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The World in Six Songs
by Daniel J. LevitinThe author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music reveals music's role in the evolution of human culture-and "will leave you awestruck" (The New York Times) Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted readers as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times bestseller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history. Dr. Levitin identifies six fundamental song functions or types-friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love-then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these "six songs" work in our brains to preserve the emotional history of our lives and species. Dr. Levitin combines cutting-edge scientific research from his music cognition lab at McGill University and work in an array of related fields; his own sometimes hilarious experiences in the music business; and illuminating interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne, as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The World in Six Songs is, ultimately, a revolution in our understanding of how human nature evolved-right up to the iPod. Read Daniel Levitin's posts on the Penguin Blog.
The World Is Made of Stories
by David R. LoyIn this dynamic and utterly novel presentation, David Loy explores the fascinating proposition that the stories we tell--about what is and is not possible, about ourselves, about right and wrong, life and death, about the world and everything in it--become the very building blocks of our experience and of reality itself. Loy uses an intriguing mixture of quotations from familiar and less-familiar sources and brief stand-alone micro-essays, engaging the reader in challenging and illuminating dialogue. As we come to see that the world is made--in a word--of stories, we come to a richer understanding of that most elusive of Buddhist ideas: shunyata, the "generative emptiness" that is the all-pervading quality inherent to all mental and physical forms in our ever-changing world. Reminiscent of Zen koans and works of sophisticated poetry, this book will reward both a casual read and deep reflection.
The World is My Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader
by Andrew Davison & Himadeep MuppidiAs recent events indicate, Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Islamic politics more broadly have been deeply influential in world affairs. Hamid Dabashi has been a highly visible and prominent commentator on these affairs, explaining, interpreting, and providing a critical perspective. This volume gathers together his most influential and insightful writings. As one of the foremost contemporary public intellectuals and scholars of our time, Dabashi's interests and writings span subjects ranging from Islamic philosophy and political ideology to Iranian art and Persian literature, from Sufism and Orientalism to Iranian and world cinema and contemporary Arab and Muslim visual arts; and from postcolonial theory and globalization to imperialism and public affairs. There is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgent global issues of the day. This book brings together some of his most important writings, especially those that offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity. The book shows the underlying conceptual themes that unify Dabashi's wide-ranging and brilliantly insightful corpus. Dabashi combines deep knowledge of the subject matter about which he writes, and highly refined sociological, hermeneutical, and cultural interpretive skills, moving far beyond the limiting, distorted, and intellectually stifling character of reigning absolutist conventions. He places existing authoritative frameworks under close scrutiny in order to produce novel and penetrating insights. These essays reflect historical and geographical worlds that are best viewed when Hamid Dabashi's work is read as a whole, which this one- volume work makes possible for the first time.
The World is Triangular
by Horst CzichosThis book gives a short presentation of the triad philosophy–physics–technology against the background of the common origin in ancient times. The emergence of the book has been described in the foreword of the first edition. The present second edition of the book is updated and extended, whereby new physical research results and technological innovations were included: - The physics of space and time after the experimental detection of gravitational waves (Nobel Prize for Physics 2017). - The New International System of Units (SI) for Physics and Technology which is completely based on natural constants and entered into force on World Metrology Day, 20 May 2019. - Actual overview of basic technologies: Material, Energy, Information. - Technologies for the “Digital World” of information and communication. - Mechatronic and Cyber-physical systems for Industry 4.0. The significance of technology for the world in the 21st century is discussed in the final section of the book.
The World Is Waiting for You: Graduation Speeches to Live By from Activists, Writers, and Visionaries
by Tara Grove Isabel OstrerWith contemporary graduation speeches that dissect the world as it is and imagine what it could be, The World Is Waiting for You brings forth eighteen courageous figures who have dared to transform the podium into a pulpit for championing peace, justice, protest, and a better world."The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them," acclaimed author and award-winning journalist Anna Quindlen cautioned graduates of Grinnell College. Jazz virtuoso and educator Wynton Marsalis advised new Connecticut College alums not to worry about being on time, but rather to be in time-because "time is actually your friend. He don't come back because he never goes away." And renowned physician and humanitarian Paul Farmer revealed at the University of Delaware his remarkable discovery-the new disease Empathy Deficit Disorder-and assured the commencers it could be cured.The prescient, fiery feminism of Gloria Steinem sits parallel to that of celebrated writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who asks, "What if I talked like a woman right here in public?" Nobelist and novelist Toni Morrison sagaciously ponders how people centuries from now will perceive our current times, and Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver asks those born into the Age of Irony to "imagine getting caught with your Optimism hanging out" and implores us always to act and speak the truth.The World Is Waiting for You speaks to anyone who might take to heart the advice of Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards-"life as an activist, troublemaker, or agitator is a tremendous option and one I highly recommend"-and is the perfect gift for all who are ready to move their tassels to the left.
