Download or read book The Limits of Mankind written by R. A. Piddington and published by Butterworth-Heinemann. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Limits of Mankind: A Philosophy of Population provides information pertinent to the tremendous problem of world population. This book discusses whether the achievement of maximum economic welfare for the whole world will not result in minimum satisfaction for everybody through the exhaustion of habitable living-space. Organized into 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of population density. This text then examines the extent of damage that humans has done to the balance of nature, including the decimation of the forests, the spread of erosion, and the creation of deserts. Other chapters consider the potential danger from disease, which is greatly increased by the proliferation of humans. This book discusses as well the idea of planetary colonization. The final chapter deals with the evils of over-population in a world that had run short of space. This book is a valuable resource for biologists, scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, and research workers.
Download or read book The Limits of Growth written by D. H. Meadows and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Limits of the Human written by Felicity Nussbaum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Felicity Nussbaum examines literary and cultural representations of human difference in England and its empire during the long eighteenth century. With a special focus on women s writing, Nussbaum analyzes canonical and lesser-known novels and plays from the Restoration to abolition. She considers a range of anomalies (defects, disease, and disability) as they intermingle with ideas of femininity, masculinity, and race to define normalcy as national identity. Incorporating writings by Behn, Burney, and the Bluestockings, as well as Southerne, Shaftesbury, Johnson, Sterne, and Equiano, Nussbaum treats a range of disabilities - being mute, blind, lame - and physical oddities such as eunuchism and giantism as they are inflected by emerging notions of a racial femininity and masculinity. She shows that these corporeal features, perceived as aberrant and extraordinary, combine in the popular imagination to reveal a repertory of differences located between the extremes of splendid and horrid novelty.
Download or read book Plato on the Limits of Human Life written by Sara Brill and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A book that is an ambitious, well-researched and provocative scholarly reflection on soul in the Platonic corpus.” —Polis By focusing on the immortal character of the soul in key Platonic dialogues, Sara Brill shows how Plato thought of the soul as remarkably flexible, complex, and indicative of the inner workings of political life and institutions. As she explores the character of the soul, Brill reveals the corrective function that law and myth serve. If the soul is limitless, she claims, then the city must serve a regulatory or prosthetic function and prop up good political institutions against the threat of the soul’s excess. Brill’s sensitivity to dramatic elements and discursive strategies in Plato’s dialogues illuminates the intimate connection between city and soul. “Sara Brill takes on at least two significant issues in Platonic scholarship: the nature of the soul, and especially the language of immortality in its description, and the relationship between politics and psychology. She treats each one of these topics in a fresh and nuanced way. Her writing is beautiful and fluid.” —Marina McCoy, Boston College
Download or read book At The Human Edge The Limits Of Human Physiology And Performance written by Marcus Ranney and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a non fiction-based piece of popular science which unravels the amazing adaptive physiological responses that our bodies undergo as we push it to the limits in extreme sports and natural environments. Each chapter captures the history, geography and physical challenges which our bodies face when we as a species have tried to conquer the great outdoors. From Mt Everest to the South Pole, from a journey to Mars to the bottom of the Mariana trench, the book makes the subject accessible to readers, with a basic knowledge of science, and also tries to bring in the author's own personal experiences and those of many legends from this sphere.For the reader (someone interested in science, particularly the life sciences or those who enjoy the outdoors and partake in extreme sports and outdoor activities), this is aimed to make physiology accessible and relatable, not as a piece of academic text.The reader will come away with a stronger understanding of human physiology (particularly at the extreme), how the body first deteriorates, then adapts and finally excels when faced with running a marathon, summiting Everest or going to Mars. Its cross functional nature, being a piece of non-fiction / popular science with personal anecdotes and history mixed in, will make for an interesting and memorable reading.
Download or read book You re Only Human written by Kelly M. Kapic and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work. Family. Church. Exercise. Sleep. The list of demands on our time seems to be never ending. It can leave you feeling a little guilty--like you should always be doing one more thing. Rather than sharing better time-management tips to squeeze more hours out of the day, Kelly Kapic takes a different approach in You're Only Human. He offers a better way to make peace with the fact that God didn't create us to do it all. Kapic explores the theology behind seeing our human limitations as a gift rather than a deficiency. He lays out a path to holistic living with healthy self-understanding, life-giving relationships, and meaningful contributions to the world. He frees us from confusing our limitations with sin and instead invites us to rest in the joy and relief of knowing that God can use our limitations to foster freedom, joy, growth, and community. Readers will emerge better equipped to cultivate a life that fosters gratitude, rest, and faithful service to God.
Download or read book Twenty First Century Fiction written by Peter Boxall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament – one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.
Download or read book Contingency and the Limits of History written by Liane Carlson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics. In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.
Download or read book Human Nature and the Limits of Science written by John Dupré and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. He claims it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do.
Download or read book Thought A Very Short Introduction written by Tim Bayne and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no denying that thinking comes naturally to human beings. But what are thoughts? How is thought realized in the brain? Does thinking occur in public or is it a purely private affair? Do young children and non-human animals think? Is human thought the same everywhere, or are there culturally specific modes of thought? What is the relationship between thought and language? What kind of responsibility do we have for our thoughts? In this compelling Very Short Introduction, Tim Bayne looks at the nature of thought. Beginning with questions about what thought is and what distinguishes it from other kinds of mental states, he goes on to examine various interpretations of thought from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. By exploring the logical structures of thought and the relationship between thought and other mental phenomena, as well as the mechanisms that make thought possible and the cultural variations that may exist in our thought processes, Bayne looks at what we know - and don't know - about our great capacity for thought. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book The Outer Limits of Reason written by Noson S. Yanofsky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.
