This book illustrates the unnaturalness of modern science and technology by tracing their cognitive, evolutionary, and religious origins. It elaborates that all premodern knowers faced inherent limits, and the West was able to develop modern science and technology because of its inherent contradictions forcing the transcendence of limitations.
The Great Knowledge is a cumulative treasure trove of information on magical and spiritual practices described in written sources dating back to the Iron and Viking Ages. Maria Kvilhaug provides a wealth of source material shining new light on the lore of old, the roles and practices that existed, healers, sorcerers, shapeshifters, berserkers, poets, initiation rites, the genderfluid, and the influence and invocations of spirit beings in the shapes of gods, trolls, giants, elves, norns. For those who have sought accurate, historical, and fact-based information on Seiðr, Volva's, Galdrar, and more, The Great Knowledge is the book that you have been waiting for.
The philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) owned one of the most extensive collections of travel literature held in any private scholarly library of his day. It is an interest which seems very much at odds with Locke's reputation as an empirical philosopher because travellers' reports have acquired a reputation for unreliability. This book sets Locke's use of travel literature within the context of the natural historical methods of investigation associated with Francis Bacon and the Royal Society. It examines the notes he made in his commonplace books to demonstrate that Locke was developing a form of comparative social anthropology and had a sympathetic attitude towards Native Americans despite his role as a colonial adminstrator.
Follows the life and teachings of the philosopher Plato, one of the world's greatest thinkers, who in his writings taught us to question what we think we know.
The Great Social Laboratory charts the development of the human sciences—anthropology, human geography, and demography—in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, this book examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum to architectural designs to that pinnacle of social scientific research—"the article." Omnia El Shakry explores the interface between European and Egyptian social scientific discourses and interrogates the boundaries of knowledge production in a colonial and post-colonial setting. She examines the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in the Egyptian colonial context, uncovering the new modes of governance, expertise, and social knowledge that defined a distinctive era of nationalist politics in the inter- and post-war periods. Finally, she examines the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians.
"What The Double Helix did for biology, David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does for economics." —Boston Globe A stimulating and inviting tour of modern economics centered on the story of one of its most important breakthroughs. In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it. This book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox identified by Adam Smith more than two hundred years earlier, its disappearance and occasional resurfacing in the nineteenth century, the development of new technical tools in the twentieth century, and finally the student who could see further than his teachers. Fascinating in its own right, new growth theory helps to explain dominant first-mover firms like IBM or Microsoft, underscores the value of intellectual property, and provides essential advice to those concerned with the expansion of the economy. Like James Gleick's Chaos or Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, this revealing book takes us to the frontlines of scientific research; not since Robert Heilbroner's classic work The Worldly Philosophers have we had as attractive a glimpse of the essential science of economics.
Is belief in God epistemically justified? That's the question at the heart of this volume in the Great Debates in Philosophy series, with Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley each addressing this fundamental question with distinctive arguments from opposing perspectives. The first half of the book contains each philosopher's explanation of his particular view; the second half allows them to directly respond to each other's arguments, in a lively and engaging conversation Offers the reader a one of a kind, interactive discussion Forms part of the acclaimed Great Debates in Philosophy series
What is reality? What if virtual-world technology has evolved beyond our wildest dreams and were actually living virtual-lives right now? Were here learning a mandatory history lesson that everyone must learn in the future before ever being truly conscious. Its a time during the early twenty-first century when the world is divided by ideological hatred. This ravenous hatred will soon climax when the Dooms-Team strikes America with a sinister act of terror that will snowball overnight into nuclear Armageddon. Right now humanity has reached a fork in the road, one road leads to life and the other to death. In this book, the first of a trilogy, youll learn whats on the road to death and a little of whats possible on the road of life. Only by showing the world the cataclysmic cost of a world divided can they appreciate the wonders of life and the endless possibilities of a world united.