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"Of the Nature of Things" is a first-century BCE didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius to explain Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. In this work, T. Lucretius Carus presents the view that the world can be described by the function of material forces and natural laws. So, one should not fear the gods or death.
Originally published in 1973. In this systematic treatise, Anthony Quinton examines the concept of substance, a philosophical refinement of the everyday notion of a thing. Four distinct, but not unconnected, problems about substance are identified: what accounts for the individuality of a thing; what confers identity on a thing; what is the relation between a thing and its appearances; and what kind of thing is fundamental, in the sense that its existence is logically independent of that of any other kind of thing? In Part 1, the first two problems are discussed, while in Part 2, the third and fourth are considered. Part 3 examines four kinds of thing that have been commonly held to be in some way non-material: abstract entities; the un-observable entities of scientific theory; minds and their states; and, finally, values. The author argues that theoretical entities and mental states are, in fact, material. He gives a linguistic account of universals and necessary truths and advances a naturalistic theory of value.
Virgil on the Nature of Things by Monica R. Gale Pdf
The Georgics has for many years been a source of fierce controversy among scholars of Latin literature. Is the work optimistic or pessimistic, pro- or anti-Augustan? Should we read it as a eulogy or a bitter critique of Rome and her imperial ambitions? This book suggests that the ambiguity of the poem is the product of a complex and thorough-going engagement with earlier writers in the didactic tradition: Hesiod, Aratus and - above all - Lucretius. Drawing on both traditional, philological approaches to allusion, and modern theories of intertextuality, it shows how the world-views of the earlier poets are subjected to scrutiny and brought into conflict with each other. Detailed consideration of verbal parallels and of Lucretian themes, imagery and structural patterns in the Georgics forms the basis for a reading of Virgil's poem as an extended meditation on the relations between the individual and society, the gods and the natural environment.
The Nature of Things weaves together a life full of happiness and sorrow. In these fourteen collected essays, Tommye McClure Scanlin reflects on her artistic journey and how crafting and life are interwoven, two threads that comprise a larger picture. Readers will find themselves lost in Scanlin's full-color tapestries and comforting writing style as they explore the natural fields and woods of southern Appalachia. A final part of the book gives an overview of tapestry weaving basics with diagrams and descriptions for setting up a simple pipe loom and weaving a small tapestry sampler. Glossary, simple pipe loom illustrations, and a resource list are included for reference.
Concerning the Nature of Things by William Bragg Pdf
Developed from a Nobel Laureate's popular lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, this easy-to-understand book explains the nature of atoms, metal, gases, diamonds, ice, crystals, liquids, and other aspects of science. It illuminates many topics that are seldom explained, defining them in simple terms. 138 illustrations. 1925 edition.
The world is an interdependent whole of which everything is an integral, complexly related, part. Yet current ways of thinking, and being, persistently separate social phenomena and the individual self from the multiple dimensions with which they are interconnected. The Integral Nature of Things examines this revealing paradox and its consequences in a variety of sites: everyday language, labour, advertising, technology, post-structuralist theory, political rhetoric, urban planning, sex, neoliberal globalisation. Mani demonstrates how even though the interrelations between things are obscured by the ruling paradigm, the facts of relationality and indivisibility continually assert themselves. The book interweaves prose with poetry and sociocultural analysis with observational accounts to offer an alternative framework for addressing aspects of the cognitive, cultural, political, and ethical crisis we face today.
The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner Pdf
April 18, 1906: A massive earthquake rocks San Francisco just before daybreak, igniting a devouring inferno. Lives are lost, lives are shattered, but some rise from the ashes forever changed. Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right. Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. Sophie discovers hidden ties to two other women. The first, pretty and pregnant, is standing on her doorstep. The second is hundreds of miles away in the American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved. The fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating earthquake, thrusting them onto a perilous journey that will test their resiliency and resolve and, ultimately, their belief that love can overcome fear. From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War and As Bright as Heaven comes a gripping novel about the bonds of friendship and mother love, and the power of female solidarity.
The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D. Pdf
“Fascinating. Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.”—Oliver Sacks, MD, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat What is neuroplasticity? Is it possible to change your brain? Norman Doidge’s inspiring guide to the new brain science explains all of this and more An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable, and proving that it is, in fact, possible to change your brain. Psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity, its healing powers, and the people whose lives they’ve transformed—people whose mental limitations, brain damage or brain trauma were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed. Using these marvelous stories to probe mysteries of the body, emotion, love, sex, culture, and education, Dr. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.
In the Nature of Things by Jane Bennett,William Chaloupka Pdf
Annotation. Informed by recent developments in literary criticism and social theory, this book addresses the presumption that nature exists independent of culture and, in particular, of language.
On the Nature of Marx's Things by Jacques Lezra Pdf
On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx’s earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx’s inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading. “Lezra,” writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, “transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation.” Lezra’s expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that’s framed Marx’s work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx’s thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx’s Things a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza’s marranismo, through Melville’s Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno’s exilic antihumanism against Said’s cosmopolitan humanism, through today’s new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital’s capture of difference away from the story of capital’s production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such “objects” as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.
