The books that give us insight into human motives and experience often are based on fieldwork: people spending time with others where those others live and work. In the World Observed sixteen researchers tell how their fieldwork experiences have been transmuted into understanding. The settings range from a women's prison in Indiana to a village in Egypt, from a streetcorner in Palermo to a gypsy funeral in New York. The authors - anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, historians - relate their struggles to find meaning in the chaos of data and the ethical problems they had to confront and resolve. Their fascinating stories offer fresh insight into how we know what we know.
Observation and conceptual interpretation constitute the two major ways through which human beings engage the world. The World Observed/The World Conceived presents an innovative analysis of the nature and role of observation and conceptualization. While these two actions are often treated as separate, Hans Radder shows that they are inherently interconnected-that materially realized observational processes are always conceptually interpreted and that the meaning of concepts depends on the way they structure observational processes and abstract from them. He examines the role of human action and conceptualization in realizing observational processes and develops a detailed theory of the relationship between observation, abstraction, and the meaning of concepts. The World Observed/The World Conceived will prove useful to many areas of scholarly study including ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, science studies, and cognitive science.
A workshop sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989 brought together more than two dozen scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore Confucian ethics as a common intellectual discourse in East Asia. The participants included specialists on the societies of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore as well as scholars who specialize in comparative studies. In nine intensive sessions, they probed the ways in which the Confucian ethic has shaped perceptions of selfhood, dynamics of familial relations, gender construction, social organization, political authority, popular beliefs, and economic culture in East Asia. This book is a distillation of the essence of their multidisciplinary and cross-cultural examination of these issues. It seeks especially to illuminate claims that Confucian ethics have provided the necessary background and a powerful motivation in the rise of industrial East Asia, the most dynamic region of sustained economic growth and political development since World War II.
This volume is about ultra high-speed cameras, which enable us to see what we normally do not see. These are objects that are moving very fast, or that we just ignore. Ultra high-speed cameras invite us to a wonderland of microseconds. There Alice (the reader) meets a ultra high-speed rabbit (this volume) and travels together through this wonderland from the year 1887 to 2017. They go to the horse riding ground and see how a horse gallops. The rabbit takes her to a showroom where various cameras and illumination devices are presented. Then, he sends Alice into semiconductor labyrinths, wind tunnels, mechanical processing factories, and dangerous explosive fields. Sometimes Alice is large, and at other times she is very small. She sits even inside a car engine. She falls down together with a droplet. She enters a microbubble, is thrown out with a jet stream, and finds herself in a human body. Waking up from her dream, she sees children playing a game: “I see what you do not see, and this is....”. Alice thinks: “The ultra high-speed rabbit showed me many things which I had never seen. Now I will go again to this wonderland, and try to find something new.
Lost in the World, Found in Christ is an account of how a merciful God brought me from boyhood, in exile from His Loving Presence, to the joy of being a priest in the Roman Catholic Church--at age 63. My objective is to inspire other older men to consider the priesthood, no matter what lies in their past lives and no matter how hard the struggle. This is a wonderful book for anyone discerning a late vocation.
It may seem obvious that the human being has always been present in anthropology. This book, however, reveals that he has never really been a part of it. Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being establishes the foundations and conditions, both theoretical and methodological, which make it possible to consider the human being as a topic of observation and analysis, for himself as an entity, and not in the perspective of understanding social and cultural phenomena. In debate with both anthropologists and philosophers, this book describes and analyzes the human being as a “volume”. To this end, a specific lexicon is built around the notions of volume, volumography and volumology. These notions are further illustrated and enriched by several drawings.
A unique resource exploring the nature of computers and computing, and their relationships to the world. Philosophy of Computer Science is a university-level textbook designed to guide readers through an array of topics at the intersection of philosophy and computer science. Accessible to students from either discipline, or complete beginners to both, the text brings readers up to speed on a conversation about these issues, so that they can read the literature for themselves, form their own reasoned opinions, and become part of the conversation by contributing their own views. Written by a highly qualified author in the field, the book looks at some of the central questions in the philosophy of computer science, including: What is philosophy? (for readers who might be unfamiliar with it) What is computer science and its relationship to science and to engineering? What are computers, computing, algorithms, and programs?(Includes a line-by-line reading of portions of Turing’s classic 1936 paper that introduced Turing Machines, as well as discussion of the Church-Turing Computability Thesis and hypercomputation challenges to it) How do computers and computation relate to the physical world? What is artificial intelligence, and should we build AIs? Should we trust decisions made by computers? A companion website contains annotated suggestions for further reading and an instructor’s manual. Philosophy of Computer Science is a must-have for philosophy students, computer scientists, and general readers who want to think philosophically about computer science.
This book presents the first unified formalization for defining novelty across the span of machine learning, symbolic-reasoning, and control and planning-based systems. Dealing with novelty, things not previously seen by a system, is a critical issue for building vision-systems and general intelligent systems. The book presents examples of using this framework to define and evaluate in multiple domains including image recognition image-based open world learning, hand-writing and author analysis, CartPole Control, Image Captioning, and Monopoly. Chapters are written by well-known contributors to this new and emerging field. In addition, examples are provided from multiple areas, such as machine-learning based control problems, symbolic reasoning, and multi-player games.
In this book, a professor of literature and a physicist offer a broad, new, interdisciplinary account of Modernism. Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook encompass physics, the visual arts and literature in a thought-provoking analysis of the period from the 1880s to World War II. Uncovering common structures and values underlying each of these disparate fields, the authors define Modernism and its historical location between nineteenth-century intellectual conventions that preceded it and the Postmodernism that followed. Bridging boundaries that traditionally divide disciplines, Vargish and Mook create a uniquely coherent and comprehensive view of the aesthetics and intellectual values that characterize the culture of Modernism.
Gross anatomy, the study of anatomical structures that can be seen by unassisted vision, has long been a subject of fascination for artists. For most modern viewers, however, the anatomy lesson—the technically precise province of clinical surgeons and medical faculties—hardly seems the proper breeding ground for the hybrid workings of art and theory. We forget that, in its early stages, anatomy pursued the highly theatrical spirit of Renaissance science, as painters such as Rembrandt and Da Vinci and medical instructors like Fabricius of Aquapendente shared audiences devoted to the workings of the human body. Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre, a remarkable consideration of new developments on the stage, as well as in contemporary writings of theorists such as Donna Haraway and Brian Massumi, turns our modern notions of the dissecting table on its head—using anatomical theatre as a means of obtaining a fresh perspective on representations of the body, conceptions of subjectivity, and own knowledge about science and the stage. Critically dissecting well-known exhibitions like Body Worlds and The Visible Human Project and featuring contributions from a number of diverse scholars on such subjects as the construction of spectatorship and the implications of anatomical history, Anatomy Live is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in this engaging intersection of science and artistic practice.
