Download or read book Chance Luck and Destiny written by Peter Dickinson and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chance Luck Destiny written by Peter Dickinson and published by Orion. This book was released on 1975 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Luck written by Nicholas Rescher and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2001-03-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luck touches us all. "Why me?" we complain when things go wrong—though seldom when things go right. But although luck has a firm hold on all our lives, we seldom reflect on it in a cogent, concerted way. In Luck, one of our most eminent philosophers offers a realistic view of the nature and operation of luck to help us come to sensible terms with life in a chaotic world. Differentiating luck from fate (inexorable destiny) and fortune (mere chance), Nicholas Rescher weaves a colorful tapestry of historical examples, from the use of lots in the Old and New Testaments to Thomas Gataker’s treatise of 1619 on the great English lottery of 1612, from casino gambling to playing the stock market. Because we are creatures of limited knowledge who do and must make decisions in the light of incomplete information, Rescher argues, we are inevitably at the mercy of luck. It behooves us to learn more about it.
Download or read book No Such Thing as Luck written by Charlie P. Johnston and published by Johnston Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biblical perspective of the concept of luck, including fate, lot, fortune, destiny, and chance
Download or read book A Handbook to Luck written by Cristina García and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-04-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 60s, three teenagers from around the globe are making their way in the world: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon's daughter in Tehran. We follow them through the years, surviving war, disillusionment, and love, as their lives and paths intersect. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement through time, and the psychological shifts between childhood and adulthood, A Handbook to Luck is a beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel by beloved storyteller Cristina García.
Download or read book Success and Luck written by Robert H. Frank and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a compelling book that explains why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in their success, why that hurts everyone, and what we can do about it How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy. Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones—and enormous income differences—over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways. But, Frank argues, we could decrease the inequality driven by sheer luck by adopting simple, unintrusive policies that would free up trillions of dollars each year—more than enough to fix our crumbling infrastructure, expand healthcare coverage, fight global warming, and reduce poverty, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. If this sounds implausible, you'll be surprised to discover that the solution requires only a few, noncontroversial steps. Compellingly readable, Success and Luck shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.
Download or read book Chase Chance and Creativity written by James H. Austin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research. This first book by the author of Zen and the Brain examines the role of chance in the creative process. James Austin tells a personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research; the conclusions he reaches shed light on the creative process in any field. Austin shows how, in his own investigations, unpredictable events shaped the outcome of his research and brought about novel results. He then goes beyond this story of serendipity to propose a new classification of the varieties of chance, drawing on his own research and examples from the history of science—including the famous accidents that led Fleming to the discovery of penicillin. Finally, he explores the nature of the creative process, considering not only the environmental and neurophysiological correlates of creativity but also the role of intuition in both scientific discoveries and spiritual quests. This updated MIT Press paperback edition includes a new introduction and recent material on medical research, creativity, and spirituality.
Download or read book The Power of Coincidence written by David Richo and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychotherapist and author behind The Five Things We Cannot Change explores how unexpected events can help us find direction, understand ourselves, and fulfill our potential Meaningful coincidences and surprising connections occur all the time in our daily lives, yet we often fail to appreciate how they can guide us, warn us, and confirm us on our life’s path. This book explores how meaningful coincidence operates in our daily lives, in our intimate relationships, and in our creative endeavors. The Power of Coincidence will help you to: interpret a series of similar happenings, open yourself to assisting forces around you, understand how your dreams can guide you through life events, use your creative imagination in life choices—and live in accord with your deepest needs and wishes, as revealed to you by meaningful coincidences. Originally published under the title Unexpected Miracles, the author has fully revised and updated the book for this edition.
Download or read book Luck written by Ed Smith and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For aspiring cricketer Ed Smith, luck was for other people. Ed believed that the successful cricketer made his own luck by an application of will power, elimination of error, and the relentless pursuit of excellence. But when a freak accident at the crease at Lords prematurely ended Ed Smith's international cricketing career, it changed everything - and prompted him to look anew at his own life through the prism of luck.Tracing the history of the concepts of luck and fortune, destiny and fate, from the ancient Greeks to the present day - in religion, in banking, in politics - Ed Smith argues that the question of luck versus skill is as pertinent today as it ever has been. He challenges us to think again about privilege and opportunity, to re-examine the question of innate ability and of gifts and talents accidentally conferred at birth. Weaving in his personal stories - notably the chance meeting of a beautiful stranger who would become his wife on a train he seemed fated to miss - he puts to us the idea that in life, luck cannot be underestimated: without any means of explaining our differing lots in life, the world without luck is one in which you deserve every ill that befalls you, where envy dominates and averageness is the stifling ideal. Embracing luck leads us to a fresh reappraisal of the nature of success, opportunity and fairness.
