After 30 years of research, the author of The History of Correlation organized his notes into a manuscript draft during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Getting it into shape for publication took another few years. It was a labor of love. Readers will enjoy learning in detail how correlation evolved from a completely non-mathematical concept to one today that is virtually always vi…
Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational p…
One central aim of science is to provide explanations of natural phenomena. What role(s) does mathematics play in achieving this aim? How does mathematics contribute to the explanatory power of science? Rules to Infinity defends the thesis, common though perhaps inchoate among many members of the Vienna Circle, that mathematics contributes to the explanatory power of science by expressing conce…
Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore is perhaps the best recognised and well-known second-person text among contem-porary readers. Published in 1979, the novel is a strange narrative collage composed of the beginnings of ten different novels which are interrupted by a second narrative strand in which a Reader (the pro-tagonist of the novel) is in searc…
How ought we to live? What really exists? How do we know? This book introduces important themes in ethics, knowledge, and the self, via readings from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Darwin, and Buddhist writers. It emphasizes throughout the point of studying philosophy, explains how different areas of philosophy are related, and explores the contexts in which philosophy was and is studied.
The first contemporary translation of the 1,000-year-old text at the foundation of modern medicine and biology • Presents the actual words of Avicenna translated directly from the original Arabic, removing the inaccuracies and errors of most translators • Explains current medical interpretations and ways to apply Avicenna’s concepts today, particularly for individualized medicine …
More than two hundred years ago, a theater journal from Hamburg reviewed a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Its author was probably Bernhard Anselm Weber, a composer and music director. The evening’s entertainment left a deep impression on Mozart’s fellow musician:It is just as one would expect from Mozart: great and beautiful, full of new ideas a…
Th is is a book about practical reason, action, and emotion in Kant. My aim is to answer what is the real importance of emotion for Kant. I will try to show that Kant had considerable views about emotions and that he was not blind to their importance in action in general. My object is not moral action, but action in general, including weak and even evil ones. My purpose is to show that Kant de…
This is the first in a series of sourcebooks charting the reception of Avicenna (Ibn S?n?, d.1037) in the Islamic East (from Syria to central Asia) in the 12th-13th centuries CE. Avicenna was the dominant philosophical authority in this period, who provoked generations of thinkers to subtle critique, defense, and development of his ideas. The series will translate and analyze hundreds of passag…
The book examines the late ancient history of one pivotal concept of contemporary culture, that of human dignity, with the view to identifying the moment in history when European culture worked out a systematic category for human axiological status. Whereas some studies concentrate on the notion of dignity in the Renaissance, suggesting that the earlier Christian thought emphasized human insign…
The book Becoming Human: Li Zehou’s Ethics offers a critical introduction and in-depth analysis of Li Zehou’s moral philosophy and ethics. Li Zehou, who is one of the most influential contemporary Chinese philosophers, believes that ethics is the most important philosophical discipline. He aims to revive, modernize, develop, and complement Chinese traditional ethics through what he calls …
In his most provocative and practical book yet,one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own ri…
Breath is an autonomic function that is essential for life. Luce Irigaray writes, in “The Age of Breath,” “breathing, in fact, corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of a human being.”1 In a less anthropocentric, more physiological sense, breath, as a term, catches and brings together all those processes by which beings with lungs take in…
We regard Economic Theory as a collection of models, each viewed as a storyor a fable rather than as a testable scientific model to be verified or refuted(seeRubinstein(2012)). Models in Economic Theory are “useful” in the samesense that fables are.Perhaps, there is no boy who literally “cried wolf”,but we nevertheless tell the story to teach our children about…
“El Perú soy yo aunque a algunos no les guste” (“I am Peru even if some do not like it”1), claimed Mario Vargas Llosa after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. And indeed, even if it is a great hon-our for any nation to have one of its citizens receive such a prestigious distinction, many Peruvians questioned the Nobel Foundat…
Are architects who write a dying race?”1 asked Belgian architectural theorist and historian Hilde Heynen in 2017, reflecting on the position of the practis-ing architect as a writing scholar in the academic field. In her article, Heynen compares Joan Ockman’s Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology with Michael Hays’s selection in Architecture Theory s…
Historically, SGBs have been given significant autonomy when organizing sporting competitions as well as regarding their internal structure and regulations. One explanation for this is the idea that (international) sports should not be subject to the political influence of specific states, and that athletes should be free to organize their activitie…
Whatever else he may have become and if he indeed became ‘what one is’, Michel Foucault (15 October 1926–25 June 1984) was first and foremost a philosopher and an activist historian of ideas. Since he started publishing his provocative philosophical works in the late 1950s, he always maintained a unique interest in the role of the intellectual as both a…
World literature is not an object, it’s a problem.’ This was Franco Moretti (2000: 55), famously, in 2000. But what is the problem of world literature today, two decades later? In broad strokes, the disciplinary challenge would seem to be the same: to devise methods and reading practices that offer alternatives to entrenched national and civilizational frameworks. Scholars…
In Annihilation (2014a), the first novel of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, a territory known as Area X has been sealed off by a secret, military organization called Central. They have set up a military research station, the eponymous Southern Reach, and from this vantage, they are trying to both contain and explore an increasingly …
Immanuel Wallerstein is often named“the master of the field”2when scholarsdiscuss world-systems theory, and while there are others whose works pavedthe way for this kind of analysis,3it is true that the former had a prominentposition within the field he helped to create. Wallerstein, however, would notonly be perceived as a “worldwide renowned and influential sociologist andeconomic histo…
Tame anxiety and take back control of your life with this "genius" (Cosmopolitan) no-f*cks-given guide from the bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck and Get Your Sh*t Together. Do you spend more time worrying about problems than solving them? Do you let unexpected difficulties ruin your day and do "what ifs" keep you up at night? Sounds like you need to Calm the…
My dad had high hopes for me to become a profession-al golfer. In my early teens, I could out-drive his golfing buddies, who would gape at my easy swing and hand–eye–body precision. This would pump up my father’s de-termination to groom my natural ability. He entered me in summer tournaments throughout the Pacific North-west. But I lacked the cutthroat drive…
Having clear boundaries is essential to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. A boundary is a personal property line that marks those things for which we are responsible. In other words, boundaries define who we are and who we are not. Boundaries impact all areas of our lives: Physical boundaries help us determine who may touch us and under what circumstances -- Mental boundaries give us the freedom t…
This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will …
Questions concerning the ethical status of children, and their position and their relationships within families, have been widely debated in recent moral philosophy and biomedical ethics, as well as in pedagogic sciences and sociology. This volume is intended to contribute to these interdisciplinary debates from a very specific angle. Combining philosophical, ethical and q…
Diverse processes of democratic participation – and exclusion – are braided with or propelled onwards by ritual acts and complexes. This volume is the result of collaborations and conversations between international researchers who have focused on the employment and deployment of those cultural resources identifiable as ‘ritual’ as pa…
We are all familiar with the many reasons why we should fight poverty. Poor people do not have enough money to meet their basic needs, are excluded from society, are often not given proper respect, or can become easy prey at the hands of others who want to dominate them. In the domains of both material and immaterial goods, there is a widespread understanding about what it means w…
"‘Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten’: Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie presents a world in flux, turning on the relationship between man, matter and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the relationship between bodily sensation, emotion and perception, and asks his readers what it means to be human i…
The project I have undertaken is to account for ethical perception (aisth?sis) in Aristotle’s ethics—to give perception a place of importance in ethi-cal reasoning, choice, and action—and to offer an account of the faculty of perception that is expansive enough to include reception of the ethical significance of particulars. This project is motivated phil…
What is time?Afirst,intuitiveanswer maybethat time isadimension of thephysical universe. As such, it existsand has always existed independentlyofhuman experience.Wethus find it natural to assigntemporal identitiestoeventsthat took place millions ofyearsbefore humanity even came into being,inpar-ticular in areas such as astrophysics,geology, and palaeontology. Weknow,orwe think we know,that the …
This open access book provides an overview of issues of scientific responsibility. The volume comprises three types of contributions: first, analyses of the responsibility of science; second, analyses of the structural conditions for science and its responsibility; and third, normative versions of scientific responsibility. The questions and problems dealt with include science as a profession, …
Jeremy Bentham’s writings on Australia, new authoritative editions of which are now published in a volume entitled Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia1 in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, have had a profound and enduring influence across a number of fields. For instance, according to the historian John Gascoigne, s…
Communities great and small across Europe for eight centuries have contracted with doctors. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and global Europe and when civic doctors were central to the rise of shared, organized written inform…