Lucretius and Shakespeare on the Nature of Things by Richard Allen Shoaf Pdf
Lucretius and Shakespeare on the Nature of Things maps large, new vistas for understanding the relationship between De rerum natura and Shakespeare’s works. In chapters on six important plays across the canon (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), it demonstrates that Shakespeare articulates his erotics of being, his “great creating nature” (The Winter’s Tale), by drawing on imagery he learned from Ovid and other classical poets, but especially from Lucretius, in his powerful epic that celebrates Venus and her endless creativity. Responding to Lucretius’s widely admired Latinity in his exposition of the life of man in nature, Shakespeare emerges as an early modern materialist who writes poetry that is effectively “atomic,” marked (as we might say today) by fission (hendiadys, for example) and fusion (synoeciosis, for example), joining and splitting, splitting and joining language and character as no other poet has ever done – To give away yourself keeps yourself still; My grave is like to be my wedding bed; I begin/To doubt the equivocation of the fiend/That lies like truth. Readers of Shoaf’s book will encounter anew, through both fresh evidence and close reading, Shakespeare’s universally acknowledged commitment to the art of nature and the nature of art. With Lucretius’s poetry as inspiration, Shakespeare becomes the poet of the material, both in art and in nature, immensely creative with his dædala lingua like dædala natura – his wonder-crafting tongue like wonder-working nature.
Were all asking the same kinds of questions, with the same goal in mind: How do I fit in? How can I navigate life gracefully? How can my life be more satisfying? How can I experience more love, joy, awe, and wonder? By learning, understanding, and applying the inherent wisdom that we find in the natural world, we can connect with people and with our planet, with our own hearts and souls, and create a life that is not only better for us as individuals, but perhaps together, create a world that works for everyone. With simplicity and humor Jeff shows how the wisdom of nature can free us, untangle us from the complexity of our ego-driven lives. This is the wisdom of the ordinary for each of us to treasure. Allow these clear and profound teachings to awaken you, so that you can glimpse the divine that is within you and all around. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee , Ph.D., Sufi teacher and author like a friendly sharing across a backyard fence or an informal exchange of insights across a cup of coffee, Jeff Anderson has written...about the times we live in, the challenges we face, and the kind of life and consciousness that may help us not just survive but prosper." David Spangler, author of Apprenticed to Spirit and Facing the Future A thought-provoking, humorous and touching collection of truly helpful ideas. Dr. Edward Viljoen, author of Practice the Presence and Spirit Is Calling
Plato: A Very Short Introduction by Julia Annas Pdf
This lively and accessible introduction to Plato focuses on the philosophy and argument of his writings, drawing the reader into Plato's way of doing philosophy, and the general themes of his thinking. This is not a book to leave the reader standing in the outer court of introduction and background information, but leads directly into Plato's argument. It looks at Plato as a thinker grappling with philosophical problems in a variety of ways, rather than a philosopher with a fully worked-out system. It includes a brief account of Plato's life and the various interpretations that have been drawn from the sparse remains of information. It stresses the importance of the founding of the Academy and the conception of philosophy as a subject. Julia Annas discusses Plato's style of writing: his use of the dialogue form, his use of what we today call fiction, and his philosophical transformation of myths. She also looks at his discussions of love and philosophy, his attitude to women, and to homosexual love, explores Plato's claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and touches on his arguments for the immortality of the soul and his ideas about the nature of the universe. 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.
The Intrinsic Nature of Things by Barbara Gellai Pdf
This book recounts the extraordinary personal journey and scientific story of Hungarian-born mathematician and physicist Cornelius Lanczos. His life and his mathematical accomplishments are inextricably linked, reflecting the social upheavals and historical events that shaped his odyssey in 20th-century Hungary, Germany, the United States, and Ireland. In his life Lanczos demonstrated a remarkable ability to be at the right place, or work with the right person, at the right time. At the start of his scientific career in Germany he worked as Einstein's assistant for one year and stayed in touch with him for years thereafter. Reacting to anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s, he moved to the United States, where he would work on some of the earliest digital computers at the National Bureau of Standards. After facing suspicion of Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era in the 1950s, Lanczos would relocate once again, joining Schrödinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Gellai's biography analyzes a rich life and a body of work that reaches across many scientific disciplines.Lanczos made important contributions to several areas of mathematics and mathematical physics. His first major contribution was an exact solution of the Einstein field equations for gravity (in general relativity). He worked out the Fast Fourier Transform, but since there were no machines on which to run it, this accomplishment would be forgotten for 25 years. Once he had access to computers, Lanczos independently rediscovered what is now known as the singular value decomposition, a fundamental tool in numerical methods. Other significant contributions included an important discovery about the Weyl tensor, which is now known as the Lanczos potential, and an important contribution on algorithms for finding eigenvalues of large matrices.
