Defining Nature's Limits
Title | Defining Nature's Limits PDF eBook |
Author | Neil Tarrant |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Total Pages | 273 |
Release | 2022-10-21 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0226819426 |
A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era. Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.
Seeking Nature's Limits
Title | Seeking Nature's Limits PDF eBook |
Author | Suzanne J. Moore |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 314 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Adaptation (Biology) |
ISBN | 9789050112215 |
Human Nature and the Limits of Science
Title | Human Nature and the Limits of Science PDF eBook |
Author | John Dupré |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 212 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0199248060 |
Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. He claims it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do.
On the Nature, Limits, Meaning, and End of Work
Title | On the Nature, Limits, Meaning, and End of Work PDF eBook |
Author | Zachary Thomas Settle |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | 153 |
Release | 2022-11-17 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1350299804 |
Articulating an Augustinian treatment of the nature, limits, meaning, and end of work, this volume will push Augustinian studies toward a more-detailed engagement with issues of political economy. Zachary Settle argues that we inhabit a culture that insists that our life's meaning is bound up in our work; we experience constant pressures at work to be more efficient and productive; and we know the ways in which our work-structures contribute to a seemingly ever-growing, corrosive system of poverty and oppression. These cultural assumptions regarding work, along with a cluster of other labor-related problems (i.e. automation, wage depression, wage theft, the rise of a flexible labor force, a lack of worker representation, over-work, and productivism) have rightfully raised a number of questions about the nature, meaning, and limits of our working lives and working structures. This book sets out the ways in which St. Augustine offers us-in piecemeal fashion-elements with which we can assemble an alternative vision. By examining his understanding of the role of work in the context of the monastery, we see his understanding of both the ways we should undertake our work and the ends toward which we should direct that work during our lives in a sinful world. Settle draws on these piecemeal treatments of work scattered throughout St. Augustine's varied writings in order to develop and articulate a unified theology of work.
Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits
Title | Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits PDF eBook |
Author | James T. Lemon |
Publisher | Wipf and Stock Publishers |
Total Pages | 352 |
Release | 2008-05-14 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1556356943 |
On the agricultural frontier and through technological progress, Europeans and others and their descendants have sought to fulfill their dreams of improvement. Through businesses, governments, and other bodies, city dwellers expedited these desires by organizing settlements, communications, trade, finance, and manufacturing. In turn, cities grew mightily. To assess the present condition of cities, Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits focuses on five large North American cities at various times in the past --Philadelphia (about 1760), New York (1860), Chicago (1910), Los Angeles (1950), and Toronto (1975). Life inside these cities--specifically the economy, society and politics, public services, land development, and the geographies of circulation, workplaces, and residential districts--is the central concern of this book. Another concern is drawing contrasts and similarities between the American and Canadian urban experiences. North Americans, most now living in cities, face the challenge of a social frontier--how to maintain civility in a near-stagnant economy. Despite recent advances in cyberspace, nature has imposed limits on technical progress defined by speed, convenience, and comfort; Promethean gains through creative destruction are no longer possible. Increased preoccupation with money, status, and safety suggests that the striving inspired by liberalism is still appealing. Yet without growth, liberal dreams cannot be fulfilled. To ensure work, income equity, and a degree of freedom in thought and action, citizens and leaders in both countries will have to commit themselves as never before to managing fairness through social democracy. Sustainable cities are not possible otherwise.
Postpolitics and the Limits of Nature
Title | Postpolitics and the Limits of Nature PDF eBook |
Author | Andy Scerri |
Publisher | SUNY Press |
Total Pages | 294 |
Release | 2019-01-01 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1438472137 |
Explores why past generations of radical ecological and social justice scholarship have been ineffective, and considers the work of a new wave of scholarship that aims to reinvent the radical project and combat injustice. In Postpolitics and the Limits of Nature, Andy Scerri offers a comprehensive overview of the critical theory project from the 1960s to the present, refracted through the lens of US politics and the American Left. He examines why past generations of radical ecological and social justice scholarship have been ineffective in the fight against injustice and rampant environmental exploitation. Scerri then engages a new wave of radicals and reformists who, in the wake of the Occupy movement and the 2016 presidential election, are reinventing the radical project as a challenge to injustice in the Anthropocene era. Along the way, he provides a fresh account of the thought of one of the major contributors to critical theory, Theodor Adorno, and of recent work that seeks to link Adornos ideas to the so-called new realism in political philosophy and political theory. This book is something like an histoire événementielle of contending philosophies of nature and the natural in relation to economy and politics over the past 60-odd years. What is impressive is the way Scerri situates the many different activists/scholars and views in the transition from Keynesian regulatory society to naturalized neoliberalism. Thus, authors are treated not as timeless purveyors of theory but, rather, as political economists rooted in the trends and currents of their particular time. I believe this will be an important book. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, coauthor of Environmental Politics for a Changing World: Power, Perspectives, and Practice, Second Edition
Human Nature and the Limits of Darwinism
Title | Human Nature and the Limits of Darwinism PDF eBook |
Author | Whitley R.P. Kaufman |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 222 |
Release | 2016-06-22 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1137592885 |
This book compares two competing theories of human nature: the more traditional theory espoused in different forms by centuries of western philosophy and the newer, Darwinian model. In the traditional view, the human being is a hybrid being, with a lower, animal nature and a higher, rational or “spiritual” component. The competing Darwinian account does away with the idea of a higher nature and attempts to provide a complete reduction of human nature to the evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction. Whitley Kaufman presents the case that the traditional conception, regardless of one's religious views or other beliefs, provides a superior account of human nature and culture. We are animals, but we are also rational animals. Kaufman explores the most fundamental philosophical questions as they relate to this debate over human nature—for example: Is free will an illusion? Is morality a product of evolution, with no objective basis? Is reason merely a tool for promoting reproductive success? Is art an adaptation for attracting mates? Is there any higher meaning or purpose to human life? Human Nature and the Limits of Darwinism aims to assess the competing views of human nature and present a clear account of the issues on this most pressing of questions. It engages in a close analysis of the numerous recent attempts to explain all human aims in terms of Darwinian processes and presents the arguments in support of the traditional conception of human nature.