Based on a conference held at Burg Wartenstein, Austria in 1968, organized by anthropologist Gregory Bateson and observed and interpreted by Mary Catherine Bateson. This classic on the mismatch between natural processes and human mental capacities and about the needed process of epistemological change was first published in 1972 (Knopf) and is reissued with a wonderful new foreword and afterword by the author. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Here's a BRIGHT IDEA: read this book. It's a PIECE OF CAKE. And trust us; no one will call you A TURKEY. For more metaphors, look inside.

“Clear medical explanations . . . will bring comfort to those readers and their loved ones facing a cancer diagnosis” (Publishers Weekly). A Finalist for the Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing Alanna Mitchell explores the facts and myths about cancer in this powerful book, as she recounts her family’s experiences with the disease. When her beloved brother-in-law John is diagnosed with malignant melanoma, Alanna throws herself into the latest clinical research, providing us with a clear description of what scientists know of cancer and its treatments. When John enters the world of alternative treatments, Alanna does, too, looking for the science in untested waters. She comes face to face with the misconceptions we share about cancer, which are rooted in blame and anxiety, and opens the door to new ways of looking at our most-feared illness. Beautifully written, Malignant Metaphor is a compassionate and persuasive book that has the power to change the conversation about cancer. “Mitchell’s research is rooted in science, while her writing remains grippingly personal.” ―Quill & Quire

Profiles of five women that aim “to shed light on personal and career obstacles women face in achieving success” by a cultural anthropologist (Publishers Weekly). Mary Catherine Bateson has been called “one of the most original and important thinkers of our time” (Deborah Tannen). Grove Press is pleased to reissue Bateson’s deeply satisfying treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women. Using their personal stories as her framework, Dr. Bateson delves into the creative potential of the complex lives we live today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities. With balanced sympathy and a candid approach to what makes these women inspiring, examples of the newly fluid movement of adaptation—their relationships with spouses, children, and friends, their ever-evolving work, and their gender—Bateson shows us that life itself is a creative process. “A masterwork of rare breadth and particularity, encompassing all the rhythms of five lives and friendships, and interweaving their stories in ways that reveal grand social truths and peculiar personal graces.”—The Boston Globe “Well-formulated and passionate . . . Offers nothing less than a radical rethinking of the concept of achievement.”—San Francisco Chronicle “As stimulating as it is hopeful . . . shakes up well-meaning truisms . . . adds new dimensions to our views of the world.”—Elizabeth Janeway, author of Man’s World, Woman’s Place “Bateson has an extremely interesting mind and the ability to express herself with extraordinary literary felicity . . . Too much truth steams behind the quiet elegance of these passages.”—The New York Times Book Review

In From Molecule to Metaphor, Jerome Feldman proposes a theory of language and thought that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a human biological ability that can be studied as a function of the brain, as vision and motor control are studied. This theory, he writes, is a "bridging theory" that works from extensive knowledge at two ends of a causal chain to explicate the links between. Although the cognitive sciences are revealing much about how our brains produce language and thought, we do not yet know exactly how words are understood or have any methodology for finding out. Feldman develops his theory in computer simulations—formal models that suggest ways that language and thought may be realized in the brain. Combining key findings and theories from biology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology, Feldman synthesizes a theory by exhibiting programs that demonstrate the required behavior while remaining consistent with the findings from all disciplines. After presenting the essential results on language, learning, neural computation, the biology of neurons and neural circuits, and the mind/brain, Feldman introduces specific demonstrations and formal models of such topics as how children learn their first words, words for abstract and metaphorical concepts, understanding stories, and grammar (including "hot-button" issues surrounding the innateness of human grammar). With this accessible, comprehensive book Feldman offers readers who want to understand how our brains create thought and language a theory of language that is intuitively plausible and also consistent with existing scientific data at all levels.

A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.

In Thinking of Others, Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity--as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. To be able to see oneself as someone else, whether the someone else is a real person or a fictional character, is to exercise the ability to deal with metaphor and other figurative language. The underlying faculty, Cohen argues, is the same--simply the ability to think of one thing as another when it plainly is not. In an engaging style, Cohen explores this idea by examining various occasions for identifying with others, including reading fiction, enjoying sports, making moral arguments, estimating one's future self, and imagining how one appears to others. Using many literary examples, Cohen argues that we can engage with fictional characters just as intensely as we do with real people, and he looks at some of the ways literature itself takes up the question of interpersonal identification and understanding. An original meditation on the necessity of imagination to moral and aesthetic life, Thinking of Others is an important contribution to philosophy and literary theory.