This book presents a readable introduction to the lives and times of the great philosophers. It takes us from the inception of Western society Plato's Athens to when the power of Marxism had captured one third of the world. Lavine discusses Western philosophers in terms of the historical and intellectual environment which influenced them, and connects their lasting ideas to the public and private choices we face in America today. The book formed the basis for the PBS television series of the same name.--From publisher description.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a stunning revision of our last great period of idealism, the 1960s, with burning relevance for our contemporary challenges. "Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders." --Alan Greenspan Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution while opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. In the 1960s, Americans sought the same goals many seek now: an end to poverty, higher standards of living for the middle class, a better environment and more access to health care and education. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus private sector advancement. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. Yet the targets of our idealism proved elusive. What's more, Johnson's and Nixon's programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. Ironically, Shlaes argues, the costs of entitlement commitments made a half century ago preclude the very reforms that Americans will need in coming decades. In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period, from U.S. Presidents to the visionary UAW leader Walter Reuther, the founders of Intel, and Federal Reserve chairmen William McChesney Martin and Arthur Burns. Great Society casts new light on other figures too, from Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to the socialist Michael Harrington and the protest movement leader Tom Hayden. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes upends the traditional narrative of the era, providing a damning indictment of the consequences of thoughtless idealism with striking relevance for today. Great Society captures a dramatic contest with lessons both dark and bright for our own time.

"This furious, trenchant, and audacious series of interrelated dialogues and letters takes a searing look at not only the legacy of psychotherapy, but also practically every aspect of contemporary living--from sexuality to politics, media, the environment, and life in the city. James Hillman--controversial renegade Jungian psychologist, the man Robert Bly has called "the most lively and original psychologist we've had in America since William James"--joins with Michael Ventura--cutting-edge columnist for the L.A. Weekly--to shatter many of our current beliefs about our lives, the psyche, and society. Unrestrained, freewheeling, and brilliant, these two intellectual wild men take chances, break rules, and run red lights to strike at the very core of our shibboleths and perceptions."--Publisher description.

Renowned interviewer David Barsamian showcases his unique access to Chomky's thinking on a number of topics of contemporary and historical import. Chomsky offers insights into the institutions that shape the public mind in the service of power and profit. In an interview conducted after the important November 1999 "Battle in Seattle," Chomsky discusses prospects for building a movement to challenge corporate domination of the media, the environment, and even our private lives. Whether discussing U.S. military escalation in Colombia, attacks on Social Security, or growing inequality worldwide, Chomsky shows how ordinary people, if they work together, have the power to make meaningful change. -- Book Cover

Based partly on interviews with scientists around the world, Achel discusses the latest developments in cosmology. Using Einstein and his theories to explain links between relativity and cosmology via Einstein's cosmological constant, the author reveals fundamental truths about our larger environment.

Scientists act within a social context and from a philosophical perspective that is inherently political. Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides. The Dialectical Biologist explores this political nature of scientific inquiry, advancing its argument within the framework of Marxist dialectic. These essays stress the concepts of continual change and codetermination between organism and environment, part and whole, structure and process, science and politics. Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

One of our most brilliant evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin has also been a leading critic of those-scientists and non-scientists alike-who would misuse the science to which he has contributed so much. In The Triple Helix , Lewontin the scientist and Lewontin the critic come together to provide a concise, accessible account of what his work has taught him about biology and about its relevance to human affairs. In the process, he exposes some of the common and troubling misconceptions that misdirect and stall our understanding of biology and evolution. The central message of this book is that we will never fully understand living things if we continue to think of genes, organisms, and environments as separate entities, each with its distinct role to play in the history and operation of organic processes. Here Lewontin shows that an organism is a unique consequence of both genes and environment, of both internal and external features. Rejecting the notion that genes determine the organism, which then adapts to the environment, he explains that organisms, influenced in their development by their circumstances, in turn create, modify, and choose the environment in which they live. The Triple Helix is vintage Lewontin: brilliant, eloquent, passionate, and deeply critical. But it is neither a manifesto for a radical new methodology nor a brief for a new theory. It is instead a primer on the complexity of biological processes, a reminder to all of us that living things are never as simple as they may seem.

"Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying "blah blah blah." Something has to change--but what, and how? In What's Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies--progressive, socialist, and revolutionary--that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What's Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns." -- Provided by publisher.

"What is time? This question has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists for thousands of years. Why does time seem to speed up with age? What is its connection with memory, anticipation, and sleep cycles? Award-winning author and mathematician Joseph Mazur provides an engaging exploration of how the understanding of time has evolved throughout human history and offers a compelling new vision, submitting that time lives within us. Our cells, he notes, have a temporal awareness, guided by environmental cues in sync with patterns of social interaction. Readers learn that, as a consequence of time's personal nature, a forty-eight-hour journey on the Space Shuttle can feel shorter than a six-hour trip on the Soyuz capsule, that the Amondawa of the Amazon do not have ages, and that time speeds up with fever and slows down when we feel in danger. With a narrative punctuated by personal stories of time's effects on truck drivers, Olympic racers, prisoners, and clockmakers, Mazur's journey is filled with fascinating insights into how our technologies, our bodies, and our attitudes can change our perceptions. Ultimately, time reveals itself as something that rides on the rhythms of our minds. 'The Clock Mirage' presents an innovative perspective that will force us to rethink our relationship with time, and how best to use it"--Jacket.

