The Restless Centuries

Author : Jessica Riskin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 571 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2016-03-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780226302928

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The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin Pdf

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.

Author : Kenneth R. Bain,James L. Gormly
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 1980-01-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0808740296

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The Restless Centuries by Kenneth R. Bain,James L. Gormly Pdf

Author : Jessica Riskin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 571 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-10
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226303086

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The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin Pdf

A “wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned” scientific and cultural history of the concept of the capacity to act in nature (London Review of Books). Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines. The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive. Praise for The Restless Clock “A wonderful contribution—and much needed corrective—to the history of European ideas about life and matter.” —Evelyn Fox Keller, author of The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture “Engrossing and illuminating.” —Nature “A sweeping survey of the search for answers to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking.” —Times Higher Education (UK)

Author : Anna Keay
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2022-03-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780008282042

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The Restless Republic: Britain without a Crown by Anna Keay Pdf

THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 WINNER OF THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE Eleven years when Britain had no king.

Author : Peter N. Carroll,David W. Noble
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1979
Category : United States
ISBN : 0808729195

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The Restless Centuries: Colonial times to 1877 by Peter N. Carroll,David W. Noble Pdf

Author : Felicity Callard,Kimberley Staines,James Wilkes
Publisher : Springer
Page : 205 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-27
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 9783319452647

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The Restless Compendium by Felicity Callard,Kimberley Staines,James Wilkes Pdf

This book is open access under a CC BY license. This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest’s presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributions ranging from investigations of daydreaming and mindwandering, through histories of therapeutic relaxation and laziness, and creative-critical pieces on lullabies and the Sabbath, to experimental methods to measure aircraft noise and track somatic vigilance in urban space. The essays are grouped by scale of enquiry, into mind, body and practice, allowing readers to draw new connections across apparently distinct phenomena. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, life sciences, arts and humanities.

Author : Odd Arne Westad
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 536 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2012-08-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780465029365

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Restless Empire by Odd Arne Westad Pdf

As the twenty-first century dawns, China stands at a crossroads. The largest and most populous country on earth and currently the world's second biggest economy, China has recently reclaimed its historic place at the center of global affairs after decades of internal chaos and disastrous foreign relations. But even as China tentatively reengages with the outside world, the contradictions of its development risks pushing it back into an era of insularity and instability -- a regression that, as China's recent history shows, would have serious implications for all other nations. In Restless Empire, award-winning historian Odd Arne Westad traces China's complex foreign affairs over the past 250 years, identifying the forces that will determine the country's path in the decades to come. Since the height of the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century, China's interactions -- and confrontations -- with foreign powers have caused its worldview to fluctuate wildly between extremes of dominance and subjugation, emulation and defiance. From the invasion of Burma in the 1760s to the Boxer Rebellion in the early 20th century to the 2001 standoff over a downed U.S. spy plane, many of these encounters have left Chinese with a lingering sense of humiliation and resentment, and inflamed their notions of justice, hierarchy, and Chinese centrality in world affairs. Recently, China's rising influence on the world stage has shown what the country stands to gain from international cooperation and openness. But as Westad shows, the nation's success will ultimately hinge on its ability to engage with potential international partners while simultaneously safeguarding its own strength and stability. An in-depth study by one of our most respected authorities on international relations and contemporary East Asian history, Restless Empire is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the recent past and probable future of this dynamic and complex nation.

Author : Peter N. Carroll,David W. Noble
Publisher : Burgess International Group
Page : 539 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 1979
Category : History
ISBN : 0808729209

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The Restless Centuries by Peter N. Carroll,David W. Noble Pdf

Author : Tom Cox
Publisher : Unbound Publishing
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2017-11-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781783524570

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21st-Century Yokel by Tom Cox Pdf

'Glorious – funny and wry and wise, and utterly its own lawmaker' Robert Macfarlane 'A rich, strange, oddly glorious brew' Guardian Longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2018 21st-Century Yokel is not quite nature writing, not quite a family memoir, not quite a book about walking, not quite a collection of humorous essays, but a bit of all five. Thick with owls and badgers, oak trees and wood piles, scarecrows and ghosts, and Tom Cox's loud and excitable dad, this book is full of the folklore of several counties – the ancient kind and the everyday variety – as well as wild places, mystical spots and curious objects. Emerging from this focus on the detail are themes that are broader and bigger and more important than ever. Tom's writing treads a new path, one that has a lot in common with a rambling country walk; it's bewitched by fresh air and big skies, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless and prone to a few detours, but it always reaches its destination in the end.

