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Book Language

Download or read book Language written by Daniel L. Everett and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold and provocative study that presents language not as an innate component of the brain—as most linguists do—but as an essential tool unique to each culture worldwide. For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. But linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows how the evolution of different language forms—that is, different grammar—reflects how language is influenced by human societies and experiences, and how it expresses their great variety. For example, the Amazonian Pirahã put words together in ways that violate our long-held under-standing of how language works, and Pirahã grammar expresses complex ideas very differently than English grammar does. Drawing on the Wari’ language of Brazil, Everett explains that speakers of all languages, in constructing their stories, omit things that all members of the culture understand. In addition, Everett discusses how some cultures can get by without words for numbers or counting, without verbs for “to say” or “to give,” illustrating how the very nature of what’s important in a language is culturally determined. Combining anthropology, primatology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and his own pioneering—and adventurous—research with the Amazonian Pirahã, and using insights from many different languages and cultures, Everett gives us an unprecedented elucidation of this society-defined nature of language. In doing so, he also gives us a new understanding of how we think and who we are.

Book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Engineering

Download or read book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Engineering written by Bocong Li and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first academic work on the philosophy of engineering in China that reflects two decades of research. It puts forward a new thesis, namely that the core maxim in the philosophy of engineering is “I create, therefore I am,” which is radically different from the Cartesian maxim: “I think, therefore I am.” In addition, the book offers the first detailed portrait of the roots and evolution of the philosophy of engineering in China. The book begins by discussing the triptych thesis of science, technology and engineering, which argues that there are a number of important distinctions between the three, e.g. scientific activities are chiefly based on discovery, while technological activities center on invention, and engineering activities focus on creation. Considering the latest developments in the philosophy of engineering, the author also analyzes engineering communities, engineering practice and a micro–meso–macro framework. In subsequent chapters, the author separately analyzes the three stages of engineering activities: planning, operating and using artifacts. In the closing chapter, two views on the philosophy of engineering (as a new subdiscipline of philosophy and as a philosophy in its own right) are briefly explained.

Book The Carbon Crunch

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dieter Helm
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2015-01-01
  • ISBN : 0300215320
  • Pages : 303 pages

Download or read book The Carbon Crunch written by Dieter Helm and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a new edition of his hard-hitting book on climate change, economist Dieter Helm looks at how and why we have failed to tackle the issue of global warming and argues for a new, pragmatic rethinking of energy policy. “An optimistically levelheaded book about actually dealing with global warming.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review “[Dieter Helm] has turned his agile mind to one of the great problems of our age: why the world's efforts to curb the carbon dioxide emissions behind global warming have gone so wrong, and how it can do better.”—Pilita Clark,Financial Times

Book Populism and Neoliberalism

Download or read book Populism and Neoliberalism written by David Cayla and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-22 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Populism and Neoliberalism argues that the roots of populism lay in the contradiction between the democratic ideal, which implies that the people should decide, and neoliberal governance, which seeks to make markets and competition the arbiters of major social developments. Neoliberalism is not the product of a clearly conceived ideology but rather a set of doctrines based on a few major principles which have been embraced by decision-makers of all kinds with little reassessment along the way. In practice, a certain art of governing that exploited an economic thinking insensitive to social complexity gradually imposed itself by being wrongly identified as the successor to liberalism. The rise of populist movements poses a significant challenge to liberal democracies, yet the causes of these movements remain beyond the understanding of experts. The explanation of populism is often limited to a mere political analysis. Contrary to that, this book investigates the economic and social dynamics of the free-market system and explains how populism emerges from its imbalances. It also aims to explain the emergence of the neoliberal doctrines during the 1930s and to characterise their common features. In light of this, it explores how the rise of inequality and social discontent create a pressing duty to develop another model, and argues that we must now rethink our policies in depth in order to respond to the challenge of authoritarian populism. This book marks a significant intervention in the debate about the rise and fall of neoliberalism. Its analysis of the links between the failings of neoclassical economics and the failings of neoliberal politics provides essential reading for anyone interested in the damaging impact of neoliberalism, the failings of neoclassical economics, and explanations for the rise of populism.