Download or read book 2052 written by Jorgen Randers and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With clarity, conscience, and courage, global-systems pioneer Jorgen Randers and his distinguished contributors map the forces that will shape the next four decades. Forty years ago, The Limits to Growth study addressed the grand question of how humans would adapt to the physical limitations of planet Earth. It predicted that during the first half of the 21st century the ongoing growth in the human ecological footprint would stop-either through catastrophic "overshoot and collapse"-or through well-managed "peak and decline." So, where are we now? And what does our future look like? In the book 2052, Jorgen Randers, one of the coauthors of Limits to Growth, issues a progress report and makes a forecast for the next forty years. To do this, he asked dozens of experts to weigh in with their best predictions on how our economies, energy supplies, natural resources, climate, food, fisheries, militaries, political divisions, cities, psyches, and more will take shape in the coming decades. He then synthesized those scenarios into a global forecast of life as we will most likely know it in the years ahead. The good news: we will see impressive advances in resource efficiency, and an increasing focus on human well-being rather than on per capita income growth. But this change might not come as we expect. Future growth in population and GDP, for instance, will be constrained in surprising ways-by rapid fertility decline as result of increased urbanization, productivity decline as a result of social unrest, and continuing poverty among the poorest 2 billion world citizens. Runaway global warming, too, is likely. So, how do we prepare for the years ahead? With heart, fact, and wisdom, Randers guides us along a realistic path into the future and discusses what readers can do to ensure a better life for themselves and their children during the increasing turmoil of the next forty years.
Download or read book The Limits of Language written by Stephen David Ross and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes the author's approach unique is its concern with the ways in which we may understand language and its relation to the world and ourselves as a question of limits, drawing upon contemporary continental and English-language views of language, philosophical and linguistic, from American pragmatists such as Peirce and Dewey, and from important contemporary sources such as feminist theory.
Download or read book Last Breath written by Peter Stark and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2002-02-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sudden, extreme deaths have always fascinated us-- and now more than ever as athletes and travelers rise to the challenges of high-risk sports and journeys on the edge. In this spellbinding book, veteran travel and outdoor sports writer Peter Stark reenacts the dramas of what happens inside our bodies, our minds, and our souls when we push ourselves to the absolute limits of human endurance. Combining the adrenaline high of extreme sports with the startling facts of physiological reality, Stark narrates a series of outdoor adventure stories in which thrill can cross the line to mortal peril. Each death or brush with death is at once a suspense story, a cautionary tale, and a medical thriller. Stark describes in unforgettable detail exactly what goes through the mind of a cross-country skier as his body temperature plummets-- apathy at ninety-one degrees, stupor at ninety. He puts us inside the body of a doomed kayaker tumbling helplessly underwater for two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes. He conjures up the physiology of a snowboarder frantically trying not to panic as he consumes the tiny pocket of air trapped around his face under thousands of pounds of snow. These are among the dire situations that Stark transforms into harrowing accounts of how our bodies react to trauma, how reflexes and instinct compel us to fight back, and how, why, and when we let go of our will to live. In an increasingly tamed and homogenized world, risk is not only a means of escape but a path to spirituality. As Peter Stark writes, "You must try to understand death intimately and prepare yourself for death in order to live a full and satisfying life." In this fascinating, informative book, Stark reveals exactly what we’re getting ourselves into when we choose to live-- and die-- at the extremes of endurance.
Download or read book The Limits of Human Rights written by Bardo Fassbender and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the limits of human rights, and what do these limits mean? This volume engages critically and constructively with this question to provide a distinct contribution to the contemporary discussion on human rights. Fassbender and Traisbach, along with a group of leading experts in the field, examine the issue from multiple disciplinary perspectives, analysing the limits of our current discourse of human rights. It does so in an original way, and without attempting to deconstruct, or deny, human rights. Each contribution is supplemented by an engaging comment which furthers this important discussion. This combination of perspectives paves the way for further thought for scholars, practitioners, students, and the wider public. Ultimately, this volume provides an exceptionally rich spectrum of viewpoints and arguments across disciplines to offer fresh insights into human rights and its limitations.
Download or read book The Limits of Free Will written by Paul Russell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Limits of Free Will presents influential articles by Paul Russell concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. These articles were written and published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade. Among the topics covered: the challenge of skepticism; moral sentiment and moral capacity; necessity and the metaphysics of causation; practical reason; free will and art; fatalism and the limits of agency; moral luck, and our metaphysical attitudes of optimism and pessimism. Some essays are primarily critical in character, presenting critiques and commentary on major works or contributions in the contemporary scene. Others are mainly constructive, aiming to develop and articulate a distinctive account of compatibilism. The general theory advanced by Russell, which he describes as a form of "critical compatibilism", rejects any form of unqualified or radical skepticism; but it also insists that a plausible compatibilism has significant and substantive implications about the limits of agency and argues that this licenses a metaphysical attitude of (modest) pessimism on this topic. While each essay is self-standing, there is nevertheless a core set of themes and issues that unite and link them together. The collection is arranged and organized in a format that enables the reader to appreciate and recognize these links and core themes.
Download or read book What Money Can t Buy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?In his New York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?