World Literature After Empire: Rethinking Universality in the Long Cold War (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
by Pieter VanhoveThis book makes the case that the idea of a "world" in the cultural and philosophical sense is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. During the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization a plethora of historical attempts were made to reinvent the notions of world literature, world art, and philosophical universality from an anticolonial perspective. Contributing to recent debates on world literature, the postcolonial, and translatability, the book presents a series of interdisciplinary and multilingual case studies spanning Europe, the United States, and China. The case studies illustrate how individual anti-imperialist writers and artists set out to remake the conception of the world in their own image by offering a different perspective centered on questions of race, gender, sexuality, global inequality, and class. The book also discusses how international cultural organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, UNESCO, and PEN International attempted to shape this debate across Cold War divides.
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics
by J. Daniel ElamWorld Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.
World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (New Comparisons in World Literature)
by Filippo MenozziDrawing on a Marxist concept of world literature, this book is a study of the manipulations of time in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. Through critical work and literary reading, this research explores the times other than the present that seem to haunt an era of capitalist globalisation: nostalgic feelings about bygone ideals of identity and community, appeals to Golden Ages, returns of the repressed and anxious anticipations of global extinction and catastrophe. The term non-synchronism explored in this book captures these dislocations of the present, while offering a critical lens to grasp the politics of time of an era marked by the continuing expansion of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a dialectical paradigm charged with antagonistic political valences. The literary analysis presented in the volume hence connects the literary manipulation of time to discourses on extinction, accumulation, nostalgia, modernity and survival in global politics and literature.
A World Not Made for Us: Topics in Critical Environmental Philosophy (SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics)
by Keith R. PetersonIn A World Not Made for Us, Keith R. Peterson provides a broad reassessment of the field of environmental philosophy, taking a fresh and critical look at three classical problems of environmentalism: the intrinsic value of nature, the need for an ecological worldview, and a new conception of the place of humankind in nature. He makes the case that a genuinely critical environmental philosophy must adopt an ecological materialist conception of the human, a pluralistic value theory that emphasizes the need for value prioritization, and a stratified categorial ontology that affirms the basic principle of human asymmetrical dependence on more-than-human nature. Integrating environmental ethics with the latest work in political ecology, Peterson argues it is important to understand that the world is not made for us, and that coming to terms with this fact is a condition for survival in future human and more-than-human communities of liberation and solidarity.
A World of Becoming
by William E. ConnollyIn A World of Becoming William E. Connolly outlines a political philosophy suited to a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate. This is a world composed of multiple interacting systems, including those of climate change, biological evolution, economic practices, and geological formations. Such open systems, set on different temporal registers of stability and instability, periodically resonate together to produce profound, unpredictable changes. To engage such a world reflectively is to feel pressure to alter established practices of politics, ethics, and spirituality. In pursuing such a course, Connolly draws inspiration from philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as the complexity theorist of biology Stuart Kauffman and the theologian Catherine Keller. Attunement to a world of becoming, Connolly argues, may help us address dangerous resonances between global finance capital, cross-regional religious resentments, neoconservative ideology, and the 24-hour mass media. Coming to terms with subliminal changes in the contemporary experience of time that challenge traditional images can help us grasp how these movements have arisen and perhaps even inspire creative counter-movements. The book closes with the chapter "The Theorist and the Seer," in which Connolly draws insights from early Greek ideas of the Seer and a Jerry Lewis film, The Nutty Professor, to inform the theory enterprise today.
The World of Dreams
by Henri BergsonBergson incorporated the best of contemporary thinking in all his works. These thinkers included A. Krauss, Delage, Freud, and W. Robert. Bergson talks about how our sensory organs (eyes) are involved in dreams so that we think we perceive something but when we open our eyes it vanishes. This book is not a dictionary of dreams but a stunning example of how dreams work and function. Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century. One of Bergson&’s main problems is to think of novelty as pure creation, instead of as the unraveling of a predetermined program. His is a philosophy of pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom, which can thus be characterized as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.
The World of Dreams
by Henri BergsonBergson incorporated the best of contemporary thinking in all his works. These thinkers included A. Krauss, Delage, Freud, and W. Robert. Bergson talks about how our sensory organs (eyes) are involved in dreams so that we think we perceive something but when we open our eyes it vanishes. This book is not a dictionary of dreams but a stunning example of how dreams work and function. Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century. One of Bergson&’s main problems is to think of novelty as pure creation, instead of as the unraveling of a predetermined program. His is a philosophy of pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom, which can thus be characterized as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.
