Conquest of Abundance

Conquest of Abundance PDF Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226245331
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
From flea bites to galaxies, from love affairs to shadows, Paul Feyerabend reveled in the sensory and intellectual abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only a fraction of these riches. "This a blessing, not a drawback," he writes. "A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed." This human reduction of experience to a manageable level is the heart of Conquest of Abundance, the book on which Feyerabend was at work when he died in 1994. Prepared from drafts of the manuscript left at his death, working notes, and lectures and articles Feyerabend wrote while the larger work was in progress, Conquest of Abundance offers up rich exploration and startling insights with the charm, lucidity, and sense of mischief that are his hallmarks. Feyerabend is fascinated by how we attempt to explain and predict the mysteries of the natural world, and he looks at the ways in which we abstract experience, explain anomalies, and reduce wonder to formulas and equations. Through his exploration of the positive and negative consequences of these efforts, Feyerabend reveals the "conquest of abundance" as an integral part of the history and character of Western civilization. "Paul Feyerabend . . . was the Norman Mailer of philosophy. . . . brilliant, brave, adventurous, original and quirky."—Richard Rorty, New Republic "As much a smudged icon as a philosophical position holder, [Feyerabend] was alluring and erotic, a torch singer for philosophical anarchy."—Nancy Maull, New York Times Book Review "[A] kind of final testament of Feyerabend's thought . . . Conquest of Abundance is as much the product of a brilliant, scintillating style as of an immense erudition and culture. . . . This book is as abundant and rich as the world it envisions."—Arkady Plotnitsky, Chicago Tribune

Conquest of Abundance

Conquest of Abundance PDF Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226245331
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
From flea bites to galaxies, from love affairs to shadows, Paul Feyerabend reveled in the sensory and intellectual abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only a fraction of these riches. "This a blessing, not a drawback," he writes. "A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed." This human reduction of experience to a manageable level is the heart of Conquest of Abundance, the book on which Feyerabend was at work when he died in 1994. Prepared from drafts of the manuscript left at his death, working notes, and lectures and articles Feyerabend wrote while the larger work was in progress, Conquest of Abundance offers up rich exploration and startling insights with the charm, lucidity, and sense of mischief that are his hallmarks. Feyerabend is fascinated by how we attempt to explain and predict the mysteries of the natural world, and he looks at the ways in which we abstract experience, explain anomalies, and reduce wonder to formulas and equations. Through his exploration of the positive and negative consequences of these efforts, Feyerabend reveals the "conquest of abundance" as an integral part of the history and character of Western civilization. "Paul Feyerabend . . . was the Norman Mailer of philosophy. . . . brilliant, brave, adventurous, original and quirky."—Richard Rorty, New Republic "As much a smudged icon as a philosophical position holder, [Feyerabend] was alluring and erotic, a torch singer for philosophical anarchy."—Nancy Maull, New York Times Book Review "[A] kind of final testament of Feyerabend's thought . . . Conquest of Abundance is as much the product of a brilliant, scintillating style as of an immense erudition and culture. . . . This book is as abundant and rich as the world it envisions."—Arkady Plotnitsky, Chicago Tribune

Conquest of Abundance

Conquest of Abundance PDF Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226245348
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
From flea bites to galaxies, from love affairs to shadows, Paul Feyerabend reveled in the sensory and intellectual abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only a fraction of these riches. "This a blessing, not a drawback," he writes. "A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed." This human reduction of experience to a manageable level is the heart of Conquest of Abundance, the book on which Feyerabend was at work when he died in 1994. Prepared from drafts of the manuscript left at his death, working notes, and lectures and articles Feyerabend wrote while the larger work was in progress, Conquest of Abundance offers up rich exploration and startling insights with the charm, lucidity, and sense of mischief that are his hallmarks. Feyerabend is fascinated by how we attempt to explain and predict the mysteries of the natural world, and he looks at the ways in which we abstract experience, explain anomalies, and reduce wonder to formulas and equations. Through his exploration of the positive and negative consequences of these efforts, Feyerabend reveals the "conquest of abundance" as an integral part of the history and character of Western civilization. "Paul Feyerabend . . . was the Norman Mailer of philosophy. . . . brilliant, brave, adventurous, original and quirky."—Richard Rorty, New Republic "As much a smudged icon as a philosophical position holder, [Feyerabend] was alluring and erotic, a torch singer for philosophical anarchy."—Nancy Maull, New York Times Book Review "[A] kind of final testament of Feyerabend's thought . . . Conquest of Abundance is as much the product of a brilliant, scintillating style as of an immense erudition and culture. . . . This book is as abundant and rich as the world it envisions."—Arkady Plotnitsky, Chicago Tribune

