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"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated
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When Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales reflect the condition of our oceans. Here she blends natural history, philosophy, and science to learn about whales so rare they have never been named; whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet's atmosphere. She takes readers...
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Sparked by a controversial debate in February 2014, Bill Nye has set off on an energetic campaign to spread awareness of evolution and the powerful way it shapes our lives. In Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, he explains why race does not really exist; evaluates the true promise and peril of genetically modified food; reveals how new species are born, in a dog kennel and in a London subway; takes a stroll through 4.5 billion years...
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"The past has always been elusive: how can we understand people whose worlds were utterly different from our own without imposing our own standards and hindsight? What did things feel like in the moment when outcomes were uncertain? How can we recover the uncertainties of the past, before the outcomes were known? What kind of imagination goes into the writing of transformative history? Are there latent trends that distinguish the kinds of history...
5) On trails
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"In 2009, while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths that lie beneath our feet: How do they form? Why do some improve over time while others fade? What makes us follow or strike off on our own? Over the course of the next seven years, Moor traveled the globe, exploring trails of all kinds, from the miniscule to the massive. He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails,...
6) Solenoid
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"From Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of existence, history, philosophy, and mathematics. On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms...
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"Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States has sold more than 2.5 million copies. It is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors who know better, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation. Zinn's history is popular, but it is also massively wrong. Scholar Mary Grabar exposes just how wrong in...
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Includes material on the influence of biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, and war on history.
In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their four decades of work on the ten monumental volumes of The Story of Civilization. The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights...
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The advent and spread of Internet and the Web have radically transformed the modes of communication. This book considers a particular ambit of online communication, namely that of science. In the first place, the author reconstructs the circumstances that gave rise to the modern system of scientific communication, and the qualitative and quantitative tools for scientific evaluation. After this, the analysis concentrates on the history, philosophy...
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This PBS documentary on Western Philosophy was produced in response to the 9/11 terror attacks. It makes the case for the West and in particular the West’s pluralistic approach to reasoning and morality. Interviews with nine clear thinkers give an introduction to Western Philosophy. It introduces the concepts of building up a moral system, the golden rule, the basics of logic (premise and inference), and pluralism. The program looks at the ideas...
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A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred...
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In this program with world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee, the late philosopher and radical political theorist Herbert Marcuse explains how the so-called Frankfurt School reevaluated Marxism when world economic crisis failed to destroy capitalism as predicted by Marx. He also analyzes the philosophical roots of the student rebellions of the sixties.
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In this program, world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Hilary Putnam of Harvard examine current philosophical thought that dismisses the primacy and infallibility of mathematical logic and the scientific method. Modern thinkers, such as Einstein, are credited with introducing interpretive logic into their scientific theories.
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In this program, world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Bernard Williams of Cambridge University discuss linguistic philosophy-an offshoot of logical positivism-which argues that sentences can have no meaning beyond that which humans give them because language is a human invention.
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The areas in which philosophy and literature overlap are examined in this program by world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Oxford novelist Iris Murdoch. Style and structure in philosophical writing are compared and contrasted with those in literature. The narrative abilities of Plato, Schopenhauer, and Kant are examined. Philosophy's predilection for accepting only literature that supports its theories is discussed as a source of antagonism...
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Simplified exercises for beginners using the fundamentals form. Includes a history, philosophy and health benefits discussion as well as instruction covering the mind/body principles, movement patterns and form instruction and perspectives for integrating Tʻai chi into one's daily life.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein developed two linguistic philosophies: one studies language as a way of giving picture-meanings to objects; the other studies the ways language is used to create different impressions. In this program, world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Oxford professor Anthony Quinton dissect the two philosophies, and discuss their influence on anthropology and sociology.
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World-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Berkeley philosopher of language John Searle discuss the question: "How does language relate to thought and to reality?" Searle explores the use of language to clarify experience as fundamental to the acquisition of knowledge. He then describes the various uses of language in the philosophies of Plato, Descartes, Frege, Mills, and others.