conservation, ecology, history of ideas, museology, and heritage studies.

America’s leading religious scholar and public intellectual introduces lay readers to the Qur’an with a measured, powerful reading of the ancient text Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Qur’an Meant, Wills invites readers to join him as he embarks on a timely and necessary reconsideration of the Qur’an, leading us through perplexing passages with insight and erudition. What does the Qur’an actually say about veiling women? Does it justify religious war? There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam. That is no longer the case. We blundered into the longest war in our history without knowing basic facts about the Islamic civilization with which we were dealing. We are constantly fed false information about Islam—claims that it is essentially a religion of violence, that its sacred book is a handbook for terrorists. There is no way to assess these claims unless we have at least some knowledge of the Qur’an. In this book Wills, as a non-Muslim with an open mind, reads the Qur’an with sympathy but with rigor, trying to discover why other non-Muslims—such as Pope Francis—find it an inspiring book, worthy to guide people down through the centuries. There are many traditions that add to and distort and blunt the actual words of the text. What Wills does resembles the work of art restorers who clean away accumulated layers of dust to find the original meaning. He compares the Qur’an with other sacred books, the Old Testament and the New Testament, to show many parallels between them. There are also parallel difficulties of interpretation, which call for patient exploration—and which offer some thrills of discovery. What the Qur’an Meant is the opening of a conversation on one of the world’s most practiced religions.

This book shows, first of all, that leadership plays a crucial role in reinventing regions and branching out from an old path to something new in order to create more balanced and sustainable regional development. Second, it maintains that leadership is not a solo but a multi-agent and -level activity and that it needs to be discussed and studied as such. Third, as the book argues, leadership is shaped differently in various institutional and cultural contexts and on different scales. This book explores the ways leadership plays our in regional development context contributing to economically, socially and ecologically balanced sustainable future.

Technological development has changed the nature of industrial production so that it is no longer a question of humans working with a machine, but rather that a joint human machine system is performing the task. This development, which started in the 1940s, has become even more pronounced with the proliferation of computers and the invasion of digital technology in all wakes of working life. It may appear that the importance of human work has been reduced compared to what can be achieved by intelligent software systems, but in reality, the opposite is true: the more complex a system, the more vital the human operator's task. The conditions have changed, however, whereas people used to be in control of their own tasks, today they have become supervisors of tasks which are shared between humans and machines. A considerable effort has been devoted to the domain of administrative and clerical work and has led to the establishment of an internationally based human-computer interaction (HCI) community at research and application levels. The HCI community, however, has paid more attention to static environments where the human operator is in complete control of the situation, rather than to dynamic environments where changes may occur independent of human intervention and actions. This book's basic philosophy is the conviction that human operators remain the unchallenged experts even in the worst cases where their working conditions have been impoverished by senseless automation. They maintain this advantage due to their ability to learn and build up a high level of expertise -- a foundation of operational knowledge -- during their work. This expertise must be taken into account in the development of efficient human-machine systems, in the specification of training requirements, and in the identification of needs for specific computer support to human actions. Supporting this philosophy, this volume *deals with the main features of cognition in dynamic environments, combining issues coming from empirical approaches of human cognition and cognitive simulation, *addresses the question of the development of competence and expertise, and *proposes ways to take up the main challenge in this domain -- the design of an actual cooperation between human experts and computers of the next century.