Download or read book Zeno and the Tortoise written by Nicholas Fearn and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions, a philosophical guide that’s “great for sounding cleverer than you really are” (Men’s Health). For those who don’t know the difference between Lucretius’s spear and Hume’s fork, Zeno and the Tortoise explains not just who each philosopher was and what he thought, but exactly how he came to think in the way he did. In a witty and engaging style that incorporates everything from Sting to cell phones to Bill Gates, Fearn demystifies the ways of thought that have shaped and inspired humanity—among many others, the Socratic method, Descartes’s use of doubt, Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism, Rousseau’s social contract, and, of course, the concept of common sense. Along the way, there are fascinating biographical snippets about the philosophers themselves: the story of Thales falling down a well while studying the stars, and of Socrates being told by a face-reader that his was the face of a monster who was capable of any crime. Written in twenty-five short chapters, each readable during the journey to work, Zeno and the Tortoise is the ideal course in intellectual self-defense. Acute, often irreverent, but always authoritative, this is a unique introduction to the ideas that have shaped us all. “A large, crafty bag of brilliant tools . . . an academic arsenal of philosophical weapons that are keen for slicing and stabbing through the slippery profoundities of day-to-day decision-making and right into the middle of dinner-party conversations of which you would have otherwise been left out.” —Philosophy Now
Download or read book The Motion Paradox written by Joseph Mazur and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the epic history of Greek philosopher Zeno's yet-unsolved paradox of motion, citing the contributions of top minds to the scientific community's understanding of the elusive basic structure of time and space.
Download or read book What the Tortoise Said to Achilles written by Lewis Carroll and published by Lindhardt og Ringhof. This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a tortoise challenges a great Greek hero to use his logic in order to decipher a simple philosophical argument, slight chaos ensues. ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’ is an endless cycle of suppositions and deductions. A refined piece of philosophical writing, Caroll’s discussion was one of the first steps towards paradoxically explaining logical truth. His clever prose makes this novel an essential read for budding philosophers and logic aficionados. Lewis Caroll (1832-1898) was a British author. He was famed for his novel ‘Alice in Wonderland' and its sequel ‘Through the Looking-Glass’. Both of which have been successfully adapted to film and stage. Aside from this, he was also a mathematician, professional photographer, and clergyman. His colorful plotlines, powerful imagery, and endless imagination earned him the title of one of the most notable authors of the nineteenth century. Among his other notable works are the poetic collection "Phantasmagoria and Other Poems", the poem "The Hunting of the Snark", and the fairy novel "Sylvie and Bruno".
Download or read book What the Tortoise Taught Us written by Burton Porter and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2010-11-16 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What the Tortoise Taught Us offers a lively, concise journey through western philosophy that explores the lives of major philosophers, their ideas, and how their thinking continues to influence our lives today.
Download or read book Achilles and the Tortoise written by Clark Griffith and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the entire body of Mark Twain's fiction, Clark Griffith in Achilles and the Tortoise answers two questions: How did Mark Twain write? And why is he funny? Griffith defines and demonstrates Mark Twain's poetics and, in doing so, reveals Twain's ability to create and sustain human laughter.Through a close reading of the fictions -- short and long, early and late -- Griffith contends that Mark Twain's strength lay not in comedy or in satire or (as the 19th century understood the term) even in the practice of humor. Rather his genius lay in the joke, specifically the "sick joke". For all his finesse and seeming variety, Twain tells the same joke, with its single cast of doomed and damned characters, its single dead-end conclusion, over and over endlessly.As he attempted to attain the comic resolution and comically transfigured characters he yearned for, Twain forever played, for Griffith, the role of the Achilles of Zeno's Paradox. Like the tortoise that Achilles cannot overtake in Zeno's tale, the richness of comic life forever remained outside Twain's grasp.The last third of Griffith's study draws parallels between Mark Twain and Herman Melville. Although the two authors never met and seem not to have read each other's works, they labored under the sense of what, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael calls "a vast practical joke ... at nobody's expense but (one's) own". The laughter occasioned by this cosmic conspiracy shapes the career of Huckleberry Finn fully as much as it does Ishmael's voyage. Out of the laughter are generated the respective obsessions of Captain Ahab and Bartleby, of Pudd'nhead Wilson and Hadleyburg. Reduced at last to a dry mock, the laughter is the prevailingtone of both Billy Budd and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts.
Download or read book The Infinite Tortoise written by Joel Levy and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2016-09-29 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, concise and fascinating guide to philosophical thought experiments and how they've shaped our understanding of the world.
