Author: Nigel Cawthorne File Type: epub Biography of British Prime Minister Theresa May May represents a different kind of politician a calm headmistress in a chamber full of over-excitable public schoolboys.
Author: Nate Jones
File Type: pdf
In November 1983, Soviet nuclear forces went on high alert. After months nervously watching increasingly assertive NATO military posturing, Soviet intelligence agencies in Western Europe received flash telegrams reporting alarming activity on U.S. bases. In response, the Soviets began planning for a countdown to a nuclear first strike by NATO on Eastern Europe. And then Able Archer 83, a vast NATO war game exercise that modeled a Soviet attack on NATO allies, ended.What the West didnt know at the time was that the Soviets thought Operation Able Archer 83 was real and were actively preparing for a surprise missile attack from NATO. This close scrape with Armageddon was largely unknown until last October when the U.S. government released a ninety-four-page presidential analysis of Able Archer that the National Security Archive had spent over a decade trying to declassify. Able Archer 83 is based upon more than a thousand pages of declassified documents that archive staffer Nate Jones has pried loose from several U.S. government agencies and British archives, as well as from formerly classified Soviet Politburo and KGB files, vividly recreating the atmosphere that nearly unleashed nuclear war.
Author: Newell Ann van Auken
File Type: pdf
Shows how the text evolved from a non-narrative historical record into a Confucian classic. The Spring and Autumn is among the earliest surviving Chinese historical records, covering the period 722479 BCE. It is a curious text the canonical interpretation claims that it was composed by Confucius and embodies his moral judgments, but this view appears to be contradicted by the brief and dispassionate records themselves. Newell Ann Van Auken addresses this puzzling discrepancy through an examination of early interpretations of the Spring and Autumn, and uncovers a crucial missing link in two sets of commentarial remarks embedded in the Zuo Tradition. These embedded commentaries do not seek moral judgments in the Spring and Autumn, but instead interpret its records as produced by a historiographical tradition that was governed by rules related to hierarchy and ritual practice. Van Aukens exploration of the Zuo Tradition and other early commentaries sheds light on the transformation of the Spring and Autumn from a simple, non-narrative historical record into a Confucian classic.
Author: Steven A. Miller
File Type: pdf
American pragmatism has always had at its heart a focus on questions of communities and ethics. This book explores the interrelated work of three thinkers influenced by the pragmatist tradition Josiah Royce, Wilfrid Sellars, and Richard Rorty. These thinkers work spanned the range of twentieth-century philosophy, both historically and conceptually, but all had common concerns about how morality functions and what we can hope for in our interactions with others. Steven Miller argues that Royce, Sellars, and Rorty form a traditional line of inheritance, with the thought of each developing upon the best insights of the ones prior. Furthermore, he shows how three divergent views about the function, possibilities, and limits of moral community coalesce into a key narrative about how best we can work with and for other people, as we strive to come to think of widely different others as somehow being morally considerable as one of us. **Review Wea word both inclusive and exclusive is the very basis of the notion of community. It is a word that means that one never has to go it solely alone. But its also a warning to outsiders you dont belong with us. Miller leads us carefully along the boundaries of the word and allows us to see both the promise and peril of community. Millers account of Royce, Sellars and Rorty is engaging and scrupulous, a succinct and convincing appeal to reconsider the we in American intellectual history. John Kaag, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA * hr Steven Millers excellent book methodically reconstructs and explores, with depth and clarity and feeling, one of the most important philosophical ideas in the American philosophical tradition, from its early formulation in Josiah Royce and C. S. Peirce, to its mid-twentieth century analytic articulation in Wilfrid Sellars, to its contemporary pragmatist vision in the wide-ranging writings of Richard Rorty namely, that we understand ourselves best when we understand ourselves as loyal members of a unified community of we-saying fellow suffers joined together in our many projects for the betterment of humanity. Jerold Abrams, Creighton University About the Author Steven A. Miller is a fellow with the Institute for American Thought at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as well as an adjunct scholar at Ripon College in Ripon, WI. His work has previously appeared in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Administration and Society, and the Journal of Social Philosophy.
Author: Thomas Oberlies
File Type: pdf
The two great epics of (old) India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are written in a language, which differs from so-called classical Sanskrit in many details. Both texts still are of an enormous importance in India and other countries. Because of this, a grammar describing all the different characteristics of epic Sanskrit has been missed until now. The Grammar of Epic Sanskrit will now close this gap. **
Author: James Randi
File Type: epub
James Randi, the celebrated magician, has written a damning indictment of the faith-healing practices of the leading televangelists and others who claim divine healing powers. Randi and his team of researchers attended scores of miracle services and often were pronounced healed of the nonexistent illnesses they claimed. They viewed first-hand the tragedies resulting from the wide-spread belief that faith healing can cure every conceivable disease. The ministries, they discovered, were rife with deception, chicanery, and often outright fraud. Self-annointed ministers of God convince the gullible that they have been healed - and that they should pay for the service. The Faith Healers examines in depth the reasons for belief in faith healing and the catastrophic results for the victims of these hoaxes. Included in Randis book are profiles of a highly profitable psychic dentist, and the Vatican-approved wizard.**
Author: Cristiano Antonelli
File Type: epub
The Routledge Handbook of the Economics of Knowledge provides a comprehensive framework to integrate the advancements over the last 20 years in the analysis of technological knowledge as an economic good, and in the static and dynamic characteristics of its generation process. There is a growing consensus in the field of economics that knowledge, technological knowledge in particular, is one of the most relevant resources of wealth, yet it is one of the most difficult and complex activities to understand or even to conceptualize. The economics of knowledge is an emerging field that explores the generation, exploitation, and dissemination of technological knowledge. Technological knowledge cannot any longer be regarded as a homogenous good that stems from standardized generation processes. Quite the opposite, technological knowledge appears more and more to be a basket of heterogeneous items, resources, and even experiences. All of these sources, which are both internal and external to the firm, are complementary, as is the interplay between a bottom-up and top-down generation processes. In this context, the interactions between the public research system, private research laboratories, and various networks of learning processes, within and among firms, play a major role in the creation of technological knowledge. In this Handbook special attention is given to the relationship among technological knowledge and both upstream scientific knowledge and related downstream resources. By addressing the antecedents and consequences of technological knowledge from both an upstream and downstream perspective, this Handbook will become an indispensable tool for scholars and practitioners aiming to master the generation and the use of technological knowledge. **Review Libraries supporting economic research, knowledge management, andor entrepreneurship programs should definitely consider this book for their collections. The handbook is particularly well suited for scholars and practitioners wishing to master the generation and use of technological knowledge. Summing Up Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. - V. Forrestal, The College of Staten Island, CHOICE, September 2015 About the Author Cristiano Antonelli is Professor of Economics at the Univeristy of Torino where he is the President of the School of Economics and Statistics and a Fellow of the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy. hr Albert N. Link is Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.
