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The Great Philosophers: Turing (Great Philosophers Ser. #No. 3)
by Andrew HodgesAlan Turing 1912 ? 1954 Alan Turing?s 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, introducing the Turing machine, was a landmark of twentieth-century thought. It settled a deep problem in the foundations of mathematics, and provided the principle of the post-war electronic computer. It also supplied a new approach to the philosophy of the mind. Influenced by his crucial codebreaking work in the Second World War, and by practical pioneering of the first electronic computers, Turing argued that all the operations of the mind could be performed by computers. His thesis, made famous by the wit and drama of the Turing Test, is the cornerstone of modern Artifical Intelligence. Here Andrew Hodges gives a fresh and critical analysis of Turing?s developing thought, relating it to his extraordinary life, and also to the more recent ideas of Roger Penrose.
The Great Philosophers: Voltaire
by John GrayPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.Voltaire's savage laughter range out across eighteenth-century Europe, puncturing the pomposities and hypocrisies of power. Kings and cardinals felt the sting of his satire; governments and aristocracies endured his derision.Yet the aims of the Enlightenment's clown were nothing if not serious: to throw back the blinds of ignorance and superstition and let the sun of science and intellect stream in; to rebuild benighted Christendom as a new civilisation, secular and free.Herald of reason and revolution, Voltaire's mocking voice has echoed through two centuries of change. But as the Enlightenment's achievements have come increasingly into question, the joke has rebounded on the comedian himself. A creation of Christianity in way he never realised, Voltaire owed more to his epoch's orthodoxies than he could have ever guessed.John Gray's absorbing provocative introduction offers a radical reassessment of a fascinating and important figure, at once demythologizing the icon and revealing his genuine greatness.
The Great Philosophers: Voltaire (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by John GrayPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.Voltaire's savage laughter range out across eighteenth-century Europe, puncturing the pomposities and hypocrisies of power. Kings and cardinals felt the sting of his satire; governments and aristocracies endured his derision.Yet the aims of the Enlightenment's clown were nothing if not serious: to throw back the blinds of ignorance and superstition and let the sun of science and intellect stream in; to rebuild benighted Christendom as a new civilisation, secular and free.Herald of reason and revolution, Voltaire's mocking voice has echoed through two centuries of change. But as the Enlightenment's achievements have come increasingly into question, the joke has rebounded on the comedian himself. A creation of Christianity in way he never realised, Voltaire owed more to his epoch's orthodoxies than he could have ever guessed.John Gray's absorbing provocative introduction offers a radical reassessment of a fascinating and important figure, at once demythologizing the icon and revealing his genuine greatness.
The Great Philosophers: Wittgenstein (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Peter HackerThis highly accessible account offers an illuminating introduction to Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind and to his conception of philosophy. Combining passages from Wittgenstein's writings with detailed interpretation and commentary, Hacker leads us into a world of philosophical investigation in which 'to smell a rat is ever so much easier than to trap it.'Wittgenstein claimed that the role of philosophy is to dissolve conceptual confusions, to untie the knots in our understanding that result from entanglement in the web of language. He overturned centuries of philosophical reflection on the nature of 'the inner', of our subjective experience and of our knowledge of self and others. Traditional conceptions of 'the outer', of human behaviour, were equally distorted and so too was the relation between the inner and the outer. Hacker shows how Wittgenstein's examination of our use of words clarifies our notions of mind, body and behaviour.
The Great Philosophers: Wittgenstein (Great Philosophers Ser.)
by Peter HackerLudwig Wittgenstein 1889 ? 1951 P.M.S. Hacker?s Wittgenstein offers an illuminating introduction to Wittgenstein?s philosophy of mind and to his conception of philosophy. Combining passages from Wittgenstein?s writings with detailed interpretation and commentary, Hacker leads us into a world of philosophical investigation in which `to smell a rat is ever so much easier than to trap it.? Wittgenstein claimed that the role of philosophy is to dissolve conceptual confusions, to untie the knots in our understanding that result from entanglement in the web of language. He overturned centuries of philosophical reflection on the nature of `the inner?, of our subjective experience and of our knowledge of self and others. Traditional conceptions of `the outer?, of human behaviour, were equally distorted and so too was the relation between the inner and the outer. Hacker shows how Wittgenstein?s examination of our use of words clarifies our notions of mind, body and behaviour.
