The Better Angels of Our Nature PDF Download
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Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143122010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 834
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Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143122010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 834
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Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Author: Philip J. Dreyfus
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806184752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco—the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and on the generations of people who have transformed them both. Dreyfus examines the ways that San Franciscans remade the landscape to fit their needs, and how their actions reflected and affected their ideas about nature, from the destruction of wetlands and forests to the creation of Golden Gate and Yosemite parks, the Sierra Club, and later, the birth of the modern environmental movement. Today, many San Franciscans seek to strengthen the ties between cities and nature by pursuing more sustainable and ecologically responsible ways of life. Consistent with that urge, Our Better Nature not only explores San Francisco’s past but also poses critical questions about its future. Dreyfus asks us to reassess our connection to the environment and to find ways to redefine ourselves and our cities within nature. Only with such an attitude will San Francisco retain the magic that has always charmed residents and visitors alike.
Author: Fenn Stewart
Publisher: Book*hug
ISBN: 9781771663380
Category : Canada
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"Preface"--"List of Whitmans (Table of Contents) "--"Major Debts / Reading List " -- "Notes
Author: Florence Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242722
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
"Highly informative and remarkably entertaining." —Elle From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.
Author: Darrell W. McNabb
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN: 1642143111
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98
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Book Description
This work is a collection of five short stories, which were inspired by the many selfless, random acts of kindness and caring, which were extended to others by simple, everyday people in ordinary places, and the positive and profound effect those deeds had on their lives. The book highlights that higher nature of humanity, "our better nature," which we all aspire to, and it is the author's intention to raise these unsung heroes out of obscurity and present them in the light of their overwhelming generosity. These are uplifting stories about life, love, faith and family; about compassion and caring, sorrow and joy; about loss and tragedy; about unfortunate endings and hopeful new beginnings. They are masterfully told in the backdrop of the Christmas season, charged with elements of magic and wonder, revealing fascinating twists and turns. These tales, while fanciful, are true, and save for a touch of color, they are delivered to the reader exactly the way they happened. Alas, those who play out their parts in these pages will know the truth of it. As these tales were given to the author, so he gives them to you and your family. It is the author's expressed wish that you are richly entertained and that these stories may serve to elevate and inspire.
Author: Guy Edwardes
Publisher: David and Charles
ISBN: 1446355470
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
This guide is suitable for all levels of photographers. 100 Ways to Take Better Nature and Wildlife Photographs features 100 practical and inspiring tips on every aspect of the genre. Guy Edwardes' breath-taking pictures accompany his eas-to-follow advice on a wide range of subjects from capturing the actions of large mammals to snapping wild birds and flowers in the garden. With tips on everything from technique to composition, coping with extreme field conditions to Photoshop software manipulation, this is an invaluable guide for anyone with a passion for photography of the natural world.
Author: Nancy Cartwright
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 0812694724
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
How fixed are the happenings in Nature and how are they fixed? These lectures address what our scientific successes at predicting and manipulating the world around us suggest in answer. One—very orthodox—account teaches that the sciences offer general truths that we combine with local facts to derive our expectations about what will happen, either naturally or when we build a device to design, be it a laser, a washing machine, an anti-malarial bed net, or an auction for the airwaves. In these three 2017 Carus Lectures Nancy Cartwright offers a different picture, one in which neither we, nor Nature, have such nice rules to go by. Getting real predictions about real happenings is an engineering enterprise that makes clever use of a great variety of different kinds of knowledge, with few real derivations in sight anywhere. It takes artful modeling. Orthodoxy would have it that how we do it is not reflective of how Nature does it. It is, rather, a consequence of human epistemic limitations. That, Cartwright argues, is to put our reasoning just back to front. We should read our image of what Nature is like from the way our sciences work when they work best in getting us around in it, non plump for a pre-set image of how Nature must work to derive what an ideal science, freed of human failings, would be like. Putting the order of inference right way around implies that like us, Nature too is an artful modeler. Lecture 1 is an exercise in description. It is a study of the practices of science when the sciences intersect with the world and, then, of what that world is most likely like given the successes of these practices. Millikan's famous oil drop experiment, and the range of knowledge pieced together to make it work, are used to illustrate that events in the world do not occur in patterns that can be properly described in so-called "laws of nature." Nevertheless, they yield to artful modeling. Without a huge leap of faith, that, it seems, is the most we can assume about the happenings in Nature. Lecture 2 is an exercise in metaphysics. How could the arrangements of happenings come to be that way? In answer, Cartwright urges an ontology in which powers act together in different ways depending on the arrangements they find themselves in to produce what happens. It is a metaphysics in which possibilia are real because powers and arrangement are permissive—they constrain but often do not dictate outcomes (as we see in contemporary quantum theory). Lecture 3, based on Cartwright's work on evidence-based policy and randomized controlled trials, is an exercise in the philosophy of social technology: How we can put our knowledge of powers and our skills at artful modeling to work to build more decent societies and how we can use our knowledge and skills to evaluate when our attempts are working. The lectures are important because: They offer an original view on the age-old question of scientific realism in which our knowledge is genuine, yet our scientific principles are neither true nor false but are, rather, templates for building good models. Powers are center-stage in metaphysics right now. Back-reading them from the successes of scientific practice, as Lecture 2 does, provides a new perspective on what they are and how they function. There is a loud call nowadays to make philosophy relevant to "real life." That's just what happens in Lecture 3, where Cartwright applies the lesson of Lectures 1 and 2 to argue for a serious rethink of the way that we are urged—and in some places mandated—to use evidence to predict the outcomes of our social policies.
Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In this picture book with minimal text, a tiger with a chair on its back wanders across the different but beautiful landscapes of the Earth, from an Alpine lake to the tundra.
Author: Hank Davis
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615928820
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Davis laments a modern world in which more people believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels than in evolution. Superstition and religion get particularly critical treatment, although Davis argues that religion, itself, is not the problem.
Author: Donald S. Maier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400739915
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 572
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Book Description
There has been a deluge of material on biodiversity, starting from a trickle back in the mid-1980's. However, this book is entirely unique in its treatment of the topic. It is unique in its meticulously crafted, scientifically informed, philosophical examination of the norms and values that are at the heart of discussions about biodiversity. And it is unique in its point of view, which is the first to comprehensively challenge prevailing views about biodiversity and its value. According to those dominant views, biodiversity is an extremely good thing – so good that it has become the emblem of natural value. The book's broader purpose is to use biodiversity as a lens through which to view the nature of natural value. It first examines, on their own terms, the arguments for why biodiversity is supposed to be a good thing. This discussion cuts a very broad and detailed swath through the scientific, economic, and environmental literature. It finds all these arguments to be seriously wanting. Worse, these arguments appear to have consequences that should dismay and perplex most environmentalists. The book then turns to a deeper analysis of these failures and suggests that they result from posing value questions from within a framework that is inappropriate for nature's value. It concludes with a novel suggestion for framing natural value. This new proposal avoids the pitfalls of the ones that prevail in the promotion of biodiversity. And it exposes the goals of conservation biology, restoration biology, and the world's largest conservation organizations as badly ill-conceived.
