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Author: Lawrence B. Slobodkin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674808256
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
"If it were necessary, for some curious legal reason, to draw a clear line between human and nonhuman--for example, if a group of australopithecines were to appear and one had to decide if they were to be protected by Fair Employment Laws or by the ASPCA--I would welcome them as humans if I knew that they were seriously concerned about how to bury their dead." In this witty and wise way, Lawrence Slobodkin takes us on a spirited quest for the multiple meanings of simplicity in all facets of life. Slobodkin begins at the beginning, with a consideration of how simplicity came into play in the development of religious doctrines. He nimbly moves on to the arts--where he ranges freely from dining to painting--and then focuses more sharply on the role of simplicity in science. Here we witness the historical beginnings of modern science as a search for the fewest number of terms, the smallest number of assumptions, or the lowest exponents, while still meeting criteria for descriptive accuracy. The result may be an elegant hypothetical system that generates the apparent world from less apparent assumptions, as with the Newtonian revolution; or it may mean deducing non-obvious processes from everyday facts, as with the Darwinian revolution. Slobodkin proposes that the best intellectual work is done as if it were a game on a simplified playing field. He supplies serious arguments for considering the role of simplification and playfulness in all of our activities. The immediate effect of his unfailingly captivating essay is to throw open a new window on the world and to refresh our perspectives on matters of the heart and mind.
Author: Lawrence B. Slobodkin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674808256
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
"If it were necessary, for some curious legal reason, to draw a clear line between human and nonhuman--for example, if a group of australopithecines were to appear and one had to decide if they were to be protected by Fair Employment Laws or by the ASPCA--I would welcome them as humans if I knew that they were seriously concerned about how to bury their dead." In this witty and wise way, Lawrence Slobodkin takes us on a spirited quest for the multiple meanings of simplicity in all facets of life. Slobodkin begins at the beginning, with a consideration of how simplicity came into play in the development of religious doctrines. He nimbly moves on to the arts--where he ranges freely from dining to painting--and then focuses more sharply on the role of simplicity in science. Here we witness the historical beginnings of modern science as a search for the fewest number of terms, the smallest number of assumptions, or the lowest exponents, while still meeting criteria for descriptive accuracy. The result may be an elegant hypothetical system that generates the apparent world from less apparent assumptions, as with the Newtonian revolution; or it may mean deducing non-obvious processes from everyday facts, as with the Darwinian revolution. Slobodkin proposes that the best intellectual work is done as if it were a game on a simplified playing field. He supplies serious arguments for considering the role of simplification and playfulness in all of our activities. The immediate effect of his unfailingly captivating essay is to throw open a new window on the world and to refresh our perspectives on matters of the heart and mind.
Author: Michael J. Sanderson
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080534112
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
Why do unrelated organisms sometimes appear almost identical in details of the anatomy, behavior, physiology, and ecology? Homoplasy assembles leaders in evolutionary biology to explore issues of parallelism, convergence, and reversals. This innovative book is certain to provoke discussion of homoplasy compelling evidence for particular theories of evolutionary change The first book on this increasingly interesting subject Includes authoritative treatments from leading experts expressing a variety of viewpoints
Author: Mark McBride
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1509937676
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
This is the first book to bring together distinguished jurisprudential theorists, as well as up-and-coming scholars, to critically assess the nature of legal reasoning. The volume is divided into 3 parts: The first part, General Jurisprudence and Legal Reasoning, addresses issues at the intersection of general jurisprudence - those pertaining to the nature of law itself - and legal reasoning. The second part, Rules and Reasons, addresses two concepts central to two prominent types of theory of legal reasoning. The essays in the third and final part, Doctrine and Practice, delve into the mechanics of legal practice and doctrine, from a legal reasoning perspective.
Author: Shlomo Ariel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031301261X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
In this visit to the wonderland of children's imaginative, make-believe play, readers are be exposed to both a general, bird's-eye view of the whole of this fascinating realm, and to a closer look at its diverse regions. This volume examines the borderlines between make-believe play and akin phenomena such as dreams, drama, and rituals. Readers will become acquainted with the secret codes of make-believe play. These codes are activated in both covert and overt power struggles among children as well as in the child's internal theater of emotions. Readers will have the opportunity to examine these uses by looking at real-life sociodramatic play scenes. Also, the development of make-believe play and its interface with the child's general cognitive and socioemotional development is traced. This volume enables readers to consider children of various cultures at play, and investigates whether make-believe play and its characteristics are universal or culture-specific. Make-believe play has been investigated across fields including cognitive, clinical, developmental, and social psychology, as well as linguistics, anthropology, and sociology. In this book, a comprehensive, integrative model is proposed, in which all of these approaches are synthesized into a single, coherent whole. The unifying hypothesis behind this synthesis is that make-believe play is a semiotic system, a body of signs and symbols, a language by means of which children express themselves and communicate. This language enables children to regulate and balance both their inner emotional life and their social life. Another central hypothesis is therefore that make-believe play functions as an homeostatic feedback mechanism for controlling the level of arousal around the child's central concerns, as well as the level of interpersonal conflict around issues of social proximity and power. Therapeutic and education applications of make-believe play are derived from these hypotheses and their ramifications.