Book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding  Dodo Press

Download or read book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Dodo Press written by David Hume and published by . This book was released on 2009-03 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. He is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist. During Hume's lifetime, he was more famous as a historian; his six-volume History of England was a bestseller well into the nineteenth century and the standard work on English history for many years. Hume was the first philosopher of the modern era to develop a systematically naturalistic philosophy. In the twentieth century, he has increasingly become a source of inspiration for those in political philosophy and economics as an early and subtle thinker in the liberal tradition, as well as an early innovator in the genre of the essay in his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1744, he applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. From 1763 to 1765, Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris, where he was admired by Voltaire and lionised by the ladies in society.

Book The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning written by Keith J. Holyoak and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-18 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is the first comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning. Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading. The volume also includes work related to developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, education, law, and medicine. Scholars and students in all these fields and others will find this to be a valuable collection.

Book From Red to Green

    Book Details:
  • Author : Paul Donovan
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2013-01-11
  • ISBN : 1136529136
  • Pages : 258 pages

Download or read book From Red to Green written by Paul Donovan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an economist and an investment professional, this book addresses the twin crises that the world is facing in the form of a simultaneous financial and environmental credit crunch. Financially, consumers are less able to consume now, and pay later. Environmentally, we may have already reached our credit limit and the bill for past financial and environmental consumption is falling due. Whether the financial credit crunch constrains consumers in a way that will be environmentally supportive, naturally slowing the consumption of finite resources, or hinders any effective resolution of the environmental credit crunch is of crucial importance. Policy responses to the financial crisis are likely to be constrained by the political need to support the economic status quo, and when combined with a global reduction in available investment capital there are serious challenges ahead if the economic and environmental damage of the environmental credit crunch is to be minimised. This book asks whether financial crunch-induced changes in consumer behaviour will be enough to avoid, or reduce, the environmental crunch many believe is just round the corner. Donovan and Hudson combine their respective economic and environmental perspectives to address this key question, reviewing this 'tale of two crunches' from the perspective of different economic sectors. The answer to the conundrum this book poses may lie in the only unlimited resource on the planet - human ingenuity.

Book Talking Cures and Placebo Effects

Download or read book Talking Cures and Placebo Effects written by David A. Jopling and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-05-29 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticisms throughout their history. In this book David Jopling argues that the changes achieved through therapy are really just functions of placebos that rally the mind's native healing powers. It is a bold new work that delivers yet another blow to Freud and his followers.

Book Burn Out

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dieter Helm
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2017-03-15
  • ISBN : 030022799X
  • Pages : 303 pages

Download or read book Burn Out written by Dieter Helm and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An energy revolution is under way with far-reaching consequences for nations, companies, and the way we address climate change Low oil prices are sending shockwaves through the global economy, and longtime industry observer Dieter Helm explains how this and other shifts are the harbingers of a coming energy revolution and how the fossil fuel age will come to an end. Surveying recent surges in technological innovations, Helm’s provocative new book documents how the global move toward the internet-of-things will inexorably reduce the demand for oil, gas, and renewables—and prove more effective than current efforts to avert climate change. Oil companies and energy utilities must begin to adapt their existing business models or face future irrelevancy. Oil-exporting nations, particularly in the Middle East, will be negatively impacted, whereas the United States and European countries that are investing in new technologies may find themselves leaders in the geopolitical game. Timely and controversial, this book concludes by offering advice on what governments and businesses can and should do now to prepare for a radically different energy future.

