The Atom in the History of Human Thought

The Atom in the History of Human Thought

Author: Bernard Pullman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780195150407

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The concept of the atom is very close to scientific bedrock, the deepest and most fundamental fact about the nature of reality. This book presents the whole panorama of the atomic hypothesis, and its place in Western civilization, from its origins in early Greek philosophy 2500 years ago to the definitive proof through direct microscopic imaging of since atoms, about ten years ago.


Atomic Age America

Atomic Age America

Author: Martin V. Melosi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 131550975X

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Atomic Age America looks at the broad influence of atomic energy¿focusing particularly on nuclear weapons and nuclear power¿on the lives of Americans within a world context. The text examines the social, political, diplomatic, environmental, and technical impacts of atomic energy on the 20th and 21st centuries, with a look back to the origins of atomic theory.


The Pattern Seekers

The Pattern Seekers

Author: Simon Baron-Cohen

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1541647130

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A groundbreaking argument about the link between autism and ingenuity. Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy thousand years, from the first tools to the digital revolution. How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species's inventiveness. However, these abilities exact a great cost on autistic people, including social and often medical challenges, so Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their triumphs. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn't just a new theory of human civilization, but a call to consider anew how society treats those who think differently.


Thinking in Time

Thinking in Time

Author: Suzanne Guerlac

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-03-15

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1501716972

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"Under the aegis of time Suzanne Guerlac displaces matter, intuition, memory, and vitalism of the early twentieth century into the wake of poststructuralism and the dilemmas of nature and culture here and now. This book is a landmark for anyone working in the currents of philosophy, science, and literature. The force and vision of the work will enthuse and inspire every one of its readers." ―Tom Conley, Harvard University "In recent years, we have grown accustomed to philosophical language that is intensely self-conscious and rhetorically thick, often tragic in tone. It is enlivening to read Bergson, who exerts so little rhetorical pressure while exacting such a substantial effort of thought.... Bergson's texts teach the reader to let go of entrenched intellectual habits and to begin to think differently—to think in time.... Too much and too little have been said about Bergson. Too much, because of the various appropriations of his thought. Too little, because the work itself has not been carefully studied in recent decades."—from Thinking in Time Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose philosophical works emphasized motion, time, and change, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. His work remains influential, particularly in the realms of philosophy, cultural studies, and new media studies. In Thinking in Time, Suzanne Guerlac provides readers with the conceptual and contextual tools necessary for informed appreciation of Bergson's work. Guerlac's straightforward philosophical expositions of two Bergson texts, Time and Free Will (1888) and Matter and Memory (1896), focus on the notions of duration and memory—concepts that are central to the philosopher's work. Thinking in Time makes plain that it is well worth learning how to read Bergson effectively: his era and our own share important concerns. Bergson's insistence on the opposition between the automatic and the voluntary and his engagement with the notions of "the living," affect, and embodiment are especially germane to discussions of electronic culture.


Finding Answers History! Religion! Science!

Finding Answers History! Religion! Science!

Author: Pauline Schiappa

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2018-04-28

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1546239189

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A mysterious and tremendous thing comes to reveal itself in the course of the lifetime of an earthly human. So mysteriously confronted by it, the earthly human becomes awed by this compelling human attribute. The earthly human becomes so enraptured by it that he begins to consider it as a quality that defines and explains his human nature. The earthly human desires to know; the earthly human desires to understand that which his physical body sense experiences of earthly reality. The earthly human holds so much psychological and intellectual desire toward knowing it that he gives it a nametruth. How does the earthly human discover truth?


The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table

Author: Eric R. Scerri

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 019091436X

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The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance traces the evolution and development of the periodic table, from Mendeleev's 1869 first published table and onto the modern understanding provided by modern physics.


