Download or read book Man a Machine And Man a Plant written by Julien Offray de La Mettrie and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first modern translation of the complete texts of La Mettrie's pioneering L'Homme machine and L'Homme plante, first published in 1747 and 1748, respectively, this volume also includes translations of the advertisement and dedication to L'Homme machine. Justin Leiber's introduction illuminates the radical thinking and advocacy of the passionate La Mettrie and provides cogent analysis of La Mettrie's relationship to such important philosophical figures as Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, and of his lasting influence on the development of materialism, cognitive studies, linguistics, and other areas of intellectual inquiry.
Download or read book La Mettrie Machine Man and Other Writings written by Julien Offray de La Mettrie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-04-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-51), author of Machine Man (1747), was the most uncompromising of the materialists of the eighteenth century, and the provocative title of his work ensured it a succès de scandale in his own time. It was however a serious, if polemical, attempt to provide an explanation of the workings of the human body and mind in purely material terms and to show that thought was the product of the workings of the brain alone. This fully annotated edition presents an English translation of the text together with the most important of La Mettrie's other philosophical works translated into English, and Ann Thomson's introduction examines his aims and the scandalous moral consequences which he drew from his materialism.
Download or read book La Mettrie written by Kathleen Anne Wellman and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julien Offray de la Mettrie, best known as the author of L'Homme machine, appears as a minor character in most accounts of the Enlightenment. But in this intellectual biography by Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie--physician-philosophe--emerges as a central figure whose medical approach to philosophical and moral issues had a profound influence on the period and its legacy. Wellman's study presents La Mettrie as an advocate of progressive medical theory and practice who consistently applied his medical concerns to the reform of philosophy, morals, and society. By examining his training with the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave, his satires lampooning the ignorance and venality of the medical profession, and his medical treatises on subjects ranging from vertigo to veneral disease, Wellman illuminates the medical roots of La Mettrie's philosophy. She shows how medicine encouraged La Mettrie to undertake an impiricist critique of the philosophical tradition and provided the foundation for a medical materialism that both shaped his understanding of the possibilities of moral and social reform and led him to espouse the cause of the philosophers. Elucidating the medical view of nature, human beings, and society that the Enlightenment and La Mettrie in particular bequethed to the modern world, La Mettrie makes an important contribution to our understanding of both that period and our own.
Download or read book Language Culture and Cognition from Descartes to Lewes written by Timo Kaitaro and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monograph tells a different story on the history of modern philosophy: the narrative is no longer centred on the question whether knowledge results from experience or reason, but whether experience and reason are in fact possible without language.
Download or read book Edison s Eve written by Gaby Wood and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and informative exploration of our age-old obsession with “making life.” Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was “the Turk,” a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a mechanical doll—a perfect woman, mass-produced? Can a twenty-first-century robot express human emotions of its own? Taking up themes long familiar from the realms of fairy tales and science fiction, Gaby Wood traces the hidden prehistory of a modern idea—the thinking, hoaxes, and inventions that presaged contemporary robotics and the current experiments with artificial intelligence. Informed by the author’s scientific and historical research, Edison’s Eve is also a brilliant literary, cultural, and philosophical examination of the motives that have driven human beings to pursue the creation of mechanical life, and the effects of that pursuit—both in its successes and in its failures—on our sense of what makes us human.
Download or read book LaMettrie s L Homme Machine written by Aram Vartanian and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a classic of the French Enlightenment, L'Homme Machine has in the past been of equal interest to students of philosophy, science, and literature. The present edition offers the first established text, with extensive notes. In his introduction, Dr. Vartanian discusses La Mettrie’s thesis, its sources, the place of the man-machine idea in the development of La Mettrie’s materialism, and its critical impact on the intellectual struggles of the eighteenth century. Originally published in 1960. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Human Animal Interactions in the Eighteenth Century written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did humans respond to the eighteenth-century discovery of countless new species of animals? This book explores the gamut of human-animal interactions: from love to cultural identifications, moral reflections, philosophical debates, classification systems, mechanical copies, insults and literary creativity.
Download or read book Science and Humanism in the French Enlightenment written by Aram Vartanian and published by Rookwood Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vartanian (1922-97) offered this set of three essays to the series editors just before he died and had no opportunity to write a general introduction explaining the direction they take. However, they were deemed to be a major contribution to the study of the French Enlightenment and are presented as
Download or read book The Wisdom of Pleasures written by Julien Offray de la Mettrie and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He's known for his audacious claim in 'Man a Machine' that humans can be reduced to their mechanism: but La Mettrie wrote other books too. In these hidden gems, the most radical of all Enlightenment thinkers lays bare his hedonistic ideas. In a godless universe that seems to be engineered only around pleasure and pain, how should we act? Should we just give in to all-out debauchery as our destiny, or is there a nobler path?This is the first-ever English translation of these books, which were originally published in 1747 and 1751.