The Great Philosophers:Aristotle (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Kenneth McleishAristotle c. 384- c.322 BCThe ideas Aristotle outlined in his Poetics have formed the foundation for the whole history of western critical theory. No work has had more influence upon the literature of centuries - neither has any been so profoundly, so perversely misunderstood.Mystification, moralization, recruitment into the cause of this or that literary culture... with all the interpretations, Aristotle has too seldom been permitted to speak for himself. If the prescriptive rigidities of the Renaissance went entirely against the grain of his open, accepting empiricism, the psychologising mania of the moderns has been no truer a reflection of his thought.Kenneth McLeish's introduction cuts through centuries of accreted obscurity to reveal the forthright, astonishingly original book which Aristotle actually wrote. The philosopher who emerges proves more 'modern' than any of his interpreters.
The Great Philosophers:Berkeley (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by David BermanPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.George Berkeley 1685-1753A scientist, theologian and writer on medicine and economics, George Berkeley was in his way a most improbable philosopher. A master of English prose, he was suspicious of language; scornful of abstractions, he looked instead to immediate experience for the basis of his thought.David Berman's readable guide traces Berkeley's experimentalism - for experiments with sight and touch to near-death experience - finding in his writings an intriguing marriage of philosophy and psychology.
The Great Philosophers:Democritus (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Paul CartledgePart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.Democritus c. 460-c. 370BCThe Renaissance's 'Laughing Philosopher'; our own age's 'Prophet of Quark': throughout the modern philosophical tradition, Democritus has been a man little known beyond his labels.Yet if the image of the cheerful ironist understates his true seriousness, that of father of modern nuclear physics - though by no means entirely unfounded - loses sign of the man in the hyperbole. Flattering as it is, it fails to do justice either to the full range of Democritus' interests or to the astonishing originality of his ideas.For Democritus' remarkable investigations took him far beyond the realms of physics and chemistry to explore the science of existence as a whole. Perception, selfhood and society; ethic, politics and the law: as Paul Cartledge's enthralling introduction makes clear, Democritus has much to teach us, in all these fields and more.
The Great Philosophers:Derrida (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Christopher JohnsonPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.Jacques Derrida 1930-2004As critics investigate the 'death of the author', they find Derrida's prints all over the murder weapon. No other recent philosopher has aroused so much suspicion - or been so badly misrepresented.His every idea a tug at the rug beneath us, questioning our sense of ourselves, our world and the language by which both are articulated, Derrida would make uncomfortable reading under any circumstances. Add to this an at time vertiginous abstruseness and a following whose 'deconstructive' readings appear to be doing away with writing as we know it, and the hostility is understandable.Yet as Christopher Johnson shows in this eloquent, exhilarating guide, 'deconstruction' doesn't mean 'destruction' - nor does it involve any 'con'. In what may seem mere convoluted cleverness, momentous consistencies can be found; in Derrida's apparently rarefied rhetoric can be read the most radical, relevant commentary we have on the world we inhabit today.
The Great Philosophers:Heidegger
by Jonathan ReeHeidegger 1889-1976'We ourselves the entities to be analysed.' With those words, Martin Heidegger launched his assault on the 'sham clarity' of traditional Western thought. We are neither immortal souls nor disembodied intellects, he argues, but finite historical existences. And we are bound to the world by threads of interpretation and misinterpretation more strange and tangled than we can ever hope to comprehend.In his masterpiece Being and Time (1927) Heidegger used his technique of 'existential analysis' to undercut traditional dilemmas of objectivity and subjectivity, rationality and irrationality, absolutism and relativism. Truth itself, he argues, is essentially historical.The greatest adventures of twentieth-century thought can be seen as footnotes to Being and Time, and in this brilliantly lucid exposition Jonathan Rée spells out all its main arguments without blunting any of its disturbing paradoxes.
The Great Philosophers:Kant (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Ralph Walker'Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.' KantIn today's increasingly fractured world of oppression and uncertainty, Kant's moral philosophy is more important than ever before. And never has the need for moral absolutes been more pressing than in this age of doubt, disillusion and cynicism. This is where Kant comes in, as his moral philosophy continues to compel the attention of every serious thinker in the field. Clear, concise - and overwhelmingly convincing - Ralph Walker's stimulating, highly accessible guide spells out the power and renewed relevance of his thinking: a genuinely objective, absolute basis for a modern moral law.