Download or read book What Are the Chances written by Barbara Blatchley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 William James Book Award, American Psychological Association Division 1 in General Psychology Most of us, no matter how rational we think we are, have a lucky charm, a good-luck ritual, or some other custom we follow in the hope that it will lead to a good result. Is the idea of luckiness just a way in which we try to impose order on chaos? Do we live in a world of flukes and coincidences, good and bad breaks, with outcomes as random as a roll of the dice—or can our beliefs help change our luck? What Are the Chances? reveals how psychology and neuroscience explain the significance of the idea of luck. Barbara Blatchley explores how people react to random events in a range of circumstances, examining the evidence that the belief in luck helps us cope with a lack of control. She tells the stories of lucky and unlucky people—who won the lottery multiple times, survived seven brushes with death, or found an apparently cursed Neanderthal mummy—as well as the accidental discoveries that fundamentally changed what we know about the brain. Blatchley considers our frequent misunderstanding of randomness, the history of luckiness in different cultures and religions, the surprising benefits of magical thinking, and many other topics. Offering a new view of how the brain handles the unexpected, What Are the Chances? shows why an arguably irrational belief can—fingers crossed—help us as we struggle with an unpredictable world.
Download or read book Chance Fortune and the Outlaws written by Shane Berryhill and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-01-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For as long as he can remember, 14-year-old Joshua Blevins has wanted to be a superhero. There's only one problem: he doesn't have any superpowers. However, Josh isn't about to let that stop him.
Download or read book Leadership written by William Russell White and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 1296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Luck Fate and Fortune written by Esther Eidinow and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make sense of apparently random events, is irrepressible. Why and how the ancient Greeks tried to foretell the outcome of the present is the subject of Esther Eidinow's lively appraisal, which explores the legacy of ancient Greek notions of luck, fate and fortune in our own era, drawing on approaches to cognitive anthropology. Perhaps the most famous of all sites of prediction is the Oracle at Delphi. But the Delphic Oracle is only the best-known example from a landscape covered by oracular sanctuaries; while across the literary genres of antiquity there are myriad tales - such as that of doomed Oedipus - which wrestle with the cruel vicissitudes of fate and fortune. Exploring some of the key ideas of ancient Greek culture that resonate with modern conceptions of destiny, Eidinow examines the ancients' notion of luck as a means to explain daily experiences. Focusing on writers such as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes, the author shows how concepts of fate in antiquity changed over time, in response to social and political currents.She draws too on modern cultural texts like "Terminator 2" and "Lawrence of Arabia", demonstrating how the recurring questions 'what if?' and 'why me?' are fundamental to the human relationship with an uncertain future, whether it be in the ancient past or the present day.
Download or read book The Myth of Luck written by Steven D. Hales and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck-novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics-and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of probability and exploring how luck relates to theology, sports, ethics, gambling, knowledge, and present-day psychology. As we travel across traditions, times and cultures, we come to realize that it's not that as soon as we solve one philosophical problem with luck that two more appear, like heads on a hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is nothing to defeat: luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. By introducing us to compelling arguments and convincing reasons that explain why there is no such thing as luck, we finally see why in a very real sense we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Luck written by Duncan Pritchard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume of its kind to provide a curated collection of cutting-edge scholarship on the philosophy of luck Offers an in-depth examination of the concept of luck, which has often been overlooked in philosophical study Includes discussions of luck from a range of philosophical perspectives, including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and cognitive science Examines the role of luck in core philosophical problems, such as free will Features work from the main philosophers writing on luck today
Download or read book No Country for Old Men written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-11-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road comes a "profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered" novel (The Washington Post) that returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of the famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Download or read book Fate and Life written by Michael Allen Fox and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some believe that fate rules our lives, while others dismiss the idea outright. Fate remains central to many cultural outlooks, and in our age of conflict, climate change, and pandemic, it features conspicuously in debates about the future. A careful examination of this important idea – its background, many meanings, and significance for everyday life – is not only informative and intriguing but also timely. In Fate and Life Michael Fox confronts the idea of fate head on and demonstrates that how we interpret and apply this concept can make it work for rather than against us. Many discussions characterize fate negatively or as part of the occult, representing it as a supernatural force that stifles our freedom. Fateful ideas have also helped rationalize and promote the persecution of certain groups. But viewed more positively, fate can be understood as the given conditions of existence and the imponderable way certain unanticipated events momentously alter the path we follow over time. Thinking about fate teaches us about who we are, how we see the world, and our evaluation of the possibilities of life. Fate and Life provides a multicultural and global account of how we talk about the idea of fate, how we use and misuse it, and how it contrasts with notions like destiny and karma. Fox’s original perspective – a breakthrough in philosophy and the history of ideas – shows that fate is supported by experience; it is compatible with our sense of agency and purpose; and it helps us make sense of our lives.