Book American Philosophy

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Kaag
  • Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Release : 2016-10-11
  • ISBN : 0374713111
  • Pages : 273 pages

Download or read book American Philosophy written by John Kaag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic wisdom contained in a lost library helps the author turn his life around John Kaag is a dispirited young philosopher at sea in his marriage and his career when he stumbles upon West Wind, a ruin of an estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that belonged to the eminent Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy and a direct intellectual descendent of William James, the father of American philosophy and psychology, with whom Kaag feels a deep kinship. It is James’s question “Is life worth living?” that guides this remarkable book. The books Kaag discovers in the Hocking library are crawling with insects and full of mold. But he resolves to restore them, as he immediately recognizes their importance. Not only does the library at West Wind contain handwritten notes from Whitman and inscriptions from Frost, but there are startlingly rare first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As Kaag begins to catalog and read through these priceless volumes, he embarks on a thrilling journey that leads him to the life-affirming tenets of American philosophy—self-reliance, pragmatism, and transcendence—and to a brilliant young Kantian who joins him in the restoration of the Hocking books. Part intellectual history, part memoir, American Philosophy is ultimately about love, freedom, and the role that wisdom can play in turning one’s life around.

Book A Serious Matter and True Joy

Download or read book A Serious Matter and True Joy written by Margaret Eleanor Menninger and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to accept that German cities and states run their own cultural institutions (concert halls, theatres, museums). This book shows how this now “self-evident” fact became a reality in the course of the long nineteenth century.

Book Poetics of Curriculum  Poetics of Life

Download or read book Poetics of Curriculum Poetics of Life written by Mary-Elizabeth Vaquer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through multiple lenses of curriculum studies, the author explores how poetry is situated in the pedagogical world. Her work aims to illuminate how poetry is studied in schools and how these practices of studying poetry give poetry its cultural identity. Each chapter is guided by insight from John Dewey’s Art as Experience which promotes explorations of opportunities for students to have profound experiences with poetry and art in schools. The purpose of this book is not to offer a prescription for teachers to use in their classrooms. This is not an outline regarding how someone should include poetry in a lesson plan. Rather, the author explores why poetry is important in our lives and how poetry can contribute to opening avenues for new possibilities through imagination and transformation based on phenomenological experience and scholarship. She explores poetry through Dewey’s notion of aesthetics across diverse aspects of meaning making through poetry in a contemporary context. She also explores the influences that poetry has on the curriculum of our lives, and the influence that our lived curriculum has on the future of poetry.

Book The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx written by Andrew Pendakis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are very few figures in history that have exerted as much and as varied an influence as Karl Marx. His work represents an unrivalled intervention into fields as various as philosophy, journalism, economics, history, politics and cultural criticism. His name is invoked across the political spectrum in connection to revolution and insurrection, social justice and economic transformation. The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx is the definitive reference guide to Marx's life and work. Written by an international team of leading Marx scholars, the book offers comprehensive coverage of Marx's: life and contexts; sources, influences and encounters; key writings; major themes and topics; and reception and influence. The defining feature of this Companion is its attention to the new directions in Marxism that animate the theoretical, scientific, and political sides of Marx's thought. Gender and the growing importance of Marxist-feminism is treated as equally important to clarifying Marx today as traditional and diverse categories of critique such as class, capital, and mode of production. Similarly, this Companion showcases the methodological and political importance of Marxism to environmentalist politics. Finally, the volume examines in detail non-European Marxisms, demonstrating the centrality of Marxist thought to political movements both within and beyond the global north. This book is the ideal research resource for anyone working on Marx and his ideas today, and as an entry point, if you are approaching Marx's thought for the first time.