The World of Dual-Brain
by Weizhi ZhangThis book leaves the template of the inertia of natural human society and traditional ideological thinking, to illustrate the mechanism of the generation of the Sociality Brain and to explore the construction path of the human-computer symbiosis order. At the same time, this book proposes concepts including ‘wisdom sharing system’, ‘the Sociality Brain’, ‘dual-brain world’, ‘off-site economic civilization’, ‘basic contradictions in the intelligent world’, and ‘class analysis and division of the dual-brain world’, etc. This is a philosophical thinking about the intelligent world beyond the categories of natural human society and biological brain.
The World of Freedom: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology
by Robert NicholsMartin Heidegger and Michel Foucault are two of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Each has spawned volumes of secondary literature and sparked fierce, polarizing debates, particularly about the relationship between philosophy and politics. And yet, to date there exists almost no work that presents a systematic and comprehensive engagement of the two in relation to one another. "The World of Freedom" addresses this lacuna. Neither apology nor polemic, the book demonstrates that it is not merely interesting but necessary to read Heidegger and Foucault alongside one another if we are to properly understand the shape of twentieth-century Continental thought. Through close, scholarly engagement with primary texts, Robert Nichols develops original and demanding insights into the relationship between fundamental and historical ontology, modes of objectification and subjectification, and an ethopoetic conception of freedom. In the process, his book also reveals the role that Heidegger's reception in France played in Foucault's intellectual development--the first major work to do so while taking full advantage of the recent publication of Foucault's last College de France lectures of the 1980s, which mark a return to classical Greek and Roman philosophy, and thus to familiar Heideggerian loci of concern.
A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers
by Lee A. JacobusThe book engages students with the big ideas that have shaped society and are reshaping it today. Readings by essential authors -help students trace the origins of central cultural concepts and respond to them. A World of Ideas asks such crucial questions as, What defines good government? What forces shape our society? What does it mean to be educated? The text helps students respond to these questions by providing the guidance they need to understand, analyze, and write. Substantial, supportive apparatus helps students focus on both the content of the readings as well as the rhetorical moves that writers use to achieve their purposes, providing instruction and models as students join in the important conversations continuing today. New chapters on Education and Gender, and new readings throughout, speak to today's urgent concerns. Improved writing instruction includes more scaffolding and examples that provide greater support for students.
The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Mathematics #2)
by Massimo MazzottiThe fascinating true story of mathematician Maria Agnesi.She is best known for her curve, the witch of Agnesi, which appears in almost all high school and undergraduate math books. She was a child prodigy who frequented the salon circuit, discussing mathematics, philosophy, history, and music in multiple languages. She wrote one of the first vernacular textbooks on calculus and was appointed chair of mathematics at the university in Bologna. In later years, however, she became a prominent figure within the Catholic Enlightenment, gave up academics, and devoted herself to the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. Indeed, the life of Maria Agnesi reveals a complex and enigmatic figure—one of the most fascinating characters in the history of mathematics. Using newly discovered archival documents, Massimo Mazzotti reconstructs the wide spectrum of Agnesi's social experience and examines her relationships to various traditions—religious, political, social, and mathematical. This meticulous study shows how she and her fellow Enlightenment Catholics modified tradition in an effort to reconcile aspects of modern philosophy and science with traditional morality and theology.Mazzotti's original and provocative investigation is also the first targeted study of the Catholic Enlightenment and its influence on modern science. He argues that Agnesi's life is the perfect lens through which we can gain a greater understanding of mid-eighteenth-century cultural trends in continental Europe.
The World of Nichiren's Writings, vol. 1: A Discussion of Humanism Religion
by Daisaku IkedaIn these insightful discussions, Daisaku Ikeda explores from a variety of angles the life, times, and teachings of Nichiren Daishonin as described in his writings. We learn how Nichiren' s actions— from his vows at an early age to bring happiness to the people through his fearlessness in face of life-threatening persecutions— can become a model for us today. And the humanistic interpretations of key Buddhist concepts bring new clarity to ideas such as “ attaining Buddhahood in this lifetime” and “ establishing the correct teaching for the peace of the land.” More than just history and theory, the inspiration offered here aims to provide a deeper understanding of how to put into daily practice Nichiren's philosophy of hope and victory.
