In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces – ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today. Who are we? What is the world? How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time? Is the cosmos without purpose or value? Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?

In doing so, he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to see it. He suggests that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination, not just one or two; that they are in any case far from being in conflict; and that the brain’s right hemisphere plays the most important part in each. And he shows us how to recognise the ‘signature’ of the left hemisphere in our thinking, so as to avoid making decisions that bring disaster in their wake.

Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful – and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom. It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson, bestselling author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time-war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, race, and tribalism-in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all. In a time when our political and cultural perspectives feel more divisive than ever, Tyson provides a much-needed antidote to so much of what divides us, while making a passionate case for the twin engines of enlightenment-a cosmic perspective and the rationality of science. After thinking deeply about how a scientist views the world and about what Earth looks like from space, Tyson has found that terrestrial thoughts change as our brain resets and recalibrates life's priorities, along with the actions we might take in response. As a result, no outlook on culture, society, or civilisation remains untouched. In Starry Messenger, Tyson reveals just how human the enterprise of science is. Far from a cold, unfeeling undertaking, scientific methods, tools, and discoveries have shaped modern civilisation and created the landscape we've built for ourselves on which to live, work, and play. Tyson shows how an infusion of science and rational thinking renders worldviews deeper and more informed than ever before-and exposes unfounded perspectives and unjustified emotions. With crystalline prose and an abundance of evidence, Starry Messenger walks us through the scientific palette that sees and paints the world differently. From lessons on resolving global conflict to reminders of how precious it is to be alive, Tyson reveals, with warmth and eloquence, ten surprising, brilliant, and beautiful truths of human society, informed and enlightened by knowledge of our place in the universe.

Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini put the knowledge of all the world’s experts at our fingertips, and can generate meaningful sentences, equations and computer code. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and refashion society in unpredictable ways. We can expect these AI systems to soon be making autonomous decisions on the user’s behalf, with transformative impact on everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work. Can AI systems ‘think’, ‘know’ and ‘understand’? Could they manipulate or deceive you, and if so, what might they make you do? Whose interests do they ultimately represent? And when will they be able to move beyond words and take actions for themselves in the real world?

To answer these questions, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explains how these strange new minds work. He charts the evolution of AI, from the earliest inklings about thinking machines in the seventeenth century to today’s gargantuan deep neural networks. The resulting book is the most accessible, up-to-date and authoritative exploration of this radical new technology. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI’s mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: can we look forward to a technological utopia, or are we in the process of writing ourselves out of history?

Theories of Emotion is a philosophical introduction to the most influential theories of emotion of the past 60 years in philosophy, psychology, and biology. This multi-disciplinary approach provides the reader with a one-stop shop for encountering the key debates and cutting-edge ideas in what is becoming a central focus of contemporary thought. An introductory chapter on definitions of emotion is followed by three main sections on the way emotions are expressed, subjectively experienced, and related to action and motivation. This accessible but probing approach integrates philosophical analysis with innovative research in psychology and cognitive science, contextualizing current debates in the history of ideas from Darwin to pragmatism. Each section is introduced by a detailed illustration of a foundational thinker's work on emotion (Charles Darwin, William James, and John Dewey, respectively), showing how their insights and discoveries have shaped current views and suggesting ways in which they might still enrich contemporary approaches.

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us-and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull resumes until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole-and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called "artificial intelligence." They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian's riveting account, we meet the alignment problem's "first-responders," and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they-and we-succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity's biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture-and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.

This book introduces the reader to the exciting new field of plant philosophy and takes it in a new direction to ask: what does it mean to say that plants are sexed? Do 'male' and 'female' really mean the same when applied to humans, trees, fungi and algae? Are the zoological categories of sex really adequate for understanding the - uniquely 'dibiontic' - life cycle of plants? Vegetal Sex addresses these questions through a detailed analysis of major moments in the history of plant sex, from Aristotle to the modern day. Tracing the transformations in the analogy between animals and plants that characterize this history, it shows how the analogy still functions in contemporary botany and asks: what would a non-zoocentric, plant-centred philosophy of vegetal sex be like? By showing how philosophy and botany have been and still are inextricably entwined, Vegetal Sex allows us to think vegetal being and, perhaps, to recognize the vegetal in us all.

What is the nature of the 'laws' that Marx and Engels sought to formulate for the development of capitalism? How to understand and judge Engels's attempt to formulate a general philosophy and worldview? These are the questions highlighted in this magnificent work that situates Marx and Engels's writing against the background of the entire nineteenth-century world of scientific problems, from physics to historiography. One of the major contributions to scholarship on Marx, Engels and nineteenth-century science, Liedman's work is here presented in English translation and with a new preface by the author.