Book The Future of American Higher Education

Download or read book The Future of American Higher Education written by Joseph L. DeVitis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-03 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This impressive anthology presents the reader with an introduction to a gallery of public intellectuals through the critical eyes of a wide array of contributing writers from various academic fields. Both the latter and the public intellectuals themselves are responding to the state of American higher education. Importantly, most of them (there are a few public intellectuals in the book who cling closer to the status quo) do not separate colleges and universities from the political, economic, and social currents of American society. They attack the realities of growing social inequality, the intractable presence of institutional racism, and the recurrent reliance on the free market as the arbiter of value. Public intellectuals assess the impact of these social factors on the organization and practices of contemporary American higher education. They force the reader to consider serious challenges to the current arrangement of higher learning and, as such, they ask us to assess the efficacy of their respective perspectives. Do they present the reader with insight or idealism, pathways or dead ends? This compendium provides an abundance of ideas for higher education leaders, policy makers, faculty members, trustees and governmental officials as well as social theorists and graduate students interested in higher education careers."—Richard Guarasci, President Emeritus of Wagner CollegeJust as our society is polarized, higher education is no less divided as to its mission and purpose, whether it should be preparing students for employment or for engagement as citizens, whether it should be corporatist and profit-driven or promote intellectual curiosity and independent thinking, and whether it should pursue a neoliberal agenda or promote a liberal education. Whose scholarship, culture and epistemologies should be validated? Should it be a private or a public good? Preserve tenure or erode it? What role should colleges and universities play in addressing economic inequality and systemic racism? The answers to these questions are critical for the future of our society as our universities and colleges are the nurseries of the values and philosophies that shape it.The chapters in this book review the contributions of seventeen public intellectuals who have been at the forefront of these issues and significantly contributed to these debates. Each describes the genesis of each scholar’s ideas and presents and critiques his or her core insights and arguments. The seventeen public intellectuals represent a spectrum of opinion, from the conservative to the progressive.At this pivotal moment when much of higher education is in economic crisis, and public trust in it has been eroded, this book offers a robust entry point for considering the options and directions ahead for anyone in a leadership position. The book will also be valuable for higher education courses to stimulate debate about these critical issues and introduce readers to the seminal thinkers in the field.Public Intellectuals PresentedStanley AronowitzMichael BérubéMarc BousquetPatricia Hill CollinsLori Patton DavisWilliam DeresiewiczStanley Fish Marybeth GasmanHenry GirouxSara Goldrick-RabbAmy GutmannRussell JacobyRandall KennedyDavid KirpDavid F. LabareeChristopher NewfieldMichael Roth

Book Political Friendship and Degrowth

Download or read book Political Friendship and Degrowth written by Areti Giannopoulou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing a contemporary account of political friendship and synthesizing it with the radical movement of degrowth, this book provides the ethical grounding and the rationale of an alternative economy which serves human flourishing. The Aristotelian political friendship embodies active concern for the others’ well-being that contemporary societies lack; the crucial problems of ecological destruction and global poverty illustrate this friendship deficit. Arguing for the need for re-embracing a friendly civic ethos and re-aligning the economy with moral objectives, the author updates the Aristotelian idea and identifies it with democratic-autonomous political-economic praxis that ensures citizens’ self-actualization. Degrowth movement questioning economic growth and productivism, and privileging a simpler life with less material goods, favours political friendship precisely because it nourishes its unconscious substratum namely human instinctual sociality. The call for genuine democratic political praxis that political friendship implies could enable the degrowth movement to retain its radical character and accomplish the shift to an economy which serves life. The book is worthwhile studying by students and researchers across social sciences and especially by scholars in the fields of sociology, philosophy, and politics, but also a broader readership sensitive to the issues of social and environmental sustainability will find this work extremely interesting.

Book Handbook of the Psychology of Science

Download or read book Handbook of the Psychology of Science written by Gregory Feist, PhD and published by Springer Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Print+CourseSmart

Book The Many Lives of Ajax

Download or read book The Many Lives of Ajax written by Timothy V. Dugan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-03-04 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ajax, the archetypal Greek warrior, has over the years been trivialized as a peripheral character in the classics through Hollywood representations, and by the use of his name on household cleaning products. Examining a broad range of sources--from film, art and literature to advertising and sports--this study of the "Bulwark of the Achaeans" and his mythological image redefines his presence in Western culture, revealing him as the predominant voice in The Iliad and in myriad works across the classical canon.