Author: Lawrence Krader
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433107627
Category : Empiricism
Languages : en
Pages : 706
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Book Description
Noetics is Lawrence Krader's magnum opus, which he began while still an undergraduate philosophy major at the City College of New York in the 1930s. By examining the architectonics of some of the greatest thinkers in history - Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl among others - as works of art combining myth, speculation and empirical science, Krader tackles one of the central problems of the philosophy of science: what is science and how does it relate to human thinking and knowing more generally. Building on his theories concerning the different orders of nature adumbrated in his Labor and Value (2003), he follows not only the lines of development of the three fields of science corresponding to three orders of nature (material, quantum, and human) but also examines the development of all three as human processes and products. Krader takes up the relations of thinking and knowing in conjunction with emotions, feelings and judgment and examines the processes of abstraction as one of the key and unique features of human being and knowing. He proposes noetics as a science of thinking and knowing and establishes its relation to the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the arts. The breadth and depth of Krader's scholarship is stunning and evokes Spinoza's thought that «all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.»
Author: Stuart Nagel
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000148270
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1094
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Book Description
"This entirely updated and enlarged Second Edition of a landmark reference/text continues to provide comprehensive coverage of every important aspect of policy studies--discussing concepts, methods, utilization, formation, and implementation both internationally and across each level of government."
Author: Dario Floreano
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540483047
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 743
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Book Description
No matter what your perspective is, what your goals are, or how experienced you are, Artificial Life research is always a learning experience. The variety of phe nomena that the people who gathered in Lausanne reported and discussed for the fifth time since 1991 at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) has not been programmed, crafted, or assembled by analytic design. It has evolved, emerged, or appeared spontaneously from a process of artificial evolution, se- organisation, or development. Artificial Life is a field where biological and artificial sciences meet and blend together, where the dynamics of biological life are reproduced in the memory of computers, where machines evolve, behave, and communicate like living organ isms, where complex life-like entities are synthesised from electronic chromo somes and artificial chemistries. The impact of Artificial Life in science, phi losophy, and technology is tremendous. Over the years the synthetic approach has established itself as a powerful method for investigating several complex phenomena of life. From a philosophical standpoint, the notion of life and of in telligence is continuously reformulated in relation to the dynamics of the system under observation and to the embedding environment, no longer a privilege of carbon-based entities with brains and eyes. At the same time, the possibility of engineering machines and software with life-like properties such as evolvability, self-repair, and self-maintainance is gradually becoming reality, bringing new perspectives in engineering and applications.
Author: Jérôme Brillaud
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789142652
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Today, “simple living” is a rallying cry for anti-consumerists, environmentalists, and anyone concerned with humanity’s effect on the planet. But what is so revolutionary about a simple life? And why are we so fascinated with simplicity today? A Philosophy of Simple Living charts the ideas, motivations, and practices of simplicity from antiquity to the present day. Bringing together an array of people, practices, and movements, from Henry David Thoreau to Steve Jobs, and from Cynics and Shakers to the “slow movement,” voluntary simplicity, and degrowth, this book is as comprehensive as it is concise. Written in elegant, spare prose, A Philosophy of Simple Living will be of great benefit to all who wish to declutter and pare back their complicated, modern lives.
Author: Lawrence Hazelrigg
Publisher: Ethics International Press
ISBN: 1871891868
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 691
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Book Description
What are the possible future worlds of social science? How do these prospects compare with recent conclusions that social science “is generally a non-factor in policy debates and irrelevant to the lives of a host of real-world people,” as a well-known sociologist reported in the centennial volume of the American Sociological Association? This substantial study covers history, art and aesthetics, identity and the self, in seeking an answer to the question of ‘Future Worlds’.
Author: Michael Moran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191563382
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1000
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. Public policy is the business end of political science. It is where theory meets practice in the pursuit of the public good. Political scientists approach public policy in myriad ways. Some approach the policy process descriptively, asking how the need for public intervention comes to be perceived, a policy response formulated, enacted, implemented, and, all too often, subverted, perverted, altered, or abandoned. Others approach public policy more prescriptively, offering politically-informed suggestions for how normatively valued goals can and should be pursued, either through particular policies or through alternative processes for making policy. Some offer their advice from the Olympian heights of detached academic observers, others as 'engaged scholars' cum advocates, while still others seek to instil more reflective attitudes among policy practitioners themselves toward their own practices. The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy mines all these traditions, using an innovative structure that responds to the very latest scholarship. Its chapters touch upon institutional and historical sources and analytical methods, how policy is made, how it is evaluated and how it is constrained. In these ways, the Handbook shows how the combined wisdom of political science as a whole can be brought to bear on political attempts to improve the human condition.