Download or read book Mind and Cosmos written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Download or read book The Bookman written by Lavie Tidhar and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a 19th century unlike our own, the shadowy assassin known as the Bookman moves unseen. His weapons are books; his enemies are many. And when Orphan, a young man with a mysterious past, loses his love to the sinister machinations of the Bookman, Orphan would stop at nothing to bring her back from the dead. In The Bookman, World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar writes a love letter to books, and to the serial literature of the Victorian era: full of hair-breadth escapes and derring-dos, pirates and automatons, assassins and poets, a world in which real life authors mingle freely with their fictional creations – and where nothing is quite as it seems. New 2016 edition includes the novelette “Murder in the Cathedral”. Discover, truthfully, what actually happened when Orphan visited Paris. File Under: Steampunk [Alternate Victorian London | Reptilian royalty | Diabolical anarchists | Extraordinary adventure!]
Download or read book From Beast machine to Man machine written by Leonora Cohen Rosenfield and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior written by Robert J. Richards and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With insight and wit, Robert J. Richards focuses on the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appearance in the eighteenth century to their controversial state today. Particularly important in the nineteenth century were Charles Darwin's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, which Richards considers against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community. Many critics have argued that the Darwinian revolution stripped nature of moral purpose and ethically neutered the human animal. Richards contends, however, that Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and their disciples attempted to reanimate moral life, believing that the evolutionary process gave heart to unselfish, altruistic behavior. "Richards's book is now the obvious introduction to the history of ideas about mind and behavior in the nineteenth century."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement "Not since the publication of Michael Ghiselin's The Triumph of the Darwinian Method has there been such an ambitious, challenging, and methodologically self-conscious interpretation of the rise and development and evolutionary theories and Darwin's role therein."—John C. Greene, Science "His book . . . triumphantly achieves the goal of all great scholarship: it not only informs us, but shows us why becoming thus informed is essential to understanding our own issues and projects."—Daniel C. Dennett, Philosophy of Science
Download or read book Conscious Robots written by Paul Kwatz and published by . This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lives up to all the hype" "An absolutely necessary book", "Should be taught in schools", "Dynamite, this is a brilliant book" - see the reviews on Amazon.com. The Future's Most important Book: -- Why we're so convinced that we're in charge when we're really just carrying out evolution's instructions -- Why our lives, as Buddha suggested, are inherently unsatisfactory, despite our luxurious homes, successful careers and loving families -- How humans will one day take control of their conscious minds, get happy and stay happy. And the real reason Aliens haven't visited the Earth yet... 107 minutes (average read time) to change the way you think about everything. "Easy to understand and persuasive" "Fun, short, insightful" "Bad Ass "
Download or read book Inborn Knowledge written by Colin McGinn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that nativism is true and important but mysterious, examining the particular case of ideas of sensible qualities. In this book, Colin McGinn presents a concise, clear, and compelling argument that the origins of knowledge are innate—that nativism, not empiricism, is correct in its theory of how concepts are acquired. McGinn considers the particular case of sensible qualities—ideas of color, shape, taste, and so on. He argues that these, which he once regarded as the strongest case for the empiricist position, are in fact not well explained by the empiricist account that they derive from interactions with external objects. Rather, he contends, ideas of sensible qualities offer the strongest case for the nativist position—that a large range of our knowledge is inborn, not acquired through the senses. Yet, McGinn cautions, how this can be is deeply problematic; we have no good theories about how innate knowledge is possible. Innate knowledge is a mystery, though a fact. McGinn describes the traditional debate between empiricism and nativism; offers an array of arguments against empiricism; constructs an argument in favor of nativism; and considers the philosophical consequences of adopting the nativist position, discussing perception, the mind–body problem, the unconscious, metaphysics, and epistemology.
Download or read book The Ultimate Experience written by Y. Harari and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-03-07 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia, war was viewed as a supreme test. In the period 1750-1850 war became much more than a test: it became a secular revelation. This new understanding of war as revelation completely transformed Western war culture, revolutionizing politics, the personal experience of war, the status of common soldiers, and the tenets of military theory.
Download or read book The Hedonist Alternative written by Julien Offray de la Mettrie and published by . This book was released on 2018-07-22 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we accept this world as the only real one, and that all we are and all we do is predetermined by the mechanical laws of nature, what will become of our morals, what will be the meaning of life? How can we find happiness in a world like that? Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-51) explores these issues, drawing on his experience and training in medicine. His conclusions were too radical even for his fellow Enlightenment thinkers; Voltaire once wrote that "there's a great difference between fighting the superstitions of mankind, and breaking all social bonds and the fetters of virtue. La Mettrie would have been dangerous if he hadn't been completely insane." (Voltaire, Letter MDCCCIII, 27 Jan. 1752). This e-book contains the following texts, some in their first-ever English translation: "Anti-Seneca", or "On Happiness""The System of Epicurus"A chapter on hedonism from "The Natural History of the Soul""A Summary of Philosophical Systems"
