Download or read book The Propensity of Things written by François Jullien and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi--meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential--as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking.
Download or read book A Treatise on Efficacy written by François Jullien and published by . This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, François Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (the battlefield, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and to bring about victory effortlessly. Efficacity in China is thus conceived of in terms of transformation (as opposed to action) and manipulation, making it closer to what is understood as efficacy in the West. Jullien’s brilliant interpretations of an array of recondite texts are key to understanding our own conceptions of action, time, and reality in this foray into the world of Chinese thought. In its clear and penetrating characterization of two contrasting views of reality from a heretofore unexplored perspective, A Treatise on Efficacy will be of central importance in the intellectual debate between East and West.
Download or read book The Propensity of Things written by Francois Jullien and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1995-11 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi--meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential--as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking.
Download or read book In Praise of Blandness written by François Jullien and published by Zone Books (NY). This book was released on 2007 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A consideration of blandness not as the absence of defining qualities but as the harmonious union of all potential values--an infinite opening into human experience.
Download or read book Vital Nourishment written by François Jullien and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical inquiry into how to "feed life," or nourish it, draws from early Chinese thinker Zhuanghi to explore notions of breath, energy, and immanence.
Download or read book The Great Image Has No Form Or On the Nonobject Through Painting written by François Jullien and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In premodern China, painters used imagery not to mirror the world, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering this art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, this book explores the 'nonobject', a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.
Download or read book Time for Things written by Stephen D. Rosenberg and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern life is full of stuff yet bereft of time. An economic sociologist offers an ingenious explanation for why, over the past seventy-five years, Americans have come to prefer consumption to leisure. Productivity has increased steadily since the mid-twentieth century, yet Americans today work roughly as much as they did then: forty hours per week. We have witnessed, during this same period, relentless growth in consumption. This pattern represents a striking departure from the preceding century, when working hours fell precipitously. It also contradicts standard economic theory, which tells us that increasing consumption yields diminishing marginal utility, and empirical research, which shows that work is a significant source of discontent. So why do we continue to trade our time for more stuff? Time for Things offers a novel explanation for this puzzle. Stephen Rosenberg argues that, during the twentieth century, workers began to construe consumer goods as stores of potential free time to rationalize the exchange of their labor for a wage. For example, when a worker exchanges his labor for an automobile, he acquires a duration of free activity that can be held in reserve, counterbalancing the unfree activity represented by work. This understanding of commodities as repositories of hypothetical utility was made possible, Rosenberg suggests, by the advent of durable consumer goods—cars, washing machines, refrigerators—as well as warranties, brands, chain stores, and product-testing magazines, which assured workers that the goods they purchased would not be subject to rapid obsolescence. This theory clarifies perplexing aspects of behavior under industrial capitalism—the urgency to spend earnings on things, the preference to own rather than rent consumer goods—as well as a variety of historical developments, including the coincident rise of mass consumption and the legitimation of wage labor.
Download or read book Unapologetic written by Francis Spufford and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford's crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.
Download or read book Rich People Things written by Chris Lehmann and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Social criticism at its scorching-hot best."--Barbara Ehrenreich "Think H.L. Mencken crossed with Jon Stewart."--The Phoenix In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It's a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation's financial elite. As the author explains, American class privilege is very much like the idea of sex in a Catholic school--it's not supposed to exist in the first place, but once it presents itself in your mind's eye, you realize that it's everywhere. A concise and easy-to-use guide, Rich People Things catalogs the fortifications that shelter the opulent from the resentments of the hoi polloi. From ideological stanchions such as the Free Market through the castellation of media including The New York Times and Wired magazine, to gatekeepers such as David Brooks, Steve Forbes, and Alan Greenspan, Lehmann covers the vast array of comforting and comprehensive protections that allow the über-privileged to maintain their iron grip on almost half of America's wealth. With chapters on Malcolm Gladwell, the Supreme Court, the memoir, and more, no one is spared from Lehmann's pointed prose. Chris Lehmann is employed, ever precariously, as an editor for Yahoo! News, Bookforum, and The Baffler, while dissecting the excesses of his social betters for his column Rich People Things at TheAwl.com. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife Ana Marie Cox and a quartet of excellent pets.
Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Download or read book Significant Objects written by Joshua Glenn and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: A Literary and Economic Experiment Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination? The founders of the Significant Objects project, that’s who. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment; you’ll never look at a thrift-store curiosity the same way again. FEATURING ORIGINAL STORIES BY: Chris Adrian • Rob Agredo • Kurt Andersen • Rachel Axler • Rob Baedeker • Nicholson Baker • Rosecrans Baldwin • Matthew Battles • Charles Baxter • Kate Bernheimer • Susanna Breslin • Kevin Brockmeier • Matt Brown • Blake Butler • Meg Cabot • Tim Carvell • Patrick Cates • Dan Chaon • Susanna Daniel • Adam Davies • Kathryn Davis • Matthew De Abaitua • Stacey • D'Erasmo • Helen DeWitt • Doug Dorst • Mark Doty • Ben Ehrenreich • Mark Frauenfelder • Amy Fusselman • William Gibson • Myla Goldberg • Ben Greenman • Jason Grote • Jim Hanas • Jennifer Michael Hecht • Sheila Heti • Christine Hill • Dara Horn • Shelley Jackson • Heidi Julavits • Ben Katchor • Matt Klam • Wayne Koestenbaum • Josh Kramer • Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer • Neil LaBute • Victor LaValle • J. Robert Lennon • Jonathan Lethem • Todd Levin • Laura Lippman • Mimi Lipson • Robert Lopez • Joe Lyons • Sarah Manguso • Merrill Markoe • Tom McCarthy • Miranda Mellis • Lydia Millet • Maud Newton • Annie Nocenti • Stephen O’Connor • Stewart O’Nan • Jenny Offill • Gary Panter • Ed Park • James Parker • Benjamin Percy • Mark Jude Poirier • Padgett Powell • Bob Powers • Todd Pruzan • Dan Reines • Nathaniel Rich • Peter Rock • Lucinda Rosenfeld • Greg Rowland • Luc Sante • R.K. Scher • Toni Schlesinger • Matthew Sharpe • Jim Shepard • David Shields • Marisa Silver • Curtis Sittenfeld • Bruce Sterling • Scarlett Thomas • Jeff Turrentine • Deb Olin Unferth • Tom Vanderbilt • Matthew J. Wells • Joe Wenderoth • Margaret Wertheim • Colleen Werthmann • Colson Whitehead • Carl Wilson • Cintra Wilson • Sari Wilson • Douglas Wolk • John Wray
Download or read book Lies That Bind written by Susan D. Blum and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2007-01-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book explores the ideology of truth and deception in China, offering a nuanced perspective on social interaction in different cultural settings. Drawing on decades of fieldwork in China, Susan D. Blum offers an authoritative examination of rules, expectations, and beliefs regarding lying and honesty in society. Blum points to a propensity for deception in Chinese public interactions in situations where people in the United States would expect truthfulness, yet argues that lying is evaluated within Chinese society by moral standards different from those of Americans. Chinese, for example, might emphasize the consequences of speech, Americans the absolute truthfulness. Blum considers the longstanding values that led to this style of interaction, as well as more recent factors, such as the government's control over expression. But Chinese society is not alone in the practice of such customs. The author observes that many Americans also excel in manipulation of language, yet find a simultaneous moral absolutism opposed to lying in any form. She also considers other traditions, including Japanese and Jewish, that struggle to control the boundaries of lying, balancing human needs with moral values in contrasting ways. Deception and lying, the book concludes, are distinctively cultural yet universal—inseparable from what it is to be a human being equipped with language in all its subtlety.
Download or read book The Book of Why written by Judea Pearl and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.
