The Battle of the Classics
The Battle of the Classics

Author: Eric Adler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-04

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 019751880X

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These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition. Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.

Practical Food Rheology
Practical Food Rheology

Author: Ian T. Norton

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1444391054

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Rheology is fundamentally important in food manufacturing in two major senses. Understanding the way in which a substance moves and behaves is essential in order to be able to transport and mix it during processing. Secondly, the rheology of a product dictates much of the consumer experience, e.g. in relation to texture and mouthfeel. This book doesn’t overwhelm the reader with complex mathematical equations but takes a simple and practically-focused approach, interpreting the implications of rheological data for use in different food systems. Through this approach industry-based food developers / rheologists, students, and academics are given clear, concise interpretation of rheological data which directly relates to actual perceived functionality in the food. The functionality may relate to texture, structure and mouthfeel, and may result as a function of temperature, pH, flocculation, concentration effects, and mixing. The interpretative view is based on the principle that the food rheologist will produce a graph, for example of viscosity or gelation profiling, and then have to extract a practical meaning from it. For example, if viscosity falls with time as a function of pH, this knowledge can be used to tell the customer that the viscosity can be followed with just a pH meter and a stopwatch. Rheological measurements have shown that once the pH has dropped 1 unit after 10 minutes, the viscosity has been halved. This is the type of practical and valuable information for customers of the industrial food rheologist which the book will enable readers to access. Key features: A uniquely practical approach to the often difficult science of food rheology Includes chapters introducing the basics of food rheology before moving on to how data can be usefully and easily interpreted by the food scientist Can be used as a teaching aid on academic or industry-based courses

Idealizations in Physics
Idealizations in Physics

Author: Elay Shech

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-01-26

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1108944175

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This Element offers an opinionated and selective introduction to philosophical issues concerning idealizations in physics, including the concept of and reasons for introducing idealization, abstraction, and approximation, possible taxonomy and justification, and application to issues of mathematical Platonism, scientific realism, and scientific understanding.

Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts
Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 9004201777

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During the last decades of the twentieth century highly imaginative thought experiments were introduced in philosophy: Searle’s Chinese room, variations on the Brain-in-a-vat, Thomson’s violinist. At the same time historians of philosophy and science claimed the title of thought experiment for almost any argument: Descartes’ evil genius, Buridan’s ass, Gyges’ ring. In the early 1990s a systematic debate began concerning the epistemological status of thought experiments. The essays in this volume are an outcome of this debate. They were guided by the idea that, since we cannot forge a strict definition of thought experiments, we should at least tame the contemporary wild usage of this notion by analysing thought experiments from various periods, and thus clarify how they work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 15