Scientists act within a social context and from a philosophical perspective that is inherently political. Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides. The Dialectical Biologist explores this political nature of scientific inquiry, advancing its argument within the framework of Marxist dialectic. These essays stress the concepts of continual change and codetermination between organism and environment, part and whole, structure and process, science and politics. Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

Preface Introduction Chapter 1 Meaning and Mentalism Fodor and Chomsky Three Reasons Why Mentalism Can't Be Right 1 Meaning Is Holistic 2 Meaning Is in Part a Normative Notion 3 Our Concepts Depend on Our Physical and Social Environment in a Way That Evolution (Which Was Com ... Connections between 1, 2, and 3 Chapter 2 Meaning, Other People, and the World The Division of Linguistic Labor Elms, Beeches, and Searle The Contribution of the Environment An Indexical Component Other Natural Kinds Reference and Theory Change Meaning and "Mental Representation" Chapter 3 Fodor and Block on "Narrow Content" Narrow Content as a "Function of Observable Properties" "Narrow Content" and "Conceptual Role" Concluding Remarks Chapter 4 Are There Such Things as Reference and Truth? Why "Folk Psychology" and Not "Folk Logic"? Disquotation, Anyone? The "Semantical Conception" of Truth Disquotation as Disappearance Chapter 5 Why Functionalism Didn't Work Sociofunctionalism What "In Principle" Means Here The Single-Computational-State Version of Functionalism Equivalence Surveying Rationality Chapter 6 Other Forms of Functionalism David Lewis and I Lewis's Theory Further Examined Conclusion Chapter 7 A Sketch of an Alternative Picture Objectivity and Conceptual Relativity Internal Realism as an Alternative Picture My Present Diagnosis of the "Functionalism" Issue Appendix Notes Author Index

"What is the right thing to do? Answers might come in the form of responses to particular ethical controversies - abortion, capital punishment, what to do about world hunger. Or they might focus on whether ethical judgements are rooted in universal principles; compassionate interpersonal connection; attempts to create the most happiness and least suffering; obedience to God; or the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment"--

This ambitious book is about a way of building that for centuries dominated the making of monumental architecture – yet now not only is it lost as practice, but knowledge of its very existence is consigned to oblivion. In pre-modern Europe, the architect built not just with imagination, brick and mortar, but with time, using vast quantities of duration to erect monumental buildings that otherwise would have been impossible. Not mere medieval muddling-through, this entailed a sophisticated set of norms and practices. Virtually all the great cathedrals of France and the rest of Europe were built under this regime, here given the name ‘Building-in-Time’. In particular, the major works of pre-modern Italy, from the Pisa cathedral group to the cathedrals of Milan,Venice and Siena, and from the monuments of fourteenth-century Florence to the new St Peter’s – the apotheosis of the practice – are thus cast in an entirely new light. Even as ‘Building-in-Time’ was flourishing, the fifteenth-century Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti proposed a new temporal regime whereby time would ideally be excluded from the making of architecture (‘Building-outside-Time’). Planning and building, which had formed one fluid, imbricated process, were to be sharply divided, and the change that always came with time excluded from architectural facture. Ironically, it was Brunelleschi, as creator of the cupola of Florence cathedral and one of the supreme practitioners of Building-in-Time, who was the lynchpin of Alberti’s turn to the arts in the mid-1430s. That he arrived in Florence just at the moment Brunelleschi’s dome was being completed was crucial to Alberti’s subsequent career in visual culture. Yet his relationship to Brunelleschi was conflicted; first praising and attaching himself to Brunelleschi, later Alberti silently sought to banish him from history’s central stage. In telling this story, Marvin Trachtenberg rewrites the history of medieval and Renaissance architecture in Italy and recasts the turn to modernity in new terms, those of temporality and its role in architectural theory and practice. Recovering this lost element of the deep architectural past allows us also to see the present in a new way: that temporality is not any neutral or secondary factor in modern architecture culture, but an epistemic condition that silently affects all production and experience of the built environment.

We often think of science as continuously advancing. In this collection of essays, five world-renowned writers explore obscure and neglected episodes in the history of science which suggest instead that the process of understanding the significance of scientific discoveries can be erratic, contradictory, even irrational. Jonathan Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Daniel Kevles show how promising new ideas may at first fail to be noticed or accepted, and then, years after they have been dismissed or forgotten, are recognized in a different form as important. R.C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould discuss the ways that words and images used by scientists and popularizers alike, from the murals on the walls of natural history museums to such ubiquitous terms as "adaptation" and "environment," reflect serious and often unacknowledged distortions in the way we conceive of both individual organisms and the natural history of the world. These essays demonstrate that science is, in the words of Oliver Sacks, "a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past, but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhood."