Download or read book Synaesthesia written by John E. Harrison and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synaesthesia is a confusion of the senses, whereby stimulation of one sense triggers stimulation in a completely different sensory modality. A synaesthete might claim to be able to hear colors, taste shapes, describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone's voice or music, the sound of which looks like 'shards of glass'. Throughout history, many notable artists and writers have claimed to suffer from synaesthesia, including, Arthur Rimbaud, Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Hockney. The condition remains as controversial now as when first brought to the public eye many years ago--one notable scientist dismissing it as mere 'romantic neurology.' In Synaesthesia: the strangest thing, a world authority on synaesthesia takes us on a fascinating tour of this mysterious condition, looking at historical incidences of synaesthesia, unraveling the theories for the condition, and additionally, examining the claims to synaesthesia of the likes of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and others. The result is an exciting, yet scientific account of an incredible condition--one that will tell us of a world rich with the most unbelievable sensory experiences.
Download or read book America the Ingenious written by Kevin Baker and published by Artisan. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Among the many rewards of America the Ingenious, Kevin Baker’s survey of Yankee know-how, is stumbling on its buried nuggets. . . . Baker examines a wide range of the achievements that have made, and still make, America great again—and again.” —The Wall Street Journal All made in America: The skyscraper and subway car. The telephone and telegraph. The safety elevator and safety pin. Plus the microprocessor, amusement park, MRI, supermarket, Pennsylvania rifle, and Tennessee Valley Authority. Not to mention the city of Chicago or jazz or that magnificent Golden Gate Bridge. What is it about America that makes it a nation of inventors, tinkerers, researchers, and adventurers—obsessive pursuers of the never-before-created? And, equally, what is it that makes America such a fertile place to explore, discover, and launch the next big thing? In America the Ingenious, bestselling author Kevin Baker brings his gift of storytelling and eye for historical detail to the grand, and grandly entertaining, tale of American innovation. Here are the Edisons and Bells and Carnegies, and the stories of how they followed their passions and changed our world. And also the less celebrated, like Jacob Youphes and Loeb Strauss, two Jewish immigrants from Germany who transformed the way at least half the world now dresses (hint: Levi Strauss). And Leo Fender, who couldn’t play a note of music, midwifing rock ’n’ roll through his solid-body electric guitar and amplifier. And the many women who weren’t legally recognized as inventors, but who created things to make their lives easier that we use every day—like Josephine Cochran, inventor of the dishwasher, or Marion O’Brien Donovan, who invented a waterproof diaper cover. Or a guy with the improbable name of Philo Farnsworth, who, with his invention of television, upended communication as significantly as Gutenberg did. At a time when America struggles with different visions of what it wants to be, America the Ingenious shows the extraordinary power of what works: how immigration leads to innovation, what a strong government and strong public education mean to a climate of positive practical change, and why taking the long view instead of looking for short-term gain pays off many times over, not only for investors and inventors, but for the rest of us whose lives are made better by the new. America and its nation of immigrants have excelled at taking ideas from anywhere and transforming them into the startling, often unexpectedly beautiful creations that have shaped our world. This is that story.
Download or read book Using Propensity Scores in Quasi Experimental Designs written by William M. Holmes and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Propensity Scores in Quasi-Experimental Designs, by William M. Holmes, examines how propensity scores can be used to reduce bias with different kinds of quasi-experimental designs and to fix or improve broken experiments. Requiring minimal use of matrix and vector algebra, the book covers the causal assumptions of propensity score estimates and their many uses, linking these uses with analysis appropriate for different designs. Thorough coverage of bias assessment, propensity score estimation, and estimate improvement is provided, along with graphical and statistical methods for this process. Applications are included for analysis of variance and covariance, maximum likelihood and logistic regression, two-stage least squares, generalized linear regression, and general estimation equations. The examples use public data sets that have policy and programmatic relevance across a variety of disciplines.
Download or read book How Not to Be Wrong written by Jordan Ellenberg and published by Penguin Press. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant tour of mathematical thought and a guide to becoming a better thinker, How Not to Be Wrong shows that math is not just a long list of rules to be learned and carried out by rote. Math touches everything we do; It's what makes the world make sense. Using the mathematician's methods and hard-won insights-minus the jargon-professor and popular columnist Jordan Ellenberg guides general readers through his ideas with rigor and lively irreverence, infusing everything from election results to baseball to the existence of God and the psychology of slime molds with a heightened sense of clarity and wonder. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see the hidden structures beneath the messy and chaotic surface of our daily lives. How Not to Be Wrong shows us how--Publisher's description.
