Author: Stephen Jay Gould File Type: pdf

Author: Lawrence Kramer File Type: pdf What can be done about the state of classical music? Lawrence Kramer asks in this elegant, sharply observed, and beautifully written extended essay. Classical music, whose demise has been predicted for at least a decade, has always had its staunch advocates, but in todays media-saturated world there are real concerns about its viability. Why Classical Music Still Matters takes a forthright approach by engaging both skeptics and music lovers alike. In seven highly original chapters, Why Classical Music Still Matters affirms the value of classical musicdefined as a body of nontheatrical music produced since the eighteenth century with the single aim of being listened toby revealing what its values are the specific beliefs, attitudes, and meanings that the music has supported in the past and which, Kramer believes, it can support in the future. Why Classical Music Still Matters also clears the air of old prejudices. Unlike other apologists, whose defense of the music often depends on arguments about the corrupting influence of popular culture, Kramer admits that classical music needs a broader, more up-to-date rationale. He succeeds in engaging the reader by putting into words musics complex relationship with individual human drives and larger social needs. In prose that is fresh, stimulating, and conversational, he explores the nature of subjectivity, the conquest of time and mortality, the harmonization of humanity and technology, the cultivation of attention, and the liberation of human energy.**

Author: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong File Type: pdf For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The neuroscience of morality is in its infancy, with the first brain imaging studies of moral development undertaken only in 2001.The contributors to volume 3 sample the best work in this very new field, discussing a variety of approaches, including functional imaging, lesion studies, abnormal psychology, and developmental neuroscience. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author(s) of the original essay. Topics include the neural basis of moral emotions and moral judgments as well as comparisons of normal adult moral judgments with those made by children, adolescents, and people with psychopathy, brain damage, and autism.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College.Contributors to volume 3 Abigail Baird, William Casebeer, Cordelia Fine, Nathan Fox, Uta Frith, Jordan Grafman, Joshua Greene, Catherine Hynes, Fatima Azavedo Ignacio, Richard Joyce, Jerome Kagan, Leonard Katz, Kent Kiehl, Jeanette Kennett, Melanie Killen, Daniel Lapsley, Heidi Maibom, Victoria McGeer, John Mikhail, Jorge Moll, Shaun Nichols, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Adina Roskies, Jana Schaich Borg, Katrina Sifferd, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Smith, Mark Timmons, Frederick de Vignemont, Paul Whalen, Roland Zahn

Author: Margaret Atwood File Type: pdf Amazon.com ReviewIn Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than fictional science (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fools paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a cliched landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing. A dangerous genius, Crake is the books most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic pleeblands.) Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crakes experiments in bioengineering cause humanitys shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowmans broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the worlds destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.caFrom Publishers WeeklyAtwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaids Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was Crake, the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmys mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryxs story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crakes affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex pixie in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. Hes procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself the Snowman, after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species. Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize Margaret Atwoods new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it.This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwoods riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crakes high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than fictional science (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fools paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart. While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a cliched landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing. A dangerous genius, Crake is the books most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic pleeblands.) Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crakes experiments in bioengineering cause humanitys shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowmans broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the worlds destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca