Author: Ernest Gellner File Type: pdf The essays in this volume gather together Gellners thinking on the connection between philosophy and life and they approach the topic from a number of directions philosophy of morals, history of ideas, a discussion of individuals including R. G. Collingwood, Noam Chomsky, Piaget and Eysenck and discussions on the setting of philosophy in the general culture of England and America. Ernest Gellner made major contributions in very diverse fields, notably philosophy and social anthropology. His attacks on the orthodoxies of his time made it difficult for him to be fully accepted into either of these academic communities, but that suited him well enough he seemed to enjoy leading a one-man crusade for critical rationalism, defending enlightenment universalism against the rising tides of idealism and relativism. His influence spread far beyond social anthropology the fierce tone of the polemics of the 1950s against Oxford philosophers was repeated during the 1990s in tangles in the TLS with the literary critic Edward Said. For Gellner the issues were essentially the same the vital need to refute the claim that ideas lead the world.

Author: Kaspar Thormod File Type: pdf In Artistic Reconfigurations of Rome Kaspar Thormod examines how visions of Rome manifest themselves in artworks produced by international artists who have stayed at the citys foreign academies. Structured as an alternative guide to Rome, the book represents an interdisciplinary approach to creating a dynamic visual history that brings into view facets of the citys diverse contemporary character. Thormod demonstrates that when artists successfully reconfigure Rome they provide us with visions that, being anchored in a present, undermine the connotations of permanence and immovability that cling to the Eternal City epithet. Looking at the work of these artists, the reader is invited to engage critically with the question what is Rome today? or perhaps better what can Rome be?

Author: Edward A. Hagan File Type: pdf Goodbye Yeats and ONeill is a reading of one or two books recently written by the following major authors Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin, John McGahern, William Trevor, Seamus Deane, Nuala OFaolain, Patrick McCabe, Colum McCann, Nick Laird, Gerry Adams, Claire Boylan, Frank McCourt, Tim OBrien, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Alice McDermott, Edward J. Delaney, Beth Lordan, William Kennedy, Thomas Kelly, and Mary Gordon. The study argues that farce has been a major mode of recent Irish and Irish-American fiction and memoir-a primary indicator of the state of both Irish and Irish-American cultures in the early twenty-first century.**

Author: Douglas Hofstadter File Type: pdf Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prizewinning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition. We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brains job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories. Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, I undressed the banana!? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, Exactly the same thing happened to me! when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friends remark triggers the offhand reply, Thats just sour grapes? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea? The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-makingthe meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights. Like Godel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant corethe incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiencesthis book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking. **