The present volume collects together papers based on the annual Keeling Memorial Lecture in ancient philosophy given at University College London, over 2011-18 (and one from 2004, previously unpublished). It contains contributions to theoretical as well as practical ancient philosophy, and in some cases, to both. Susanne Bobzien argues that Frege plagiarised the Stoics in respect of logic, Gail…
An essential teaching companion offering practical strategies for enhancing learning for all teachers of history in higher education. The study of the eighteenth century has been a growth area in university research and teaching in recent decades. Although widely taught in history departments, the eighteenth century also presents challenges, including new students’ unfamiliarity with the peri…
This open access proceedings presents new approaches to Machine Learning for Cyber-Physical Systems, experiences and visions. It contains some selected papers from the international Conference ML4CPS – Machine Learning for Cyber-Physical Systems, which was held in Hamburg (Germany), March 29th to 31st, 2023. Cyber-physical systems are characterized by their ability to adapt and to learn: They…
The human mind is capable of entertaining an astounding range of thoughts. These thoughts are composed of concepts or ideas, which are the building blocks of thoughts. This book is about where all of these concepts come from and the psychological structures that ultimately account for their acquisition. We argue that the debate over the origins of concepts, known as the rationalism-empiricism d…
In many countries, the political backlash against neoliberalism has mainly been a retreat from democracy, with a decline in independence of the judiciary and the monetary authorities, increased control of the media, and manipulation of elections for purposes of authoritarian control. The economic dynamics and the impact of neoliberalism, i.e. deregulation and liberalized markets, is just one ca…
Kegalauan adalah melihat masa depan dengan mempertimbangkan semua hal buruk yang bisa terjadi. Kecemasan tak semestinya seperti itu adalah penyakit kognitif dalam skala mewabah di dunia modern kita. Penangkalnya adalah melihat masa depan dengan mempertimbangkan segala hal baik yang bisa terjadi. Ini bahkan bisa meningkatkan kemungkinan keberhasilan. Ini menambah harapan alih-alih negativitas…
We have seen how, as a consequence of the Revolution and of the cold, destructive, criticism of the eighteenth century, there was a demand for constructive thought. This was a desire common not only to the Traditionalists but to De Biran and Cousin. They aimed at intellectual reconstruction. While, however, there were some who combated the principles of the Revolution, as did the Traditionalist…
Humans have always had the ability to influence the genetic makeup of their children. Individuals who wanted tall and attractive children, for instance, could find tall and attractive partners to reproduce with, thereby raising the probability that their progeny would be tall and attractive. However, until very recently, this power was limited. Individuals …
Technical politics is the name for disputes over technology design involving social actors with different values, interests and ideas about the future shape of society. Such disputes are surely as old as technology itself but in the modern, industrial period they tended to involve quite narrow sections of society, and the resultant technology served very spe-cifi…
Greek philosophers assumed that the world, the universe, the cosmos, or nature as a whole, existed in some form from eternity, that is, infinitely into the past, and that the basic stuff of the universe is uncreated, everlasting, self-sufficient, and indestructible. The official Christian view, by contrast, was and is that the world was created by God out ofnothing (ex nihi/o) at some point in …
With this programme, the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster aims to make a lasting impact on Arts Education in Africa by creating a vibrant forum for exchange between Africa’s cultural scholars and practitioners and by producing research that is specifically targeted at Africa- based practitioners and policy makers.D. M.:The idea to decolonize art education seems to…
Como todo ser humano, no puedo suponer, sino que soy parte de una conciencia cósmica y, en este sentido, debería decir que soy seguidor de lo que se ha llamado “panpsiquismo”, el cual tendría antecedentes en el pensamiento, que ya viene de Aristóteles (“todo es alma”) y antes todavía, de Heráclito de un logos cósmico universal. A su vez, este último se reca-pitularí…
You have probably heard Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer in some version or other: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ It’s clever and touching, but there is a bit of a false dichotomy. There is often very little we can do to make changes to the world, …
The story behind this book has its origins in some work that I began in 1981, with a group of students classed as requiring ‘Special Education’ – that is to say, students who had spent more than three years in school, but had still not learned to read or write. The events took place at a public school, the Escola Paula Brito, in the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro.I had a…
Theredoesnotseemtobeanyseriousreasontosupposeasignificantevo-lution in Plotinus’ philosophy. Even leaving aside the problematic nature ofdevelopmentaltheoriesfromahermeneuticalperspective,thereexistssomepositiveevidenceforconsistencyinPlotinus’thought.InhisLifeof Plotinus,Porphyrygivesatleastfourreasonsforadoptingaunitaryperspective.Thefirsttwoargumentsareratherindirect:First,Plotinusbegant…
There are many reasons why I liked Mary so much, as a person, a writer and a philosopher. I liked her for her wit, her warmth, her level- headedness and her moral clarity; her ability to steer clear of all unnecessary technicalities and cut straight to the chase, focusing on the big picture rather than getting mired in the details of any particu…