The rise of civilization is synonymous with the creation of tools that extend the intel-lectual and physical reach of human beings [133]. The pinnacle of such endeavours isto replicate the flexible reasoning capacity of human intelligence within a machine,making it capable of performing useful work on command, despite the complexityand adversity of the real world. In order to achieve such Artif…
Every day in hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, and school sick bays around the world, children (including adolescents) present with what have come to be known as functional somatic symptoms. These symptoms are ones that cannot be explained by an identifiable disease process—even after an extensive medical assessment has been done. They reflect, instead, …
For more than 20 years I have practiced nursing, first in oncology services, then in palliative care. As a teacher and psychotherapist for the past 10 years, I have had the opportunity to continue working with nursing students in palliative care and psychi-atric services, as well as to supervise nursing teams. An ethicist by training, I belong to an ethics committee in a neuropsychiatric hospit…
A landmark volume in science writing by one of the great minds of our time, Stephen Hawking’s book explores such profound questions as: How did the universe begin—and what made its start possible? Does time always flow forward? Is the universe unending—or are there boundaries? Are there other dimensions in space? What will happen when it all ends? Told in language we all can understand…
Is objectivity possible? Can there be objectivity in matters of morals? What would a truly objective account of the world be like? Is everything subjective, or relative? Are moral judgments objective or culturally relative? This Very Short Introduction demonstrates that there are a number of common misunderstandings about what objectivity is, and explores the theoretical and practical problems …
Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encount…
Rates of diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are skyrocketing, throughout America and the rest of the world. U.S. rates of youth diagnosis have increased 40% from just a decade ago. Adults with ADHD are now the fastest-growing segment of the population receiving diagnosis and medication. The disorder is painful and sometimes disabling for individuals and tremendously co…
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…
Trees can also be tied to the idea of domination. I have long argued that the process of ecological restoration, in which a kind of environ-mental engineering attempts the re-creation of previously degraded or destroyed natural environments, is an example of the human project to assert our technological mastery over the autonomous processes of the natural world.1 The management of forests for h…
These listings provided the now vanished cinematic geography of prewar Paris. One could chart how movies moved through neighborhoods, the de-velopment (and closure) of cinemas, and the relative importance of movies to diferent parts of town (typically around eighteen cinemas in the periph-eral, working-class twentieth arrondissement and none in the firs…