Author: Alan Jasanoff
File Type: epub
A pioneering neuroscientist argues that we are more than our brains To many, the brain is the seat of personal identity and autonomy. But the way we talk about the brain is often rooted more in mystical conceptions of the soul than in scientific fact. This blinds us to the physical realities of mental function. We ignore bodily influences on our psychology, from chemicals in the blood to bacteria in the gut, and overlook the ways that the environment affects our behavior, via factors varying from subconscious sights and sounds to the weather. As a result, we alternately overestimate our capacity for free will or equate brains to inorganic machines like computers. But a brain is neither a soul nor an electrical network it is a bodily organ, and it cannot be separated from its surroundings. Our selves arent just inside our heads--theyre spread throughout our bodies and beyond. Only once we come to terms with this can we grasp the true nature of our humanity. **Review This philosophical puzzle has been posed, in various forms, for centuries and is one of the starting points for Alan Jasanoffs elegant and spirited attack on what he calls our cerebral mystique ... A lucid primer on current brain science that takes the form of a passionate warning about its limitations.**Wall Street Journal**** In this powerful treatise, neurological engineer Alan Jasanoff issues a corrective to the cerebral mystique.**Nature**** The book features a learned and experienced author who has the ability to take complex concepts of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology and explain them in easy to understand descriptions. The intelligent reader interested in 21st century understanding of the human brain and particularly those who may be involved in mental or physical health will find this book useful and interesting.**The New York Journal of Books **** [Jasanoffs] clear, lively writing reveals how our emotions, such as the fight-or-flight response and the suite of thoughts and actions associated with stress, provide strong evidence for a brain-body connection.**Science News**** Taking the brain off of its pedestal, Jasanoff offers an exhaustive, comprehensible, and at times playful (e.g., why do humans now study brains instead of eat them?) look at the brain. Appropriate for both neuroscientists as well as general readers interested in gaining a better understanding of this vital organ.**Library Journal**** Jasanoff writes with admirable clarity as he argues that the modern tendency of neuroscience to take a brain-centered view that overlooks external sources of behavior can lead to epistemological dead ends.**Kirkus Reviews**** Neuroscientist Alan Jasanoff has identified a widespread Brain Mystique--a collection of folk theories about the brain that are scientifically false. In The Biological Mind, Jasanoff dispels these theories while leading the reader on an engaging tour of real neuroscience, from the brain to the body to the social and physical world.*George Lakoff, coauthor of *The Neural Mind**** Any book that opens with a historical account of the nutritional merits of eating animal brains and concludes with an imaginary account of the authors brain being removed from his body to take up residence in a vat is certainly worth a read, and Alan Jasanoffs The Biological Mind is precisely that. Thought-provoking and enjoyable, this book will provide readers with a new conception of who they are.*Robert Whitaker, author of *Anatomy of an Epidemic**** The dark side of all the wonderful new neurotechnology at researchers fingertips is that too many experts are now over-simplifying mental illness, reducing it to mere descriptions of brain physiology. Alan Jasanoff does an outstanding job of bringing much needed nuance, humanity, and compassion to the way we think about mental illness and the brain.*Sally Satel, M.D., Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine*** Alan Jasanoffs The Biological Mind provides a provocative and accessible neuroscientific defense of the extended mind thesis--the idea that we are much more than our brains, and even the bodies in which they are normally housed. By the conclusion, readers will be left wondering whether Jasanoffs findings suggest something even more radical that our brains are actually platforms for launching any number of versions of who we really are.*Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick and author of *Humanity 2.0**** About the Author Alan Jasanoff is the award-winning director of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering. He lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Author: Hans Ulrich Vogel
File Type: pdf
In Marco Polo was in China Hans Ulrich Vogel offers an innovative look at the highly complex topics of currencies, salt production and taxes, commercial levies and other kinds of revenue as well as the administrative geography of the Mongol Yuan empire. The author s rigorous analysis of Chinese sources and all the important Marco Polo manuscripts as well as his thorough scrutiny of Japanese, Chinese and Western scholarship show that the fascinating information contained in Le devisament dou monde agrees almost pefectly with that we find in Chinese sources, the latter only available long after Marco Polo s stay in China. Hence, the author concludes that, despite the doubts that have been raised, the Venetian was indeed in Khubilai Khan s realm.
Author: Lorraine Daston
File Type: pdf
Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk Object Lessons from Art and Science (both Zone Books). Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einsteins Clocks, Poincares Maps Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999). **