The Great Philosophers:Marx
by Terry Eagleton'We are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity' Karl MarxFor Marx, freedom entailed release from commercial labour. In this highly engaging account, Eagleton outlines the relationship between production, labour and ownership which lie at the core of Marx's thinking. Marx's utopia was a place in which labour is increasingly automated, emancipating the wealth of sensuous individual development so that 'savouring a peach [is an aspect] of our self-actualisation as much as building dams or churning out coat-hangers'. Combining extracts from Marx's revolutionary philosophy, along with insightful analysis, this is the perfect guide to one of the world's greatest thinkers.
The Great Philosophers:Pascal (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Ben RogersPascal 1623-1662The moralist who advocated dressing up, the ascetic who liked a flutter, the devout Christian who lauded vanity, Pascal is a funnier, more ironic philosopher than his reputation as an anguished existentialist would suggest.Yet however irreverent the terms of his ironic project, its underlying impetus is both serious and profound. In this superb new introduction to the thinker and his thought, Ben Rogers demonstrates the deep wisdom of Pascal's defence of popular folly - a defence which he used to highlight the higher delusions of the learned.Setting the Pensées in the context of Pascal's life and philosophical career, Rogers reveals how their apparent frivolity underpins a fascinating, far-reaching and still challenging body of moral and political thought. His remarkable guide offers an eye-opening account of the work of a marvellous and much neglected thinker.
The Great Philosophers:Schopenhauer (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Michael TannerSchopenhauer 1788 - 1860Western philosophy's most profound and unrelenting pessimist, Schopenhauer hymned the miseries of human existence with a joylessness that was little short of lyrical. Yet he thrilled to the beauties of music and art.How did such deep bleakness and such sublime enthusiasm come to coincide in one man, one mind? Only by squaring these two sides of Schopenhauer can we truly hope to understand this most paradoxical - even perverse of thinkers. Only through his thoughts on Beauty can we apprehend his attitude towards Truth.The failure of later philosophers down the generations to resolve these apparent contradictions has seen Schopenhauer's thought unjustly marginalized and philosophy itself much poorer. Michael Tanner's enthralling introduction teases out the difficulties and unpicks the paradoxes to reveal the exhilarating coherence beneath. It amounts to nothing less than a rediscovery of one of Western tradition's greatest philosophers.
The Great Promise of Educational Technology: Citizenship and Education in a Globalized World (New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics)
by Dan MamlokThis book critically looks at the tensions between the promise to transform education through the use of digital technology and the tendency to utilize digital technology in instrumental and technical ways. The widespread use of digital technology has had a remarkable effect on almost every domain of human life. This technological change has caused governments, educational departments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to recognize the need to develop educational plans that would support the social and the cultural changes that have occurred with the ubiquitous permeation of digital technology into our everyday lives. This book challenges common assumptions regarding digital technology and education, through critical exploration of educational policies, interviews, and class observations in the US and Israel. In doing so, the author sheds light on the possibilities of advancing digital citizenship under current educational policies.
The Great Psychic Outdoors: Adventures in Low Fidelity
by Enrico MonacelliExplores the weird world of lo-fi music to investigate its revolutionary potential and its ability to subvert what we think music can do.Homemade records, tape-hiss worship and a taste for a very peculiar kind of psychedelia have carved themselves a weird niche in the contemporary musical landscape under the name of lo-fi.This genreless genre, characterized by poor recordings and rough sounds, spanning from the most extreme heavy metal to the sweetest ear-candies pop can offer, has become a solid presence in our collective sensibility. And yet, it has largely been neglected: this staunch refusal of anything hi-fi and hi-tech has fallen under the radar of the categories we use to analyse ourselves and our times.The Great Psychic Outdoors, dedicated to the most interesting and controversial artists in this movement, will rectify this injustice and vindicate the revolutionary potential of lo-fi music, engaging with this weird genre on its own terms and facing head on the contradictions and possibilities of this multi-faceted phenomenon. Confronting the aesthetic and conceptual stakes of this sonic craft, The Great Psychic Outdoors shows what lo-fi says about us, our lives under capitalism and the strange ways we cope with pain, madness and beauty.
The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic
by Paolo GerbaudoWhat comes after neoliberalism?In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, deficit spending and climate planning. This is the Great Recoil, the era when the neo-statist endopolitics of national sovereignty, economic protection and democratic control overrides the neoliberal exopolitics of free markets, labour flexibility and business opportunity. Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left, Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against redistributive demands, as proposed by the right&’s authoritarian protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the left&’s social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation.
The Great Reversal
by David TabachnickEvery day, we are presented with new technologies that can influence human thought and action, such as psychopharmaceuticals, new generation performance enhancing drugs, elective biotechnology, and gastric bypass surgery. Have we let technology go too far in this respect? In The Great Reversal, David Edward Tabachnick contends that this question may not be unique to contemporary society. Through an assessment of the great works of philosophy and politics, Tabachnick explores the largely unrecognized history of technology as an idea.The Great Reversal takes the reader back to Aristotle's ancient warning that humanity should never allow technical thinking to cloud our judgment about what makes for a good life. It then charts the path of how we began to relinquish our deeply rooted intellectual and practical capacities that used to allow us to understand and regulate the role of technologies in our lives. As the rise of technology threatens our very humanity, Tabachnick emphasizes that we still may have time to recover and develop these capacities - but we must first decide how far we want to allow technology to determine our existence and our future.
The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide
by Michael E. HobartIn their search for truth, contemporary religious believers and modern scientific investigators hold many values in common. But in their approaches, they express two fundamentally different conceptions of how to understand and represent the world. Michael E. Hobart looks for the origin of this difference in the work of Renaissance thinkers who invented a revolutionary mathematical system—relational numeracy. By creating meaning through numbers and abstract symbols rather than words, relational numeracy allowed inquisitive minds to vault beyond the constraints of language and explore the natural world with a fresh interpretive vision. The Great Rift is the first book to examine the religion-science divide through the history of information technology. Hobart follows numeracy as it emerged from the practical counting systems of merchants, the abstract notations of musicians, the linear perspective of artists, and the calendars and clocks of astronomers. As the technology of the alphabet and of mere counting gave way to abstract symbols, the earlier “thing-mathematics” metamorphosed into the relational mathematics of modern scientific investigation. Using these new information symbols, Galileo and his contemporaries mathematized motion and matter, separating the demonstrations of science from the linguistic logic of religious narration. Hobart locates the great rift between science and religion not in ideological disagreement but in advances in mathematics and symbolic representation that opened new windows onto nature. In so doing, he connects the cognitive breakthroughs of the past with intellectual debates ongoing in the twenty-first century.
The Great Society: 50 Years Later
by The Washington PostA stirring profile of our 36th president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who presided over one of the most tumultuous eras in our country’s history. Lyndon B. Johnson’s unprecedented and ambitious domestic vision in the 1960s changed the nation. It unraveled and restitched the very fabric of the American life. It knocked down racial barriers, provided health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and museums in cities across the country, and put seat belts and padded dashboards in every automobile. But it also carved the deep philosophical divide that has come to define the nation’s harsh politics. Half a century later, the policies of Lyndon B. Johnson continue to define politics and power in America. The Great Society: 50 Years Later is a series from the Washington Post that examines the legacy—and limits—of Johnson’s deeply humanistic, and profoundly revolutionary social agenda.
The Great Speckled Bird: Multicultural Politics and Education Policymaking
by Catherine Cornbleth Dexter WaughThis unique volume takes readers behind the scenes for an "insider/outsider" view of education policymaking in action. Two state-level case studies of social studies curriculum reform and textbook policy (California and New York) illustrate how curriculum decision making becomes an arena in which battles are fought over national values and priorities. Written by a New York education professor and a California journalist, the text offers a rare blend of academic and journalistic voices. The "great speckled bird" is the authors' counter-symbol to the bald eagle--a metaphor representing the racial-ethnic-cultural diversity that has characterized the U.S. since its beginnings and the multicultural reality of American society today. The text breaks new ground by focusing on the intersections of national debates and education policymaking. It situates the case studies within historical and contemporary cultural contexts--with particular attention to questions of power and knowledge control and how influence is exercised. By juxtaposing the contrasting cases of California and New York, the authors illustrate commonalities and differences in education policymaking goals and processes. By sharing stories of participants at and behind the scenes, policymaking comes alive rather than appearing to result from impersonal "forces" or "factors."