Author : György Spiró
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 864 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2015-11-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781632060495

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Captivity by György Spiró Pdf

A literary sensation in Hungary, Gyorgy Spiro's Captivity is set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ's death and the outbreak of the Jewish War. It follows the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew. Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri's father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family's prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later he has an awakening in cosmopolitan Alexandria, and then returns home to an unexpected inheritance.

Author : Leigh Eric Schmidt
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2012-09-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780520954113

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Restless Souls by Leigh Eric Schmidt Pdf

Yoga classes and Zen meditation, New-Age retreats and nature mysticism—all are part of an ongoing religious experimentation that has surprisingly deep roots in American history. Tracing out the country’s Transcendentalist and cosmopolitan religious impulses over the last two centuries, Restless Souls explores America’s abiding romance with spirituality as religion’s better half. Now in its second edition, including a new preface, Leigh Eric Schmidt's fascinating book provides a rich account of how this open-road spirituality developed in American culture in the first place as well as a sweeping survey of the liberal religious movements that touted it and ensured its continued vitality.

Author : Agustín de Rojas,Hebe Powell
Publisher : Restless Books
Page : 540 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2016-07-12
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781632060174

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The Year 200 by Agustín de Rojas,Hebe Powell Pdf

The cult classic from the godfather of Cuban science fiction, Agustín de Rojas’s The Year 200 is both a visionary sci-fi masterwork and a bold political parable about the perils of state power. Centuries have passed since the Communist Federation defeated the capitalist Empire, but humanity is still divided. A vast artificial-intelligence network, a psychiatric bureaucracy, and a tiny egalitarian council oversee civil affairs and quash “abnormal” attitudes such as romantic love. Disillusioned civilians renounce the new society and either forego technology to live as “primitives” or enhance their brains with cybernetic implants to become “cybos.” When the Empire returns and takes over the minds of unsuspecting citizens in a scenario that terrifyingly recalls Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the world’s fate falls into the hands of two brave women. Originally published in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the onset of Cuba's devastating Special Period, Agustín de Rojas’s magnum opus brings contemporary trajectories to their logical extremes and boldly asks, “What does ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ really mean?”

Author : Benjamin Storey,Jenna Silber Storey
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691211121

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Why We Are Restless by Benjamin Storey,Jenna Silber Storey Pdf

"No one seems to be happy with the present. That loathing of the present is understandable. The present moment, in modern life, is hard to love, or even to grasp. For the modern present is a state of constant motion. Perpetual moral, social, and psychic revolution is the price we pay for our unprecedented liberty, equality, and prosperity. Though we rightly prize those great political goods, having our world turned upside down every morning makes us all of us uneasy and some of us miserable. We exacerbate our unease by our failure to recognize it. With our ritual insistence that we are perfectly content to "go with the flow," we deny even the existence of our disquiet. We refuse to see what time it is, and we refuse to see ourselves"--

Author : William Gaunt
Publisher : London : Phaidon
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 1972
Category : Art
ISBN : UOM:39015014418019

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The Restless Century: Painting in Britain, 1800-1900 by William Gaunt Pdf

Author : Sarah Meyrick
Publisher : SPCK
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2019-04-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781910674550

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The Restless Wave by Sarah Meyrick Pdf

When Nell comes across an old envelope in a desk drawer, the discovery sets her on a path to uncover a secret dating back to the Second World War. Told from the perspectives of Nell, her mother and her grandfather, this immensely empathetic novel explores the complexities of family dynamics, as each generation tries to make sense of the world and the events of their time.