The author has built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and has become a national sensation as a blogger. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, he examines the world of prediction

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a cultural philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and historian of music who, along with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, founded the Frankfurt School. Against Epistemology is one of his most important works. It inspired Habermas and Marcuse and continues to influence other eminent thinkers in philosophy and the social sciences today. Against Epistemology is in essence a long essay against Western metaphysics or, as Adorno put it, "the lordship of the subject." Traditional philosophy, he noted, leads in practice to fascism. In this book, he combines analytic philosophy, social theory, and cultural criticism to try to show how epistemology betrays experience, using Husserl's work as a concrete model.

"Past and Present brings together almost two dozen newly collected essays by the distinguished American historian and cultural critic, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Their common theme is the intriguing, often unexpected ways in which the past illuminates the present. The novelist William Faulkner wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In these essays, Himmelfarb shows the truth of this statement. She helps us find a new perspective on contemporary issues by bringing to bear a trenchant analysis of debates and thinkers of the past. She allows the past to inform the present without distorting either past or present. The essays, unified by the common theme of present and past, are varied. The topics range from the disorders of modern democracy to the challenges of postmodernism, from the Victorian ethos to the Jewish question. The thinkers range from Edmund Burke to Leo Strauss, from Cardinal Newman to Lionel Trilling. The political figures range from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, from the American founders to Queen Elizabeth II. The underlying premise and principle of the essays is the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge and truth, however difficult or discomforting, eminently matters, in the "practical life,"as Trilling put it,as in the "moral life."Past and Presentis a notable contribution to this endeavor-to understanding where we have been, where we are now, and where we may be-or should be-going"--

Theology and the scientific imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the metaphysical foundations of modern science and shows how, by the 1600s, theological and scientific thinking had become almost one. Major figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others developed an unprecedented secular theology whose debt to medieval and scholastic though shaped the trajectory of the scientific revolution. The book ends with Funkstein's influential analysis of the seventeenth century's "unprecedented fusion" of scientific and religious language. Featuring a new foreword, Theology and the Scientific imagination is a path breaking and classic work that remains a fundamental resource for historians and philosophers of science.

"Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster's cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential interdisciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster's élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur. Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication. The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker"--

The Robot in the Garden initiates a critical theory of telerobotics and introduces telepistemology, the study of knowledge acquired at a distance. Many of our most influential technologies, the telescope, telephone, and television, were developed to provide knowledge at a distance. Telerobots, remotely controlled robots, facilitate action at a distance. Specialists use telerobots to explore actively environments such as Mars, the Titanic, and Chernobyl. Military personnel increasingly employ reconnaissance drones and telerobotic missiles. At home, we have remote controls for the garage door, car alarm, and television (the latter a remote for the remote).The Internet dramatically extends our scope and reach. Thousands of cameras and robots are now accessible online. Although the role of technical mediation has been of interest to philosophers since the seventeenth century, the Internet forces a reconsideration. As the public gains access to telerobotic instruments previously restricted to scientists and soldiers, questions of mediation, knowledge, and trust take on new significance for everyday life.Telerobotics is a mode of representation. But representations can misrepresent. If Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" was the defining moment for radio, what will be the defining moment for the Internet? As artists have always been concerned with how representations provide us with knowledge, the book also looks at telerobotics' potential as an artistic medium.The seventeen essays, by leading figures in philosophy, art, history, and engineering, are organized into three sections: Philosophy; Art, History, and Critical Theory; and Engineering, Interface, and System Design.

For centuries, knowledge has been thought to be the key to human progress of all kinds and has dominated Western culture. But what if knowing has now become an impediment to further human development? The End of Knowing is concerned with the practical consideration of how to reconstruct our world when modernist ideas have been refuted and many social problems appear insoluble. Newman and Holzman suggest provocatively that we should give up knowing in favour of "performed activity." They show how to reject the knowing paradigm in practice and present the many positive implications this has for social and educational policy.