De La Mettrie's Ghost

De La Mettrie's Ghost PDF Author: Chris Nunn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 0230552218
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book is about how we make choices. It is a compelling analysis of the nature of free will, drawing together evidence from chemistry, literature, politics, history and beyond. Psychiatrist Chris Nunn elegantly explores the revolutions in medicine, genetics, bioethics and neuroscience spurred by Julien de la Mettrie's 300-year-old tract Man the Machine. Nunn concludes that a mechanistic view of the human brain, though once fruitful, is now moribund. He proposes a powerful alternative: that stories, recorded in our memories throughout life, are the mediators of free choice. Nunn demonstrates how this original approach could reconcile the latest brain-imaging results and our seemingly contradictory intuition about decision making and responsibility.

De La Mettrie's Ghost

De La Mettrie's Ghost PDF Author: Chris Nunn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 0230552218
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is about how we make choices. It is a compelling analysis of the nature of free will, drawing together evidence from chemistry, literature, politics, history and beyond. Psychiatrist Chris Nunn elegantly explores the revolutions in medicine, genetics, bioethics and neuroscience spurred by Julien de la Mettrie's 300-year-old tract Man the Machine. Nunn concludes that a mechanistic view of the human brain, though once fruitful, is now moribund. He proposes a powerful alternative: that stories, recorded in our memories throughout life, are the mediators of free choice. Nunn demonstrates how this original approach could reconcile the latest brain-imaging results and our seemingly contradictory intuition about decision making and responsibility.

The Ghost Dimension

The Ghost Dimension PDF Author: Jack Tanner
Publisher: Magus Books
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In the 17th century, an English philosopher proposed the existence of a fourth dimension, inhabited by spirits. This same philosopher was an immense influence on Isaac Newton. Leibniz accused Newton of believing in the occult, citing gravity as a theory of which any magician would be proud. God is the essential ingredient in Newton's famous theory of gravity. They don't teach you that in science class! John Maynard Keynes said of Newton, "He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage." Has science since Newton buried the spiritual dimension that Newton believed essential to any rational explanation of reality?! Can it be resurrected?

The Experience of God

The Experience of God PDF Author: David Bentley Hart
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300167334
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths. Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points. Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.

Big Data Challenges

Big Data Challenges PDF Author: Anno Bunnik
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349948853
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This book brings together an impressive range of academic and intelligence professional perspectives to interrogate the social, ethical and security upheavals in a world increasingly driven by data. Written in a clear and accessible style, it offers fresh insights to the deep reaching implications of Big Data for communication, privacy and organisational decision-making. It seeks to demystify developments around Big Data before evaluating their current and likely future implications for areas as diverse as corporate innovation, law enforcement, data science, journalism, and food security. The contributors call for a rethinking of the legal, ethical and philosophical frameworks that inform the responsibilities and behaviours of state, corporate, institutional and individual actors in a more networked, data-centric society. In doing so, the book addresses the real world risks, opportunities and potentialities of Big Data.

No Ghost in the Machine

No Ghost in the Machine PDF Author: Rodney Cotterill
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description


The Recovery of the West

The Recovery of the West PDF Author: Marvin Bram
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1453565361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
The Recovery of the West is the first full-scale study of Western civilization employing the methods of symbolic history. These methods permit (1) an account of the human endowment taking up thought, feeling, and behavior from fruitful new perspectives, (2) a correspondingly new account of the course of Western history seen from the point of view of the degrees of retention, surrender, and deformation of fundamental elements of the human endowment over time, and (3) a therapeutic program based on the present condition of that endowment.

European Theatre Performance Practice, 1750–1900

European Theatre Performance Practice, 1750–1900 PDF Author: Jim Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351938290
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
This volume contains key articles and chapters which represent both seminal and innovative scholarship on European theatre performance practice from 1750 to 1900. The selected topics focus on acting and performance, staging (including set design and lighting), and audiences, and are approached with a broad perspective as well as with in-depth, focussed analysis. The volume captures the rich, dynamic and variegated nature of European theatre throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and provides a carefully selected body of significant texts on this important period of theatre history.

The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers

The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers PDF Author: Heiner F. Klemme
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474256007
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 939

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Book Description
The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers is a landmark work. Covering one of the most innovative centuries for philosophical investigation, it features more than 650 entries on the eighteenth-century philosophers, theologians, jurists, physicians, scholars, writers, literary critics and historians whose work has had lasting philosophical significance. Alongside well-known German philosophers of that era-Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-the Dictionary provides rare insights into the lives and minds of lesser-known individuals who influenced the shape of philosophy. Each entry discusses a particular philosopher's life, contributions to the world of thought, and later influences, focusing not only on their most important published writings, but on relevant minor works as well. Bibliographical references to primary and secondary source material are included at the end of entries to encourage further reading, while extensive cross-referencing allows comparisons to be easily made between different thinkers' ideas and practices. For anyone looking to understand more about the century when enlightenment thinking arrived in Germany and established conceits were challenged, The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers is a valuable, unparalleled resource.

Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century

Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Mark Sandy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317061489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Concerned with the intermingled thematic and formal preoccupations of Romantic thought and literary practice in works by twentieth-century British, Irish, and American artists, this collection examines the complicated legacy of Romanticism in twentieth-century novels, poetry, and film. Even as key twentieth-century cultural movements have tried to subvert or debunk Romantic narratives of redemptive nature, individualism, perfectibility, and the transcendence of art, the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continue to exert a signal influence on the modern moment - both as a source of tension and as creative stimulus. As the essays here show, the exact meaning of the Romantic bequest may be bitterly contested, but it has been difficult to leave behind. The contributors take up a wide range of authors, including Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Franzen. What emerges from this lively volume is a fuller picture of the persistence and variety of the Romantic period's influence on the twentieth-century.

Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History

Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History PDF Author: K. Reilly
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230347541
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The automaton, known today as the robot, can be seen as a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored. Chapters include examinations of Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass nature, the Cartesian mind/body divide, automata as objects of courtly desire, the uncanny Olympia, and the revolutionary Robots in post-WWI drama.