Download or read book Paradoxes from A to Z written by Michael Clark and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This sentence is false'. Is it? If a hotel with an infinite number of rooms is fully occupied, can it still accommodate a new guest? How can we have emotional responses to fiction, when we know that the objects of our emotions do not exist?
Download or read book Zeno s Paradoxes written by Wesley C. Salmon and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reprint of the Bobbs-Merrill edition of 1970. These essays lead the reader through the land of the wonderful shrinking genie to the warehouse where the infinity machines are kept. By careful examination of a lamp that is switched on and off infinitely many times, or the workings of a machine that prints out an infinite decimal expansion of pi, we begin to understand how it is possible for Achilles to overtake the tortoise. The concepts that form the basis of modern science---space, time, motion, change, infinity---are examined and explored in this edition. Includes an updated bibliography.
Download or read book Plato s Parmenides written by Samuel Scolnicov and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-07-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.
Download or read book Zeno s Paradox written by Joseph Mazur and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of an ancient riddle and what it reveals about the nature of time and space Three millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of logical paradoxes to prove that motion is impossible. Today, these paradoxes remain on the cutting edge of our investigations into the fabric of space and time. Zeno's Paradox uses the motion paradox as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the twenty-five-hundred-year quest to uncover the true nature of the universe. From Galileo to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, some of the greatest minds in history have tackled the problem and made spectacular breakthroughs, but through it all, the paradox of motion remains.
Download or read book The Tortoise and the Hare written by Aesop and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2011 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A boastful hare meets his match in this attractive retelling of Aesop's famed tale.
Download or read book Practical Tortoise Raising written by Simon Blackburn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Blackburn presents a selection of his philosophical essays from 1995 to 2010. He offers engaging and illuminating discussions of a wide range of topics, including moral philosophy, the theory of meaning, pragmatism, and the theory of reason and reasoning.
Download or read book Certain Philosophical Questions written by J. E. McGuire and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-13 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaac Newton wrote the manuscript Questiones quaedam philosophicae at the very beginning of his scientific career. This small notebook thus affords rare insight into the beginnings of Newton's thought and the foundations of his subsequent intellectual development. The Questiones contains a series of entries in Newton's hand that range over many topics in science, philosophy, psychology, theology, and the foundations of mathematics. These notes, written in English, provide a very detailed picture of Newton's early interests, and record his critical appraisal of contemporary issues in natural philosophy. Written predominantly in 1664-5, they give a significant perspective on Newton's thought just prior to his annus mirabilis, 1666. This volume provides a complete transcription of the Questiones, together with an 'expansion' into modern English, and a full editorial commentary on the content and significance of the notebook in the development of Newton's thought. It will be essential reading for all those interested in Newton and the intellectual foundations of science.
Download or read book Enlightening Symbols written by Joseph Mazur and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-23 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining look at the origins of mathematical symbols While all of us regularly use basic math symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into what we know today? In Enlightening Symbols, popular math writer Joseph Mazur explains the fascinating history behind the development of our mathematical notation system. He shows how symbols were used initially, how one symbol replaced another over time, and how written math was conveyed before and after symbols became widely adopted. Traversing mathematical history and the foundations of numerals in different cultures, Mazur looks at how historians have disagreed over the origins of the numerical system for the past two centuries. He follows the transfigurations of algebra from a rhetorical style to a symbolic one, demonstrating that most algebra before the sixteenth century was written in prose or in verse employing the written names of numerals. Mazur also investigates the subconscious and psychological effects that mathematical symbols have had on mathematical thought, moods, meaning, communication, and comprehension. He considers how these symbols influence us (through similarity, association, identity, resemblance, and repeated imagery), how they lead to new ideas by subconscious associations, how they make connections between experience and the unknown, and how they contribute to the communication of basic mathematics. From words to abbreviations to symbols, this book shows how math evolved to the familiar forms we use today.
Download or read book Great Ideas V the Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise written by Jorge Luis Borges and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of wise, witty and fascinating essays, Borges discusses the existence (or non-existence) of Hell, the flaws in English literary detectives, the philosophy of contradictions, and the many translators of 1001 Nights. Varied and enthralling, these pieces examine the very nature of our lives, from cinema and books to history and religion. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
Download or read book The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought written by Barbara M. Sattler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides, the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible. With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental framework with which we conceptualise motion today.
Download or read book Achilles in the Quantum Universe written by Richard Morris and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, and scientists throughout history have attempted to define infinity, and how each attempt has driven the advancement of physics and mathematics, including the development of relativity and quantum mechanics.