The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, the Lamrim Chenmo)
by Tsong-kha-paThe first volume of the 15th-century spiritual classic that condenses Buddhist teachings into one easy-to-follow meditation manualThe Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Tib. Lam rim chen mo) is one of the brightest jewels in the world&’s treasury of sacred literature. The author, Tsong-kha-pa, completed it in 1402, and it soon became one of the most renowned works of spiritual practice and philosophy in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. Because it condenses all the exoteric sūtra scriptures into a meditation manual that is easy to understand, scholars and practitioners rely on its authoritative presentation as a gateway that leads to a full understanding of the Buddha&’s teachings.Tsong-kha-pa took great pains to base his insights on classical Indian Buddhist literature, illustrating his points with classical citations as well as with sayings of the masters of the earlier Kadampa tradition. In this way the text demonstrates clearly how Tibetan Buddhism carefully preserved and developed the Indian Buddhist traditions.This first of three volumes covers all the practices that are prerequisite for developing the spirit of enlightenment (bodhicitta).
The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, the Lamrim Chenmo)
by Tsong-kha-paThe third volume of the 15th-century spiritual classic that condenses Buddhist teachings into one easy-to-follow meditation manualThe Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Tib. Lam rim chen mo) is one of the brightest jewels in the world&’s treasury of sacred literature. The author, Tsong-kha-pa, completed it in 1402, and it soon became one of the most renowned works of spiritual practice and philosophy in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. Because it condenses all the exoteric sūtra scriptures into a meditation manual that is easy to understand, scholars and practitioners rely on its authoritative presentation as a gateway that leads to a full understanding of the Buddha&’s teachings.Tsong-kha-pa took great pains to base his insights on classical Indian Buddhist literature, illustrating his points with classical citations as well as with sayings of the masters of the earlier Kadampa tradition. In this way the text demonstrates clearly how Tibetan Buddhism carefully preserved and developed the Indian Buddhist traditions.This first of three volumes covers all the practices that are prerequisite for developing the spirit of enlightenment (bodhicitta).
The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, the Lamrim Chenmo)
by Tsong-kha-paThe second volume of the 15th-century spiritual classic that condenses Buddhist teachings into one easy-to-follow meditation manualThe Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Tib. Lam rim chen mo) is one of the brightest jewels in the world&’s treasury of sacred literature. The author, Tsong-kha-pa, completed it in 1402, and it soon became one of the most renowned works of spiritual practice and philosophy in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. Because it condenses all the exoteric sūtra scriptures into a meditation manual that is easy to understand, scholars and practitioners rely on its authoritative presentation as a gateway that leads to a full understanding of the Buddha&’s teachings.Tsong-kha-pa took great pains to base his insights on classical Indian Buddhist literature, illustrating his points with classical citations as well as with sayings of the masters of the earlier Kadampa tradition. In this way the text demonstrates clearly how Tibetan Buddhism carefully preserved and developed the Indian Buddhist traditions.This first of three volumes covers all the practices that are prerequisite for developing the spirit of enlightenment (bodhicitta).
The Great War and the Death of God
by Charles A. O'ConnorA compelling analysis of how World War I spurred the rise of atheism and the subsequent effect on Western theology, philosophy, literature, and art. The catastrophic Great War left humanity in a world no longer trustworthy and reassuring but seemingly meaningless and indifferent. Instead of redressing humanity’s cosmic alienation, postwar Western culture abandoned its concern for cosmic meaning, lost its confidence in human reason, and enabled the scientific worldview of neo-Darwinian materialism to emerge and eventually dominate the Western mind. According to the proponents of that worldview, science is the only source of genuine truth, nature is the product of a blind evolutionary process, and reality at bottom is just physics and chemistry. Thus, God is dead and continued belief in a transcendently purposeful universe is intellectually indefensible and either disingenuous or delusional. By turning away from the eternal questions about the nature of reality, Western culture effectively ceded unwarranted credibility and prominence to neo-Darwinian materialism, including its recently strident New Atheism.“O’Connor revisits the 20th century’s journey from Nietzsche’s declaration of the ‘death of God’ to the rise of materialism as the dominant worldview of western intelligentsia. We live in a world that has largely expelled both mind and meaning from the citadels of serious intellectual pursuit, and O’Connor’s book is a fascinating and scholarly expedition into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of that troubling development.” —Carter Phipps, author of Evolutionaries“I found this topic to be top-rate. The book is well researched and conceived, nicely narrated and analyzed, and an original body of inquiry into a challenging, fascinating intellectual tradition.” —Ronald M. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of American History, Georgetown University