Download or read book On Modern Origins written by Richard Kennington and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Kennington (1921-1999), a professor for many years at Pennsylvania State University and the Catholic University of America, was renowned for his insight in reading and teaching early modern philosophy. Although he published articles and spoke widely, never before have his writings been collected in a book. On Modern Origins deftly shows how modern thinkers assessed the errors of the classical tradition and established in its place a philosophy that fuses a new meaning of nature and of theory with humanitarian goals. This volume is an essential source for scholars seeking to understand the contemporary significance of the dawning of the modern era.
Download or read book Modern Origins written by Jean-Jacques Hublin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, Africa has taken a central position in the search for the timing and mechanisms leading to modern human origins, and the rich archaeological and human paleontological record of North Africa is critical to this search. In this volume, we bring together new research into the archaeology, human paleontology, chronology, and environmental context of modern human origins in North Africa. The result is a volume that better integrates the North African record into the modern human origins debate and at the same time highlights the research questions that are currently the focus of continued work in the area.
Download or read book The Origins of the Modern World written by Robert Marks and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the modern world get to be the way it is? How did we come to live in a globalized, industrialized, capitalistic set of nation-states? Moving beyond Eurocentric explanations and histories that revolve around the rise of the West, distinguished historian Robert B. Marks explores the roles of Asia, Africa, and the New World in the global story. He defines the modern world as marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, and an escape from environmental constraints. Bringing the saga to the present, Marks considers how and why the United States emerged as a world power in the 20th century and the sole superpower by the 21st century; the powerful resurgence of Asia; and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment.
Download or read book The Origins of Modern Germany written by Geoffrey Barraclough and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1984 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "No one is likely to underrate the importance for the rest of Europe--and, indeed, for world history--of the German reaction, beginning in the days of Bismarck, to the crisis of modern industrial capitalism," writes Professor Barraclough, "but the peculiar character of that reaction is only comprehensible in the light of Germany's past. Factors deeply rooted in German history . . . constituted an iron framework, a mold within which were cast all German efforts, from 1870 to 1939, to cope with the problems of modern capitalist society."
Download or read book Origins of the Modern Mind written by Merlin Donald and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993-03-15 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to artificial intelligence, presenting an enterprising and original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form.
Download or read book Global Origins of the Modern Self from Montaigne to Suzuki written by Avram Alpert and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how writers across five continents and four centuries have debated ideas about what it means to be an individual, and shows that the modern self is an ongoing project of global history. In Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki, Avram Alpert contends that scholars have yet to fully grasp the constitutive force of global connections in the making of modern selfhood. Alpert argues that canonical moments of self-making from around the world share a surprising origin in the colonial anthropology of Europeans in the Americas. While most intellectual histories of modernity begin with the Cartesian inward turn, Alpert shows how this turn itself was an evasion of the impact of the colonial encounter. He charts a counter-history of the modern self, tracing lines of influence that stretch from Michel de Montaigne’s encounter with the Tupi through the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into German Idealism, American Transcendentalism, postcolonial critique, and modern Zen. Alpert considers an unusually wide range of thinkers, including Kant, Hegel, Fanon, Emerson, Du Bois, Senghor, and Suzuki. This book not only breaks with disciplinary conventions about period and geography but also argues that these conventions obscure our ability to understand the modern condition. Avram Alpert is Lecturer in the Writing Program at Princeton University.
Download or read book Origins of the Modern Japanese State written by E. Herbert Norman and published by New York : Pantheon Books. This book was released on 1975 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Origins of Modern Witchcraft written by Aoumiel and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2000 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on the ancient origins of religion to give Wiccans, Witches, and the Neo-Pagans a sense of where they belong in history.