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest PDF Author: Susan Sleeper-Smith
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469640597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion. By the late eighteenth century, Montreal silversmiths were sending their best work to Wabash Indian villages, Ohio Indian women were setting the fashions for Indigenous clothing, and European visitors were marveling at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality of trading entrepots such as Miamitown. Confederacy, agrarian abundance, and nascent urbanity were, however, both too much and not enough. Kentucky settlers and American leaders—like George Washington and Henry Knox—coveted Indian lands and targeted the Indian women who worked them. Americans took women and children hostage to coerce male warriors to come to the treaty table to cede their homelands. Appalachian squatters, aspiring land barons, and ambitious generals invaded this settled agrarian world, burned crops, looted towns, and erased evidence of Ohio Indian achievement. This book restores the Ohio River valley as Native space.

The Conquest of Bread

The Conquest of Bread PDF Author: Peter Kropotkin
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The Conquest of Bread is a political treatise written by the anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Written after a split between anarchists and Marxists at the First International (a 19th-century association of left-wing radicals), The Conquest of Bread advocates a path to a communist society distinct from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation. Since its original publication in 1892, The Conquest of Bread has immensely influenced both anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. As one of the first comprehensive works of anarcho-communist theory published for wide distribution, it both popularized anarchism in general and encouraged a shift in anarchist thought from individualist anarchism to social anarchism. It was also an influential text among the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and the late anarchist theorist and anthropologist David Graeber cited the book as an inspiration for the Occupy movement of the early 2010s in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Interpreting Feyerabend

Interpreting Feyerabend PDF Author: Karim Bschir
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108620531
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This collection of new essays interprets and critically evaluates the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It offers innovative historical scholarship on Feyerabend's take on topics such as realism, empiricism, mimesis, voluntarism, pluralism, materialism, and the mind-body problem, as well as certain debates in the philosophy of physics. It also considers the ways in which Feyerabend's thought can contribute to contemporary debates in science and public policy, including questions about the nature of scientific methodology, the role of science in society, citizen science, scientism, and the role of expertise in public policy. The volume will provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the topics which Feyerabend engaged with throughout his career, showing both the breadth and the depth of his thought.

The Tyranny of Science

The Tyranny of Science PDF Author: Paul K. Feyerabend
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745651897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Paul Feyerabend is one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century and his book Against Method is an international bestseller. In this new book he masterfully weaves together the main elements of his mature philosophy into a gripping tale: the story of the rise of rationalism in Ancient Greece that eventually led to the entrenchment of a mythical ‘scientific worldview’. In this wide-ranging and accessible book Feyerabend challenges some modern myths about science, including the myth that ‘science is successful’. He argues that some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life. Far from solving the pressing problems of our age, such as war and poverty, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities, at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful. Objectivity and generality are based on abstraction, and as such, they come at a high price. For abstraction drives a wedge between our thoughts and our experience, resulting in the degeneration of both. Theoreticians, as opposed to practitioners, tend to impose a tyranny on the concepts they use, abstracting away from the subjective experience that makes life meaningful. Feyerabend concludes by arguing that practical experience is a better guide to reality than any theory, by itself, ever could be, and he stresses that there is no tyranny that cannot be resisted, even if it is exerted with the best possible intentions. Provocative and iconoclastic, The Tyranny of Science is one of Feyerabend’s last books and one of his best. It will be widely read by everyone interested in the role that science has played, and continues to play, in the shaping of the modern world.

The Conquest of Fear

The Conquest of Fear PDF Author: Basil King
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description


Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640

Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 PDF Author: Patricia Seed
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521497572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A 1996 comparative history exploring the significance of ceremonies performed by the western imperial powers to mark their territorial possession of the New World.

Farewell to Reason

Farewell to Reason PDF Author: Paul Feyerabend
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789607434
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Farewell to Reason offers a vigorous challenge to the scientific rationalism that underlies Western ideals of "progress" and "development," whose damaging social and ecological consequences are now widely recognized. For all their variety in theme and occasion, the essays in this book share a consistent philosophical purpose. Whether discussing Greek art and thought, vindicating the church's battle with Galileo, exploring the development of quantum physics or exposing the dogmatism of Karl Popper, Feyerabend defends a relativist and historicist notion of the sciences. The appeal to reason, he insists, is empty, and must be replaced by a notion of science that subordinates it to the needs of citizens and communities. Provocative, polemical and rigorously argued, Farewell to Reason will infuriate Feyerabend's critics and delight his many admirers.

Conquest of the Mind

Conquest of the Mind PDF Author: Elbert Willis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780898580372
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description