The Precipice

The Precipice

Author: Toby Ord

Publisher: Hachette Books

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 031648489X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker


Arms for Oil

Arms for Oil

Author: Michael Barratt Brown

Publisher: Spokesman Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9780851246987

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is a fact, an unfortunate fact, that economic relations between the West and the Arab and other Islamic countries could for many years be described accurately in just three words Oil for Arms or alternatively Arms for Oil. This has a long history going back to the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up between the British and French Empires and client regimes were established in the newly created states. The Second World War brought in the American Empire, but the main purpose of all these empires was to control the rich oil reserves in the region. Arms were supplied as necessary to maintain the client regimes in power. This became essential if oil was to remain cheap.


Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell

Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell

Author: Javier Pérez-Jara

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-08-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1793618488

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a logician, a philosopher, and one of the twentieth century’s most visible public intellectuals. Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology brings those three aspects together to trace Russell’s changing views on the role of science and technology in society throughout his long intellectual career. Drawing from cultural sociology, history of science, and philosophy, Javier Pérez-Jara and Lino Camprubí provide a fresh multidimensional analysis of the general themes of science, technology, utopia, and apocalypse. The book critically examines Russell’s influential interpretations of the turn-of-the-century mathematical logic, World War I, the metaphysics and epistemology of mind and matter, World War II, nuclear holocaust, and the Vietnam War. In Russell’s compelling narratives, humanity was a powder keg and the match was represented by different and successive meta-adversaries, such as religion, communism, and American imperialism. And the only way to avoid a coming global Holocaust was to follow his own salvific recipes. In working around Russell’s role in the cultural perception of the final destiny of humanity, Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell invites the reader to think about the place of the techno-scientific sphere in human progress and decadence in both our current epoch and the distant future.


Collected Prefaces

Collected Prefaces

Author: Nicholas Hagger

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2022-04-29

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1789042747

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Nicholas Hagger's 55 books include innovatory works on literature, history, philosophy and international politics. In his first published literary work he revived the Preface, which had fallen into disuse after Wordsworth and Shelley. He went on to write Prefaces (sometimes called ‘Prologues’, ‘Introductions’ or ‘Introductory Notes’) for all his subsequent books. Collected Prefaces, a collection of 55 Prefaces (excluding the Preface to this book), sets out his thinking and the reader can follow the development of his philosophy of Universalism (of which he is the main exponent), his literary approach (particularly his combination of Romanticism and Classicism which he calls "neo-Baroque") and his metaphysical thinking. His Prefaces can be read as essays, and as in T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays there is an interaction between adjacent Prefaces that brings an entirely new perspective to Hagger's works. These Prefaces cover an enormous range. Nicholas Hagger is a Renaissance man at home in many disciplines. His Universalism focuses on humankind’s relationship to the whole universe as reflected in seven key disciplines seen as wholes: the whole of literature, history, philosophy and the sciences, mysticism, religion, international politics and statecraft and world culture. Behind all the Prefaces is Hagger’s fundamental perception of the unity of the universe as the One and of humankind’s position in it. These Prefaces complement his Selected Letters, a companion volume also published by O-Books, and contain startling insights that illumine and send readers to the works the Prefaces introduce.


The First Fifty Years of Peace Research

The First Fifty Years of Peace Research

Author: David J. Dunn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-18

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1351146742

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Peace research first emerged as an explicit academic area of study in the 1950s. Pioneers of peace research included Wright, Richardson and Lenz, and this book examines their contribution and that of the 'frontiersmen' who developed the study further, establishing peace research in its own right. Assessing the evolution, status and significance of peace research after fifty years, this novel and comprehensive book is relevant not only to students of peace research, but also to the developing debates within international relations and security studies. This is where there are real problems associated with the understanding of new problems and issues by reference to traditional concepts and categories. The book will attract a broad market in the fields of international relations, politics and social theory, as well as scholars in peace studies.


The ABC of Relativity

The ABC of Relativity

Author: Bertrand Russell

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1504000994

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Nobel Prize winner offers “an ideal introduction to the theories of special and general relativity” in clear, comprehensible language(Nature). A renowned mathematician and philosopher, and as well as recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bertrand Russell was acclaimed for his ability to address complex subjects in accessible ways. In this classic reference book, Russell delves into physics and relativity, helping everyday readers grasp the genius and implications of Albert Einstein’s theory. When originally published in 1925, The ABC of Relativity brought science to a more general audience—and it continues to do so in the twenty-first century. “A mind of dazzling brilliance.” —The New York Times


Einstein on Einstein

Einstein on Einstein

Author: Hanoch Gutfreund

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0691200114

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

New perspectives on the iconic physicist's scientific and philosophical formation At the end of World War II, Albert Einstein was invited to write his intellectual autobiography for the Library of Living Philosophers. The resulting book was his uniquely personal Autobiographical Notes, a classic work in the history of science that explains the development of his ideas with unmatched warmth and clarity. Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn introduce Einstein's scientific reflections to today's readers, tracing his intellectual formation from childhood to old age and offering a compelling portrait of the making of a philosopher-scientist. Einstein on Einstein features the full English text of Autobiographical Notes along with incisive essays that place Einstein's reflections in the context of the different stages of his scientific life. Gutfreund and Renn draw on Einstein's writings, personal correspondence, and critical writings by Einstein's contemporaries to provide new perspectives on his greatest discoveries. Also included are Einstein's responses to his critics, which shed additional light on his scientific and philosophical worldview. Gutfreund and Renn quote extensively from Einstein's initial, unpublished attempts to formulate his response, and also look at another brief autobiographical text by Einstein, written a few weeks before his death, which is published here for the first time in English. Complete with evocative drawings by artist Laurent Taudin, Einstein on Einstein illuminates the iconic physicist's journey to general relativity while situating his revolutionary ideas alongside other astonishing scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.


The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell Volume 29

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell Volume 29

Author: Bertrand Russell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 771

ISBN-13: 1134245254

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Détente or Destruction, 1955-57 continues publication of Routledge's multi-volume critical edition of Bertrand Russell's shorter writings. Between September 1955 and November 1957 Russell published some sixty-one articles, reviews, statements, contributions to books and letters to editors, over fifty of which are contained in this volume. The texts, several of them hitherto unpublished, reveal the deepening of Russell's commitment to the anti-nuclear struggle, upon which he embarked in the previous volume of Collected Papers (Man's Peril, 1954-55). Continuing with the theme of nuclear peril, this volume contains discussion of nuclear weapons, world peace, prospects for disarmament and British-Soviet friendship against the backdrop of the Cold War. One of the key papers in this volume is Russell's message to the inaugural conference of the Pugwash movement, which Russell was instrumental in launching and which became an influential, independent forum of East-West scientific cooperation and counsel on issues as an internationally agreed nuclear test-ban. In addition to the issues of war and peace, Russell, now in his eighties, continued to take an interest in a wide variety of themes. Russell not only addresses older controversies over nationalism and empire, religious belief and American civil liberties, he also confronts head-on the new and pressing matters of armed intervention in Hungary and Suez, and of the manufacture and testing of the British hydrogen bomb. This volume includes seven interviews ranging from East-West Relations after the Geneva conference to a Meeting with Russell.