Download or read book The Origins of Modern Science written by Ofer Gal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book attempts to introduce to its readers major chapters in the history of science. It tries to present science as a human endeavor - a great achievement, and all the more human for it. In place of the story of progress and its obstacles or a parade of truths revealed, this book stresses the contingent and historical nature of scientific knowledge. Knowledge, science included, is always developed by real people, within communities, answering immediate needs and challenges shaped by place, culture, and historical events with resources drawn from their present and past. Chronologically, this book spans from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton's Principle. The book starts in the high Middle Ages and proceeds to introduce the readers to the historian's way of inquiry. At the center of this introduction is the Gothic Cathedral - a grand achievement of human knowledge, rooted in a complex cultural context, and a powerful metaphor for science. The book alternates thematic chapters with chapters concentrating on an era. Yet it attempts to integrate discussion of all different aspects of the making of knowledge: social and cultural settings, challenges and opportunities; intellectual motivations and worries; epistemological assumptions and technical ideas; instruments and procedures. The cathedral metaphor is evoked intermittently throughout, to tie the many themes discussed to the main lesson: that the complex set of beliefs, practices, and institutions we call science is a particular, contingent human phenomenon"--
Download or read book Origins of the Modern Chinese State written by Philip A. Kuhn and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is "Chinese about Chinas modern state? This book proposes that the state we see today has developed over the past two centuries largely as a response to internal challenges emerging from the late empire. Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political participation affect state power? How is the state to secure a share of societys wealth? In response to the changing demands of the age, this agenda has been expressed in changing language. Yet, because the underlying pattern remains recognizable, the modernization of the state in response to foreign aggression can be studied in longer perspective. The author offers three concrete studies to illustrate the constitutional agenda in action: how the early nineteenth-century scholar-activist Wei Yuan confronted the relation between broadened political participation and authoritarian state power; how the reformist proposals of the influential scholar Feng Guifen were received by mainstream bureaucrats during the 1898 reform movement; and how fiscal problems of the late empire formed a backdrop to agricultural collectivization in the 1950s. In each case, the author presents the "modern constitutional solution as only the most recent answer to old Chinese questions. The book concludes by describing the transformation of the constitutional agenda over the course of the modern period.
Download or read book The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution written by Simon J. Gilhooley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhooley traces how debates around the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia gave rise to the articulation of this constitutional interpretation, which constrained the radical potential of the constitutional text. To reconstruct the origins of this interpretation, Gilhooley draws on rich sources that include historical newspapers, pamphlets, and congressional debates. Examining free black activism in the North, Abolitionism in the 1830s, and the evolution of pro-slavery thought, this book shows how in navigating the existence of slavery in the District and the fundamental constitutional issue of the enslaved's personhood, Antebellum opponents of abolition came to promote an enduring but constraining constitutional imaginary.
Download or read book The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West written by Richard W. Davis and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume begins with a study by Douglass C. North that emphasizes the economic and social factors that encouraged the development of freedom in the West and inhibited its development in other societies, notably China. The Greeks first devised civil and political liberty, and also were the first to have a word, eleutheria, for the concept. Martin Ostwald traces the history of the word over the course of Greek history, seeking when and why it assumed a meaning similar to freedom. Brian Tierney demonstrates how the medieval Church, by perpetuating Roman traditions of popular election and inspiring representative government, was vital to the development of modern freedom. The earliest secular institutions to follow the example of the Church in shaping their own governments were the towns of Italy, and John Hine Mundy shows how the towns served as the initial training grounds for laymen in the practice of free government. Monarchs whose coffers were depleted by continuous warfare sought to tap the resources of the wealthy towns and better-off rural residents, but these long-independent groups were not easily bullied and gathered their representatives together to negotiate taxation and grievances. In two chapters, H. G. Koenigsberger traces this background of parliaments and estates from all over Europe from the thirteenth century through the early modern era. In seventeenth-century England, parliamentary legislation would become the major vehicle for protecting the liberties of the subject. Before that, however, the common law courts were the main arena for advancing freedom, as J. H. Baker shows in his examination of the key developments in the common law. Traditionally, the Renaissance and the Reformation have been looked upon as largely separate phenomena. William J. Bouwsma asserts that in fact they were closely linked, with profound consequences for the shaping of modern freedom. Donald R. Kelley discusses the various forms and justifications of resistance that arose against the powerful monarchies that had emerged from the chaos and confusion of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
Download or read book The Origins of Modern Town Planning written by Leonardo Benevolo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1971-08-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the social origins and history of town planning in nineteenth-century England and France. Carefully documented and copiously illustrated, Origins of Modern Town Planning delves into the social origins and history of town planning in nineteenth-century England and France.The touchstone of Benevolo's research is the relationship between town planning and politics. The twofold origin of the planning concept found expression in two schools of nineteenth-century thought: the Utopians—Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier—and their active vision of the town as a self-sufficient, coherent organism are contrasted with the specialists and officials who endeavored to remedy each urban defect individually by introducing new health regulations and social legislation into already existing towns. Despite the conceptual difference, however, Benevolo points out the shared ideology which inspired all achievements of thought and action—even the purely technical—and establishes its correspondence in spirit up to the time of modern socialism.
