Author: Jonathan Sheehan File Type: pdf Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systemsnatural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and otherswhose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the worlds disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effectbut with them also a new ability to imagine the worlds orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture. **Review Wide ranging, with substantial discussions of Bayle, Defoe, Locke, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Newton, Pope, Rousseau, and Vico, among others, including some lesser-known figures. . . . Recommended. (Choice) A fascinating exploration of the proliferating logics of self-organization across various Enlightenment discourses, ranging from metaphysics and political economy to botany, mathematics, and epistemology. (Immanent Frame) Even if it was not his original intention, Marx . . . signaled the existence of a manifold phenomenoneconomic theology. Recovering its eighteenth-century history demands the same critical rigor that Wahrman and Sheehan so admirably employ in their survey of self-organization. (Modern Intellectual History) The key concept [of self-organization] develops a broad and enlightening link in the study between such disparate discursive fields as psychology, biology, mathematics and probability theory, political theory, and financial economics. . . . A detailed and thoughtfully structured work. (Merkur) Jonathan Sheehan is a gifted intellectual historian Dror Wahrman, an accomplished cultural historian. They have combined their talents and approaches here to achieve one of the richest recent books on the origins of how we moderns reason. (New Rambler) The deep research and the breadth of learning on display in Invisible Hands are impressive. . . . Sheehan and Wahrman have done a great service by identifying a central topos and a veritable state of mind in eighteenth-century European life. Not only specialists of the eighteenth century but all historians of science and math, economic historians, and specialists of moral philosophy will reap rewards from this intelligent book. (American Historical Review) Invisible Hands is a landmark piece of work, a brilliant excavation of eighteenth-century patterns of thought. Sheehan and Wahrman demonstrate in a virtuoso manner that eighteenth-century thinkers came to discern the same fundamental quality of self-organization at work in many different systems. The authors often wax lyrical, beautifully so, in their exploration of their topic, and do not shy away from posing questions of profound philosophical import. This book will cause a stir. (David A. Bell, Princeton University) Sheehan and Wahrman offer exciting insights into the discourses of order and self-organization, which informed such disparate domains as the emerging life sciences, concepts of human cognition, politics, and economics. The reader is skillfully guided on a complex journey of discovery, at times through arcane archives, which are opened up for new and creative uses. Enjoyably witty, this is a most engaging read for anybody interested in the intersections of intellectual and cultural history. (Dorothea E. von Mucke, Columbia University) Free markets non-linear systems chaotic dynamics our world seems always at the mercy of uncertainty but still mysteriously orderly. Sheehan and Wahrman ingeniously locate the origins of our anxieties about self-organization in the busy, bruising world of the early Enlightenment. Invisible Hands is itself something of a miracle of organization, drawing together the histories of theology and botany, political economy and epistemology, mechanics and medicine, into an unsettling but strangely satisfying whole. (David Armitage, Harvard University) About the Author Jonathan Sheehan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Dror Wahrman is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana UniversityBloomington, as well as the Vigevani Chair in European Studies and dean of humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of several books, including Mr. Colliers Letter Racks A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age and The Making of the Modern Self Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England.

Author: Ginger Gorman File Type: epub In 2013, journalist Ginger Gorman was trolled online. She received scores of hateful tweets, including a death threat. A picture of Ginger heavily pregnant alongside her husband and two-and-half year old daughter appeared on a fascist website. Understandably she was terrified, but once the attack subsided, she found herself curious. Who were these trolls? How and why did they coordinate such an attack? And how does someone fight back against a troll?Over the next five years Gorman spoke to psychologists, trolling victims, law enforcement, academics and, most importantly, the trolls themselves, embedding herself into their online communities and their psyches in ways she had never anticipated. What she discovered was both profoundly shocking and fascinating. Syndicates of highly organised predator trolls across the globe systematically set out to disrupt and disturb. Some want to highlight the medias alleged left-wing bias, some want to bring down capitalism, and some just want to have fun. Even if it means destroying someones life...An intense and compelling read, Troll Hunting is an important window into not just the mindset and motivation of trolls, but the history of this kind of aberrant behaviour. Ginger Gorman has gained unprecedented access to trolls, even formed strange and enduring relationships with them, and her comprehensive investigation into what makes them tick has given us a brilliant book that is impossible to put down.

Author: John Pierson File Type: pdf The legendary figure who launched the careers of Spike Lee, Michael Moore, and Richard Linklater offers a no-holds-barred look at the deals and details that propel an indie film from a dream to distribution.**

Author: John D. Cox File Type: pdf As scientists carefully search for clues in the sun and storm patterns from our distant, past, they are gradually writing a new history of Earths climate. Layers extracted from cores drilled into glaciers and ice sheets, sediments collected from the shores of lakes and oceans, and growth rings exposed in ancient corals and trees all tell the same surprising story. It is now apparent that alterations in our climate can happen quickly and dramatically. Physical evidence reveals that centuries of slow, creeping climate variations have actually been punctuated by far more rapid changes. While this new paradigm represents a significant shift in our picture of Earths past, the real question is what it means for our future. Many researchers are now quietly abandoning the traditional vision of a long, slow waltz of slumbering ice ages and more temperate periods of interglacial warming. While theyve long recognized the threats posed by global warming, they must now consider that the natural behavior of our climate is perhaps a greater threat than wed imagined. And though there is no need for immediate alarm, the fact that changes in our climate can happen much more quickly than wed originally thought--perhaps in the course of a human lifetime--makes it clear that science has a lot of questions to answer in this area. What are the mechanisms for triggering a significant climate change? In what ways should we expect this change to manifest itself? When will it likely happen? Climate Crash seeks to answer these questions, breaking the story of rapid climate change to general public that is already intensely curious about what science has to say on the topic.From BooklistStarred Review Several good recent books, such as Richard B. Alleys Two-Mile Time Machine (2000) and Spencer R. Wearts Discovery of Global Warming(2003), have considered various aspects of radical climate change. Coxs overview covers those books main topics and others. Each chapter has a particular focus. The first limns the original field research on polar ice, which occurred as part of a 1930 expedition to Greenland directed by the father of plate tectonics, Albert Wegener, who died, a victim of the cold, during it. The second concerns the 1930s discovery of a severe cold period directly preceding the last 12,800 years of the Holocene epoch. Succeeding chapters follow different avenues of subsequent research and theory, which together paint a dauntingly complex portrait of climate change. Abrupt shifts are common, and civilizations have perished during geologically short but deadly cold spells. The two chapters on the plethora of theories and of possible climatological causative factors make the most formidable reading, but the last chapter, Surprises, which cites evidence indicative of an approaching cold-shift and cautions that not enough is known to say whether human action, such as artificially increasing greenhouse gases, could push-start it, is the most provocative. Alleys book had a similarly cautionary conclusion and was just as well written, but Coxs more summary work is the book to read first and to circulate to the most readers. Ray Olson American Library Association. ltReviewEvidence for abrupt climate change is readily apparent in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica... global climate is moving in a direction that makes abrupt climate change more probable... and the consequences of ignoring this may be large.