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"What if there had been no World War I or no Russian Revolution? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1815, or if Martin Luther had not nailed his complaints to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, or if the South had won the American Civil War? The questioning of apparent certainties or 'known knowns' can be fascinating and, indeed, 'What if?' books are very popular. However, this speculative approach, known as counterfactualism, has had limited...
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EXPERIENCE AND NATURE by JOHN DEWEY. Originally printed in the united states of America in 1929. Contents include: THE PAUL CARUS FOUNDATION .... ix CHAPTER I. EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHIC METHOD . la II. EXISTP NCE AS PRECARIOUS AND AS STABLE . 40 III. NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES .... 78 IV. NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE . . . 121 V. NATURE, COMMUNICATION AND AS MEANING 166 VI. NATURE, MIND AND THE SUBJECT . . . 208 VII. NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND . ....
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Nineteen brilliantly led conversations with a sterling roster of natural and social scientists, shedding new light on their ideas, discoveries and lives. How does Jane Goodall's relationship with her dog Rusty inform her thinking about our relationship to other species? Which time and place would Jared Diamond most prefer to live in, in light of his work on the role of chance in history? What does driving a sports car have to do with Steven Weinberg's...
64) Waiting
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An owl, puppy, bear, bunny, and pig wait for marvelous things to happen.
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"This book is about the tension and potential balance between the active and contemplative lives--between the "vita activa" and the "vita contemplativa"--Ideals that have been debated since antiquity. The message of this book is that deep human needs call forth both possibilities."--Provided by publisher.
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Have you ever wondered about how best to live your life? Religions claim to have answers, but they are couched in faith and constrained by rituals that make each religion different from the next. The inevitable result has been conflict and war. Enlightened Living is neither religious nor spiritual, offering instead a rational and practical path that is available to everyone. Enlightenment isn't found by austerity or following rituals but by the sustained...
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"A history of the Flat Earth movement and a look at the recent boom in conspiratorial thinking in America"--
Since 2015 there has been a spectacular boom in a centuries-old delusion: that the earth is flat. Weill draws a direct line from today's conspiratorial moment, brimming not just with Flat Earthers but also anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers, back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s. When faced with a complicated world out of...
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Dr. Stephen Hawking was the most renowned scientist since Einstein, known both for his groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology and for his mischievous sense of humor. He educated millions of readers about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes, and inspired millions more by defying a terrifying early prognosis of ALS, which originally gave him only two years to live. In later life he could communicate only by using a few facial...
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Raymond Geuss is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His books include Politics and the Imagination and Philosophy and Real Politics (both Princeton).
Why the human and natural world is not as intelligible to us as we think it is
Wishful thinking is a deeply ingrained human trait that has had a long-term distorting effect on ethical thinking. Many influential ethical views depend on the optimistic assumption that, despite...
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"Reason, long held as the highest human achievement, is under siege. According to Aristotle, the capacity for reason sets us apart from other animals, yet today it has ceased to be a universally admired faculty. Rationality and reason have become political, disputed concepts, subject to easy dismissal. Julian Baggini argues eloquently that we must recover our reason and reassess its proper place, neither too highly exalted nor completely maligned....
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International encyclopedia of unified science volume 2, no.2
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First published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions "reshaped our understanding of the scientific enterprise and human inquiry in general." In it, he challenged long-standing assumptions about scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don't arise from the gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation, but instead occur outside of "normal science." Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences,...
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Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep...
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For millennia, idleness and laziness have been regarded as vices. We're all expected to work to survive and get ahead, and devoting energy to anything but labor and self-improvement can seem like a luxury or a moral failure. Far from questioning this conventional wisdom, modern philosophers have worked hard to develop new reasons to denigrate idleness. In Idleness, the first book to challenge modern philosophy's portrayal of inactivity, Brian O'Connor...
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"A study of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical project and the necessary role his essays on Jewish education play in the project's success. Reexamining Emmanuel Levinas's essays on Jewish education within the context of his larger philosophical project, Claire Elise Katz provides new insights into the importance of education and its potential to transform a democratic society. Katz examines Levinas's "Crisis of Humanism," which motivated his effort...
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Over the course of his career, Gianni Vattimo has assumed a number of public and private identities and has pursued multiple intellectual paths. He seems to embody several contradictions, at once defending and questioning religion, critiquing and serving the state, yet the diversity of his life and thought form the very essence of, as he sees it, the vocation and responsibility of the philosopher. In a world that desires quantifiable results and ideological...
77) First principles
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Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics,...
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"We are, all of us, everywhere, always, enmeshed in a web of rules and constraints. Rules fix the beginning and end of the working day and the school year, direct the ebb and flow of traffic on the roads, dictate who can be married to whom and how, place the fork to the right or the left of the plate, lay down the meter and rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet, and order the rites of birth and death. Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of...
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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., first revealed the sequences that governed American politics over the past two centuries in The Cycles of American History. Faced with a new century, a new millennium, and social and technological revolutions, Schlesinger confronts the possibility of a revolution in American political cycles.
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This engaging and wide-ranging collection of essays is informed and unified by the conviction that philosophy can, and should, engage with real-world issues. Susan Haack's keen analytical skills and well-chosen illustrations illuminate a diverse range of cultural questions; and her direct style and wry sense of humor make complex ideas and subtle distinctions accessible to serious readers whatever their discipline or particular interests. Putting...
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