Download or read book Acquired Tastes written by Benjamin R. Cohen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How modern food helped make modern society between 1870 and 1930: stories of power and food, from bananas and beer to bread and fake meat. The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book shows that our current food system began to coalesce much earlier. Modern food came from and helped to create a society based on racial hierarchies, colonization, and global integration. Acquired Tastes explores these themes through a series of moments in food history—stories of bread, beer, sugar, canned food, cereal, bananas, and more—that shaped how we think about food today. Contributors consider the displacement of native peoples for agricultural development; the invention of Pilsner, the first international beer style; the “long con” of gilded sugar and corn syrup; Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and the rise of celebrity tastemakers; and faith in institutions and experts who produced, among other things, food rankings and fake meat.
Download or read book On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State written by Joseph R. Strayer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern state, however we conceive of it today, is based on a pattern that emerged in Europe in the period from 1100 to 1600. Inspired by a lifetime of teaching and research, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State is a classic work on what is known about the early history of the European state. This short, clear book book explores the European state in its infancy, especially in institutional developments in the administration of justice and finance. Forewords from Charles Tilly and William Chester Jordan demonstrate the perennial importance of Joseph Strayer's book, and situate it within a contemporary context. Tilly demonstrates how Strayer’s work has set the agenda for a whole generation of historical analysts, not only in medieval history but also in the comparative study of state formation. William Chester Jordan's foreword examines the scholarly and pedagogical setting within which Strayer produced his book, and how this both enhanced its accessibility and informed its focus on peculiarly English and French accomplishments in early state formation.
Download or read book John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing written by William Aspray and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990-12-07 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Aspray provides the first broad and detailed account of von Neumann's many different contributions to computing. John von Neumann (1903-1957) was unquestionably one of the most brilliant scientists of the twentieth century. He made major contributions to quantum mechanics and mathematical physics and in 1943 began a new and all-too-short career in computer science. William Aspray provides the first broad and detailed account of von Neumann's many different contributions to computing. These, Aspray reveals, extended far beyond his well-known work in the design and construction of computer systems to include important scientific applications, the revival of numerical analysis, and the creation of a theory of computing.Aspray points out that from the beginning von Neumann took a wider and more theoretical view than other computer pioneers. In the now famous EDVAC report of 1945, von Neumann clearly stated the idea of a stored program that resides in the computer's memory along with the data it was to operate on. This stored program computer was described in terms of idealized neurons, highlighting the analogy between the digital computer and the human brain. Aspray describes von Neumann's development during the next decade, and almost entirely alone, of a theory of complicated information processing systems, or automata, and the introduction of themes such as learning, reliability of systems with unreliable components, self-replication, and the importance of memory and storage capacity in biological nervous systems; many of these themes remain at the heart of current investigations in parallel or neurocomputing.Aspray allows the record to speak for itself. He unravels an intricate sequence of stories generated by von Neumann's work and brings into focus the interplay of personalities centered about von Neumann. He documents the complex interactions of science, the military, and business and shows how progress in applied mathematics was intertwined with that in computers. William Aspray is Director of the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Download or read book At the Origins of Modern Atheism written by Michael J. Buckley and published by . This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Michael J. Buckley investigates the rise of modern atheism, arguing convincingly that its roots reach back to the seventeenth century, when Catholic theologians began to call upon philosophy and science-rather than any intrinsically religious experience-to defend the existence of god. Buckley discusses in detail thinkers such as Lessius, Mersenne, Descartes, and Newton, who paved the way for the explicit atheism of Diderot and D'Holbach in the eighteenth century. [A] capaciously learned and brilliantly written book...This is one of the most interesting and closely argued works on theology that i have read in the last decade.-Lawrence S. Cunningham, Theology Today