Atoms, Corpuscles and Minima in the Renaissance

Atoms, Corpuscles and Minima in the Renaissance

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-10-31

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 900452892X

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The Renaissance witnessed an upsurge in explanations of natural events in terms of invisibly small particles – atoms, corpuscles, minima, monads and particles. The reasons for this development are as varied as are the entities that were proposed. This volume covers the period from the earliest commentaries on Lucretius’ De rerum natura to the sources of Newton’s alchemical texts. Contributors examine key developments in Renaissance physiology, meteorology, metaphysics, theology, chymistry and historiography, all of which came to assign a greater explanatory weight to minute entities. These contributions show that there was no simple ‘revival of atomism’, but that the Renaissance confronts us with a diverse and conceptually messy process. Contributors are: Stephen Clucas, Christoph Lüthy, Craig Martin, Elisabeth Moreau, William R. Newman, Elena Nicoli, Sandra Plastina, Kuni Sakamoto, Jole Shackelford, and Leen Spruit.


The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing

Author:

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 2009-04-14

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0834823667

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This anonymous fourteenth-century text is the glory of English mysticism, and one of the most practical and useful guides to finding union with God ever written. Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s new translation is the first to bring the text into a modern English idiom—while remaining strictly faithful to the meaning of the original Middle English. The Cloud of Unknowing consists of a series of letters written by a monk to his student or disciple, instructing him (or her) in the way of Divine union. Its theology is presented in a way that is remarkably easy to understand, as well as practical, providing advice on prayer and contemplation that anyone can use. Previous translations of the Cloud have tended to veil its intimate, even friendly tone under medieval-sounding language. Carmen Butcher has boldly brought the text into language as appealing to modern ears as it was to its original readers more than five hundred years ago. Also included in the volume is the companion work attributed to the same anonymous author, The Book of Privy Counsel, which contains further advice for approaching God in a way that emphasizes real experience rather than human knowledge.


From the Atom to Living Systems

From the Atom to Living Systems

Author: Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0197598900

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From the Atom to Living Systems represents an original historico-epistemological approach to follow the passage, in the microscopic analysis of reality, from the atomic to the molecular to the macromolecular levels and then to the threshold of life itself. Naturally, some parts of this journey have been developed in other works, some highly specialized and others of a more general nature. However, although this journey has often been traced in specialized scientific detail, the philosophical implications of the journey have not been discussed to any satisfactory degree. This scientific journey does have important philosophical consequences that constitute an integral part of this book, which is framed within the perspective of systems science and the so-called sciences of complexity, which are areas fundamental to 21st century science. In fact, the possibility of studying and understanding the material world through levels of complexity opens a great philosophical space that proposes to provide systemic and complex explanations, rather than reductive accounts that pretend to explain all phenomena through the interactions of elementary particles while considering all phenomena implicit and deterministic. The systemic and complex approach implies substituting unique bottom-up explanations, which move exclusively from the microscopically simple to the macroscopically complex, with a series of explanations that are horizontal within planes of complexity, vertically bottom up between various levels of complexity, vertically top-down, as well as circular in a manner that renders all levels of reality and the disciplines that study them as both autonomous and interconnected.


The Four Ways to Construct Narratives on Origins

The Four Ways to Construct Narratives on Origins

Author: Pascal Nouvel

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1527564207

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The book proposes an originology, an investigation into the discourses on origins. This leads to the identification of four different types of discourses on origins: the mythical discourses (biblical Genesis or Hesiod’s Theogony, for example); the rational discourses (which either delve deeper or, on the contrary, attempt to disqualify the question of origins); the scientific discourses (of the Universe, of the Earth, of life, of man as seen by the sciences); and, finally, the phenomenological discourses (which, since Husserl, propose a completely new way of entering into the question of origins). The various ways in which one can talk about origins, without exclusivity and without giving preference to any of these discourses, are examined here. The book shows that each of these discourses has a singular structure: In order to this, it defines ascending and descending types of discourse, and demonstrates that scientific discourses are ascending; mythical ones are descending; rational ones are both ascending and descending; and finally, phenomenological ones are neither ascending nor descending. It also shows that scientific discourses on origins did not themselves originate at the time of the scientific revolution, but much later, in the 19th century with Darwin. It is biology that will pave the way to physics when it turns to discourses on origins, not the other way around.