A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State
by John C. Rule Ben S. TrotterHistorians and social scientists have long identified bureaucracy as the modern state's foundation and the reign of France's Louis XIV as a model for its development. A World of Paper offers a fresh interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King's last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien regime. Building on the work of his predecessors, he fashioned a skilled team of collaborators as he managed the complex issues of war and peace during the turbulent final decades of Louis XIV's reign. John Rule and Ben Trotter examine Torcy's department to depict administrative structures as they emerged through the circulating stream of paper that connected his office with provincial administrators and diplomats abroad. They explore the collection and centralization of information during Torcy's tenure through the creation of a modern state archive, discreet intelligence gathering, and the surveillance and management of the French mails. They also study the postal carriers, couriers, household officers of the royal court, genealogists hired for research, and an informal "brain trust" of experts, and advisors who carried vital information in and out of the department every day. A remarkable reconstruction of the department of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, A World of Paper demystifies bureaucracy and explores the ways in which the modern information state developed from his labours.
The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment (Routledge Classics Ser.)
by Karl PopperThis unique collection of essays, published together for the first time, not only elucidates the complexity of ancient Greek thought, but also reveals Karl Popper's engagement with Presocratic philosophy and the enlightenment he experienced in his reading of Parmenides. As Karl Popper himself states himself in his introduction, he was inspired to write about Presocratic philosophy for two reasons - firstly to illustrate the thesis that all history is the history of problem situations and secondly, to show the greatness of the early Greek philosophers, who gave Europe its philosophy, its science and its humanism.
The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment
by Karl Sir PopperWith a new foreword by Scott Austin 'I hope that these essays may illustrate the thesis that all history is or should be the history of problem situations, and that in following this principle we may further our understanding of the Presocratics and other thinkers of the past. The essays also try to show the greatness of the early Greek philosophers, who gave Europe its philosophy, its science, and its humanism.' - Karl Popper, from the preface The World of Parmenides is a brilliant exploration of the complexity of ancient Greek thought and science by one of the twentieth century’s leading philosophers. It reveals the great importance of Presocratic philosophy to Popper’s thought as a whole and shows the profound enlightenment he experienced reading not only Parmenides but the wider world of Greek science and philosophy including Xenophanes and Heraclitus. Edited by Arne F. Petersen, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen.
The World of Perception
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty'Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own.'In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.These lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable and prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world. Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.
The World of Perception
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James ElkinsMaurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception.From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.
A World of Public Debts: A Political History (Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance)
by Nicolas Barreyre Nicolas DelalandeThis book analyzes public debt from a political, historical, and global perspective. It demonstrates that public debt has been a defining feature in the construction of modern states, a main driver in the history of capitalism, and a potent geopolitical force. From revolutionary crisis to empire and the rise and fall of a post-war world order, the problem of debt has never been the sole purview of closed economic circles. This book offers a key to understanding the centrality of public debt today by revealing that political problems of public debt have and will continue to need a political response. Today’s tendency to consider public debt as a source of fragility or economic inefficiency misses the fact that, since the eighteenth century, public debts and capital markets have on many occasions been used by states to enforce their sovereignty and build their institutions, especially in times of war. It is nonetheless striking to observe that certain solutions that were used in the past to smooth out public debt crises (inflation, default, cancellation, or capital controls) were left out of the political framing of the recent crisis, therefore revealing how the balance of power between bondholders, taxpayers, pensioners, and wage-earners has evolved over the past 40 years. Today, as the Covid-19 pandemic opens up a dramatic new crisis, reconnecting the history of capitalism and that of democracy seems one of the most urgent intellectual and political tasks of our time. This global political history of public debt is a contribution to this debate and will be of interest to financial, economic, and political historians and researchers. Chapters 13 and 19 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms)
by Anjan Chakrabarti Anup DharThis book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and world of the third. The authors counterpose the world of the third to the mainstream notion of the third world, seen as a lacking other in desperate need of aid and development. Thus, for them, the hegemonic form of global capital is engendered through the foregrounding of the poor, victim third world and the foreclosure of the non-capitalist world of the third. Building on what they characterize as an ab-original reading of Marxian historical materialism and the Lacanian real, the authors seek to conceptualize a counter-hegemonic revolutionary subject as a basis for postcapitalist alternatives to the hegemonic form of global capital.
The World of Tibetan Buddhism
by Thupten Jinpa Richard Gere His Holiness the Dalai LamaWith characteristic humility, His Holiness the Dalai Lama begins this landmark survey of the entire Buddhist path by saying, "I think an overview of Tibetan Buddhism for the purpose of providing a comprehensive framework of the path may prove helpful in deepening your understanding and practice." In this book, the Dalai Lama delivers a presentation that is both concise and profound, accessible and engaging. As readers explore Tibetan Buddhism more fully than ever before, they will find in His Holiness a great friend and authority.