Hang on for a Wild Journey through the Political and Spiritual Adventures of the Baby-Boom Generation Join Wes "Scoop" Nisker as he takes us on a hilarious, wild ride through the heyday of the Beats and the Hippies and the birth of the modern environmental movement, and the surge of Buddhism in the West.

First published in 1992, The Way is Edward Goldsmith's magnum opus. In it, he proposes that the stability and integrity of humans depend on the preservation of the balance of natural systems surrounding the individual―family, community, society, ecosystem, and the ecosphere itself. Portraying life processes and ecological thinking as holistic, Goldsmith calls for a paradigm shift away from the reductionist approach of modern science. The basic belief in the whole was at the heart of the worldview of primal, earth-oriented societies, as manifested by the Tao of the ancient Chinese, the R'ta of Vedic India, the Asha of the Avestas, and the Sedaq of the tribal Hebrews. The Way was the path taken to maintain the critical order of the cosmos. Echoing the way of traditional cultures, Goldsmith presents an all-embracing, coherent worldview that promotes more harmonious and sustainable practices capable of satisfying real biological, social, ecological, and spiritual needs.

"The newest addition to John Brockman's Edge.org series explores life itself, bringing together the world's leading biologists, geneticists, and evolutionary theorists -- including Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, J. Craig Venter, and Freeman Dyson. Scientists' understanding of life is progressing more rapidly than at any point in human history, from the extraordinary decoding of DNA to the controversial emergence of biotechnology. Featuring pioneering biologists, geneticists, physicists, and science writers, Life explains just how far we've come -- and takes a brilliantly educated guess at where we're heading. Richard Dawkins and J. Craig Venter compare genes to digital information, and sketch the frontiers of genomic research. Edward O. Wilson reveals what ants can teach us about building a superorganism -- and, in turn, about how cells build an organism. Elsewhere, David Haig reports new findings on how mothers and fathers individually influence the human genome, while Kary Mullis covers cutting edge treatments for dangerous viruses. And there's much more in this fascinating volume. We may never have all the answers. But the thinkers collected in Life are asking questions that will keep us dreaming for generations."--provided by Amazon.com.

The bestselling philosopher's unforgettable exploration of the true meaning of life on earth, now in paperback for the first time. What is the purpose of life on earth? In An Unknown World , philosopher Jacob Needleman frames man's role on the planet in a completely new and fresh way, moving beyond the usual environmental concerns to reveal how the care and maintenance of a world is something vital and basic to our existence as authentic human beings. "Striking . . . takes some really original positions on topics that have become run into the ground by the same discussions and same assumptions." --Ken Wilbur "His lively prose, storytelling skills and lucid insights draw us into an animated conversation with a brilliant teacher." -- Publishers Weekly

Without of course adopting a Platonic metaphysics, the eighteenth-century philosophes were Grecophiles who regarded the Athenian philosophers as their intellectual forbearers and mentors. So powerful was their identification with c1assification that ancient ideas were taken as keys to the design of the modem world, but usually the ideas were taken separately and as divided from their systematic context. The power of number was an idea the En lightenment thinkers deployed with their legendary passion and vigor, particularly as an instrument for social reconstruction. It is no exaggemtion to say that the role of quantities in contemporary social scientific theorizing cannot be understood with any depth absent a recollection of the philosophes' axial development of the notion of quantification. It is a commonplace that for the philosophes progress required releasing human abilities to have power over nature. Aprerequisite for this power was knowledge of the underlying causes of natural events, knowledge that required quantitative precision. Enlightenment thinkers were sufficiently aware of themselves as products of their time to appreciate the importance of a liberal social environment to the knowledge enterprise; the supposition that the reverse is also the case, that enhanced knowledge could advance social conditions, came easily.

For more than forty years, the American government has struggled with the challenge of maintaining useful relations with a special breed of regime: one whose rulers profess a community of interests with the United States while they rule through authoritarian means. Relationships with such "friendly tyrants" almost invariably generate tensions between the need for prudent security strategies and the ideal of promoting liberty and human rights worldwide. The Devil and Uncle Sam: A User's Guide to the Friendly Tyrants Dilemma distills the policy lessons of over four decades and offers practical approaches to negotiating these obstinate ambiguities of contemporary political life.This User's Guide brings together a team of eminent authors with diverse talents and experience to present a comparative study of the Friendly Tyrants phenomenon in recent history and to devise a systematic set of guidelines for dealing with it. The book is organized around ten essential maxims (Beware Dependence, Be Nimble, Promote Democracy, Chastise with Care, Define Goals, Know the Country, Think It Through, Coordinate Policy, Hedge Bets, Plan for Crises) and a larger number of specific Do's and Don'ts.The Devil and Uncle Sam draws richly upon historical examples to illustrate general principles that will prove invaluable to policymakers and political analysts. The Persian Gulf*War has shown that the Friendly Tyrants problem is still with us, even in the post-Cold War environment. The authors' understanding of past patterns yields insights that should help to prevent the preventable. While new situations will create possibilities for new mistakes, old ones must not be repeated. Contributors to The Devil and Uncle Sam include, in addition to Adam Garfinkle, Daniel Pipes, Kenneth Adelman, Patrick Clawson, Mark Falcoff, and Douglas J. Feith.