Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Download or read book History of the Idea of Progress written by Robert Nisbet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world. Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He sees Christianity as a key element in both secular and spiritual evolution, for it conveys all the ingredients of the modern idea of progress: the advancement of the human race in time, a single time frame for all the peoples and epochs of the past and present, the conception of time as linear, and the envisagement of the future as having a Utopian end. In his new introduction, Nisbet shows why the idea of progress remains of critical importance to studies of social evolution and natural history. He provides a contemporary basis for many disciplines, including sociology, economics, philosophy, religion, politics, and science. History of the Idea of Progress continues to be a major resource for scholars in all these areas.
Download or read book A Short History of Progress written by Ronald Wright and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.
Download or read book The Progress of America written by John Macgregor (Secretary to the Board of Trade.) and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 1436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sucker s Progress written by Herbert Asbury and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the great raconteur of the American underworld, and author of The Gangs of New York, comes Sucker’s Progress: An Information History of Gambling in America. From Midwestern Riverboats to East Coast Racetracks, Herbert Asbury explores the legal and illegal history of gambling in pre-WWII America. Describing notorious gambling havens like Chicago and New Orleans, as well as lesser-known outposts in cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio, Asbury examines the gambling houses, big and small, which peppered the American landscape. Also presented are the lives of some of America’s most famous gamblers, including Mike McDonald, John Morrissey, and Richard Canfield, as well as their infamous counterparts like “Canada Bill” and “Charley Black Eyes,” men who made their names as grifters and con men. Asbury also explores the games these men played, describing the rules and origins of dozens of dice and card games. From $1 lottery tickets to thousand dollar pokes antes, America’s love of gambling thrives today, but it was during Asbury’s era that gambling was established as an American passion. “Asbury embarked on what seems in retrospect an extraordinary mission: to document the entire underworld of America, from New Orleans to San Francisco....His studies of gambling, of the racial politics of the New Orleans French Quarter, and of the history of Chicago crime remain monuments to an ambition that was then confined to the fringes of pop history. Sucker’s Progress, his history of gambling and swindling in America, is dense with facts about a subject one would have thought persisted only as rumour and tall tale.”—A. GOPNIK, The New Yorker One of the best American books of its kind. He tells the story of the New York underworld of the past century, and his narrative is excellently presented in a book adorned with amusing pictures from the weeklies and newspapers.”—E. Pearson, The Sat. Rev. of Books
Download or read book Essays on the Progress of Nations written by Ezra Champion Seaman and published by . This book was released on 1846 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century written by Edward W. Byrn and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century by Edward W. Byrn
Download or read book Annual Report written by Peel River Land and Mineral Co and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page 1068 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memorials of the Early Progress of Methodism in the Eastern States written by Abel Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Chapter of American History Five Years progress of the Slave Power written by John Gorham Palfrey and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Annual Research Progress Report US Army Institute of Surgical Research written by and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 1486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Painting Its Rise and Progress from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time written by and published by . This book was released on 1846 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey Showing the Progress of the Survey During the Year written by United States Coast Survey and published by . This book was released on 1867 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Necessity the Reality and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race written by George Bancroft and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Progress of America written by John Mac Gregor and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 1546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of Literature Or the Progress of Language Writing and Letters from the Earlist Ages of Antiquity to the Present Time with a View of the State of Science and the Fine Arts written by William Boyd and published by . This book was released on 1846 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
