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.

Emotion, Place and Culture

Emotion, Place and Culture PDF Author: Mick Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317144643
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Recent years have witnessed a rapid rise in engagement with emotion and affect across a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with geographers among others making a significant contribution by examining the emotional intersections between people and places. Building on the achievements of Emotional Geographies (2005), the editors have brought together leading scholars such as Nigel Thrift, Alphonso Lingis and Frances Dyson as well as young, up and coming academics from a diverse range of disciplines to investigate feelings and affect in various spatial and social contexts, environments and landscapes. The book is divided into five sections covering the themes of remembering, understanding, mourning, belonging, and enchanting.

Who Was Mrs Willett?

Who Was Mrs Willett? PDF Author: Chris Nunn
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845404130
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Here is an account of mentality and human experience, written for a multi-disciplinary readership. The focus is on how mind, consciousness and selves inter-relate, extending into exploration of ideas about the nature of awareness and a search for relevant evidence. 'Consciousness studies' has reached something of a crossroads nowadays. Computational approaches to mind and 'quantum consciousness' theories, have not lived up to early hopes. Neuroscience has made huge strides in the last few years, but is still nowhere near able to account for the existence of consciousness itself - as opposed to being able to explain how some of its content gets there. Philosophically, there is lack of consensus over both the nature of consciousness and what questions we should be asking about it. Chris Nunn's book surveys the current situation and argues that, as far as 'mind' is concerned, we need to take the overall dynamics into consideration, which include genetic, environmental and social factors along with neurology. He emphasizes the close links that exist between memory, experience and personhood. What emerges most strongly from this account is that answers to questions about the nature of consciousness are likely to depend on achieving a better understanding of the physics of time.

Non-Representational Theory

Non-Representational Theory PDF Author: Nigel Thrift
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134162715
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 681

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Book Description
This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It: introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre. A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift’s outstanding work brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. This noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and is essential reading for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.

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.

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?

Longing in a Culture of Cynicism

Longing in a Culture of Cynicism PDF Author: Stephan van Erp
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3825812359
Category : Cynicism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Through current expressions of religion, people are confronted with all kinds of longings and desires which have no place in a rationalised and alienated culture. At the same time, these longings are seeking and finding opportunities for expression. How to understand this cultural ambiguity? The authors in this volume explore the possibilities of a rationality beyond rationalism, reflecting beyond the borders of human imagination on the hidden God.

The Lancet

The Lancet PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 1344

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Book Description


Revisiting Richard Rorty

Revisiting Richard Rorty PDF Author: Pedro Góis Moreira
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622739205
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Richard Rorty is considered one of the most original philosophers of the last decades, and he has generated warm enthusiasm on the part of many intellectuals and students, within and outside the field of philosophy. The collection opens with an essay by Robert Brandom, in which he continues the discussion of Rorty’s “vocabulary vocabulary” that he began in Rorty and his Critics, and ends with an interview in which Brandom talks about Rorty himself as a teacher and friend. The collection is then divided into three further sections, each addressing an aspect of Rorty’s thought. First, a political section contains several essays discussing Rorty’s notorious “prophecy” in Achieving our Country and the idea that he would have foreseen the rise of a political “strongman.” Also discussed are Rorty's view of the cultural left, his view of the relation between truth and democracy, and Rorty on the concept of fraternity. In a second, epistemological section, several essays address Rorty’s historicism, anti-representationalism, and his views on truth and on religion, often through the lenses of his critics (Putnam, Habermas, Dews). A final section addresses the relations between Rorty and other philosophers such as Hume, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset. This works contains valuable essays in three languages — English, Portuguese, and Spanish — and is a small example of the reach of Rorty’s thought and its expansion beyond the Anglo-Saxon world in only ten years after his death. It will appeal to Rorty’s scholars and researchers as well as any student of pragmatism and anti-foundationalist thought.

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.