The Pursuit of Harmony

The Pursuit of Harmony PDF Author: Aviva Rothman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649702X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A committed Lutheran excommunicated from his own church, a friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a “priest of God,” a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, a man who argued at the same time for the superiority of one truth and the need for many truths to coexist—German astronomer Johannes Kepler was, to say the least, a complicated figure. With The Pursuit of Harmony, Aviva Rothman offers a new view of him and his achievements, one that presents them as a story of Kepler’s attempts to bring different, even opposing ideas and circumstances into harmony. Harmony, Rothman shows, was both the intellectual bedrock for and the primary goal of Kepler’s disparate endeavors. But it was also an elusive goal amid the deteriorating conditions of his world, as the political order crumbled and religious war raged. In the face of that devastation, Kepler’s hopes for his theories changed: whereas he had originally looked for a unifying approach to truth, he began instead to emphasize harmony as the peaceful coexistence of different views, one that could be fueled by the fundamentally nonpartisan discipline of mathematics.

The Pursuit of Harmony

The Pursuit of Harmony PDF Author: Aviva Rothman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649702X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A committed Lutheran excommunicated from his own church, a friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a “priest of God,” a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, a man who argued at the same time for the superiority of one truth and the need for many truths to coexist—German astronomer Johannes Kepler was, to say the least, a complicated figure. With The Pursuit of Harmony, Aviva Rothman offers a new view of him and his achievements, one that presents them as a story of Kepler’s attempts to bring different, even opposing ideas and circumstances into harmony. Harmony, Rothman shows, was both the intellectual bedrock for and the primary goal of Kepler’s disparate endeavors. But it was also an elusive goal amid the deteriorating conditions of his world, as the political order crumbled and religious war raged. In the face of that devastation, Kepler’s hopes for his theories changed: whereas he had originally looked for a unifying approach to truth, he began instead to emphasize harmony as the peaceful coexistence of different views, one that could be fueled by the fundamentally nonpartisan discipline of mathematics.

The Core Values of Chinese Civilization

The Core Values of Chinese Civilization PDF Author: Lai Chen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811033676
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Drawing on the core values of western civilization, the author refines the counterparts in Chinese civilization, summarized as four core principles: duty before freedom, obedience before rights, community before individual, and harmony before conflict. Focusing on guoxue or Sinology as the basis of his approach, the author provides detailed explanations of traditional Chinese values. Recent scholars have addressed the concept of guoxue since the modern age, sorting through it and piecing it together, which has produced an extremely abundant range of information. However, given that the concepts and theories involved have been left largely unanalyzed, this book develops a theoretical treatment of them in several important respects. First, it analyzes the mindset of guoxue, examining the dominant ideas and values of the era from which the term “guoxue” arose, focusing on its connection to early changes and trends in society and culture, and distinguishing three key phases of development. Past scholars mainly had in mind the range of objects studied in guoxue when defining it, and what this book underscores is the meaning of guoxue as a modern body of research. Secondly, it assesses several phases in the modern evolution of the body of guoxue research from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, i.e., ending with the later phase of the National Heritage movement. Third and lastly, the book explores the various main modes of modern guoxue, which correspond step by step with the evolutionary phases of guoxue research.

The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom

The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom PDF Author: Naomi E. Maurer
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838637493
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This book explores van Gogh's and Gauguin's concepts of spirituality in life and art, and the ways in which their ideas and the events of their personal lives shaped their creation of repertoires of meaningful symbolic motifs.

The Pursuit of Pleasure

The Pursuit of Pleasure PDF Author: Arsen Dallan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3838269500
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This important book unveils how the pleasure principle has taken humanity hostage to the powers of branding and consumerism, steering our most basic desires. Radically re-evaluating the notion of pleasure and arguing for a deep societal change, it shows the way to a new humanist culture.

The Pursuit of Human Well-Being

The Pursuit of Human Well-Being PDF Author: Richard J. Estes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319391011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
This handbook informs the reader about how much progress we, the human race, have made in enhancing the quality of life on this planet. Many skeptics focus on how the quality of life has deteriorated over the course of human history, particularly given World War II and its aftermath. This handbook provides a positive perspective on the history of well-being. Quality of life, as documented by scientists worldwide, has significantly improved. Nevertheless, one sees more improvements in well-being in some regions of the world than in others. Why? This handbook documents the progress of well-being in the various world regions as well as the differences in those regions. The broad questions that the handbook addresses include: What does well-being mean? How do different philosophical and religious traditions interpret the concept of well-being within their own context? Has well-being remained the same over different historical epochs and for different regions and subregions of the world? In which areas of human development have we been most successful in advancing individual and collective well-being? In which sectors has the attainment of well-being proven most difficult? How does well-being differ within and between different populations groups that, for a variety of socially created reasons, have been the most disadvantaged (e.g., children, the aged, women, the poor, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities)?

A Way of Music Education

A Way of Music Education PDF Author: C. Victor Fung
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190234466
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Moving back through Dewey, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Rousseau, the lineage of Western music education finds its origins in Plato and Pythagoras. Yet theories not rooted in the ancient Greek tradition are all but absent. A Way of Music Education provides a much-needed intervention, integrating ancient Chinese thought into the canon of music education in a structured, systematized, and philosophical way. The book's three central sources - the Yijing (The Book of Changes), Confucianism, and Daoism - inform author C. Victor Fung's argument: that the human being exists as an entity at the center of an organismic world in which all things and events, including music and music education, are connected. Fung ultimately proposes a new educational philosophy based on three key ideas in Chinese thought: change, balance, and liberation. A unique work, A Way of Music Education offers a universal approach engrained in a specific and ancient cultural tradition.

Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa'ida since 9/11

Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa'ida since 9/11 PDF Author: Seth G. Jones
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393084027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 587

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Book Description
From one of our most trusted counterterrorism experts, a sweeping, insider's account of the decade-long chase for America's deadliest enemy. This landmark history chronicles the dramatic, decade-long war against al Qa’ida and provides a model for understanding the ebb and flow of terrorist activity. Tracing intricately orchestrated terrorist plots and the elaborate, multiyear investigations to disrupt them, Seth G. Jones identifies three distinct “waves” of al Qa’ida violence. As Jonathan Mahler wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “studying these waves and the counterwaves that repelled them can tell us a lot about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to fighting terrorism.” The result is a sweeping, insider’s account of what the war has been and what it might become.

Knowledge and Cosmos

Knowledge and Cosmos PDF Author: Robert K. DeKosky
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761874038
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
In Knowledge and Cosmos: Development and Decline of the Medieval Perspective, 2nd Edition, Robert K. DeKosky focuses on issues in astronomy, cosmology, physics, matter theory, philosophy, and theology vital to the “Copernican Revolution.” This book describes efforts among individuals advocating different world views to fit new ideas compatibly into broad perspectives reflecting four traditional patterns of interpretation: teleological, mechanical, occultist, and mathematico-descriptive. These four modes had guided medieval accounts of heavenly phenomena, material process, and motion. The teleological explanation, prevalent in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, posited “final causes” (ends or goals toward which objects strove or attempted to become). Ancient classical atomists had emphasized strictly mechanical explanations, invoking direct material contact and collision of moving matter as agents of physical change. Traditions of astrology, magic, and alchemy embraced an occultist pattern of interpretation—citing hidden forces opaque to both sensual detection and rational understanding as explanations of various phenomena. Finally, the mathematico-descriptive approach interpreted natural phenomena according to geometric or arithmetic relationships; unlike the other three, this did not involve causal explanation of a process. Part I discusses development of the four patterns in the ancient period and their uneasy medieval relationships with each other and with basic Judaeo-Muslim-Christian exigencies of faith. Theory of the heavens follows, including the mathematico-descriptive approach of Ptolemaic astronomy, the teleological and mechanical cosmology of Aristotle, and occultist interpretations of astrologers and magicians. Part I then turns to matter and materiality, discussing differences among the mechanical philosophy of classical atomism, teleological emphases in Aristotle’s material theory, and occultist assumptions of some alchemists. Finally, Part I analyzes conceptions of motion, focusing on Aristotelian interpretations and critical commentaries thereon during the Middle Ages. Part II relates struggles of leading early-modern figures to adapt new concepts (e.g., Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy/cosmology, Galileo’s inertial theories of motion, and Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbit) to an allegiance to two or more of the four patterns of interpretation. By this approach, it identifies decreasing dependence on teleological explanation of physical phenomena as crucial to decline of medieval interpretations of those phenomena, followed by rejection of teleology in the natural philosophy of Descartes, and subsequent fruitful confluence of the mechanical, mathematico-descriptive, and occultist patterns in the physics and cosmology of Isaac Newton.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The Pursuit of Happiness PDF Author: Jeffrey Rosen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1668002493
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A fascinating examination of what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to our nation’s Founders and how that famous phrase defined their lives and became the foundation of our democracy. The Declaration of Independence identified “the pursuit of happiness” as one of our unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, profiles six of the most influential founders—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—to show what pursuing happiness meant in their lives. By reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen shows us how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good—the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure. Among those virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders viewed as part of a daily struggle for self-improvement, character development, and calm self-mastery. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government. For all six Founders, the pursuit of virtue was incompatible with enslavement of African Americans, although the Virginians betrayed their own principles. The Pursuit of Happiness is more than an elucidation of the Declaration’s famous phrase; it is a revelatory journey into the minds of the Founders, and a deep, rich, and fresh understanding of the foundation of our democracy.

The Pursuit of Dreams

The Pursuit of Dreams PDF Author: Ganesh S Loke
Publisher: Australian Self Publishing Group
ISBN: 0648245276
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In this inspirational book based on a true story of Ganesh Loke, who arrived in Australia in 1999 as an International student with only $500 in his pocket, tells his amazing story. During his studies, he was living in a shared accommodation in Sydney and struggled to survive on his own in an unfamiliar country. But with his determination, motivated approach, hard work and extra-ordinary vision Ganesh not only bought his dream house in Sydney, but also became a ‘multiple properties investor’. He also went on to become a Movie Producer to produce Bollywood/ Indian movies and also acted in them, which was his childhood dream. This book provides an insight into this extra-ordinary life journey of Ganesh Loke. It is written by an Australian author Ms. Dominique Mayfair who has previously written fiction books in Australia. She was inspired by Ganesh’s amazing true-story and transformed it into this great book with the inputs from Ganesh. This book will inspire you to believe that, if you pursue your dreams with determination and hard work, your dreams can really come true!