The literary arts represent and provoke experiences of understanding and emotion, and this open access study examines how the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself. During the past twenty years, much admirable work in the "health humanities" has focused upon what studies of literature contribute to the understandings and the practical work-the "worldly work"-of healthcare. Such a project aims at developing healthcare practitioners who bring greater care to those who come to them ailing or in fear or faced with terrible suffering. Literary Studies and Well-Being turns this inside out by examining the intergenerational caretaking of healthcare in a manner which allows us to comprehend the nature and discipline of literary studies in new ways. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Oklahoma.

Can the existence of God by proven by science? The answer will still surprise you. Since the advent of science in the 16th century, it has navigated mankind in the direction of mechanistic materialism, and as a consequence to atheism. Since the beginning of the 20th century this direction has changed. Relativity and quantum physics, in conjunction with Big Bang cosmology, laid the foundation for a revolution in physics, in what became labelled as the "New Physics". Subsequently during the 1970's it was discovered that the universe, at every level and from its first billionth of a second at the time of its creation, was mysteriously fine-tuned. This fine-tuning comprises the inexplicable and delicate balance of the four fundamental forces that rule the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces. This discovery implies that even the most basic building blocks of matter, such as atoms and its sub-atomic particles, can only exist by the grace of an inexplicable, complex and delicate balance between these forces. The chance that this fine-tuning could have emerged spontaneously and fortuitously, is not only improbable, but utterly impossible. Intelligence or Chaos elucidates that the complexity and fine-tuning of the universe can only be explained by the presence of an all-pervasive intelligence, the source and reservoir of the Information that actually guides and controls the universe. For the first time in history such a conclusion is confirmed by indubitable scientific evidence. The existence of an all-pervading intelligence, as expressed in the principle of fine-tuning, is also at the core of the ancient Vedanta philosophy of India. The author explores how Vedanta disentangles some of the paradoxes encountered in quantum physics and major cosmological questions such as the Big Bang and its origin. Using the latest empirical and scientific evidence Intelligence or Chaos clearly shows that the universe is ruled by intelligence and information, and not by chance and chaos.

This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be. While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, sociological surveys, simulations, as well as history and philosophy of science, in order to yield meaningful results about the core questions in medicine. They focus on concepts central to philosophy of medicine and medical practice, such as death, pain, disease and disorder, advance directives, medical explanation, disability and informed consent. Presenting empirical findings and providing a crucial foundation for future work in this dynamic field, this collection explores new ways for philosophers to cooperate with scientists and reveals the value of these collaborations for both philosophy and medicine. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant.

Throughout history, humans have dreamed of knowing the reason for the existence of the universe. In The Mind of God, physicist Paul Davies explores whether modern science can provide the key that will unlock this last secret. In his quest for an ultimate explanation, Davies reexamines the great questions that have preoccupied humankind for millennia, and in the process explores, among other topics, the origin and evolution of the cosmos, the nature of life and consciousness, and the claim that our universe is a kind of gigantic computer. Charting the ways in which the theories of such scientists as Newton, Einstein, and more recently Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman have altered our conception of the physical universe. Davies puts these scientists' discoveries into context with the writings of philosophers such as Plato. Descartes, Hume, and Kant. His startling conclusion is that the universe is "no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here." By the means of science, we can truly see into the mind of God.

Mojca Kuplen connects 18th-century German aesthetics to contemporary theories of self-knowledge in order to highlight the unique cognitive value of art. She does this through revisiting Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas, and demonstrating how works of art can increase our understanding of abstract concepts whilst promoting self-knowledge. Addressing some of the most fundamental questions in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of art, this study covers the value and importance of art, the relationship between art and beauty, the role of knowledge in art and the criteria for artistic excellence. It offers an insight into problems related to the apprehension of meaning and the cognitive processing of abstract representations that have been of interest to contemporary cognitive science. Kant's Aesthetic Cognitivism presents these arguments in a lucid and wide-ranging engagement with the history of aesthetics and current academic debates to understand what art is and why it is valuable.

Jesuit engagement with natural philosophy during the late 16th and early 17th centuries transformed the status of the mathematical disciplines and propelled members of the Order into key areas of controversy in relation to Aristotelianism. Through close investigation of the activities of the Jesuit 'school' of mathematics founded by Christoph Clavius, The Scientific Counter-Revolution examines the Jesuit connections to the rise of experimental natural philosophy and the emergence of the early scientific societies. Arguing for a re-evaluation of the role of Jesuits in shaping early modern science, this book traces the evolution of the Collegio Romano as a hub of knowledge. Starting with an examination of Clavius's Counter-Reformation agenda for mathematics, Michael John Gorman traces the development of a collective Jesuit approach to experimentation and observation under Christopher Grienberger and analyses the Jesuit role in the Galileo Affair and the vacuum debate. Ending with a discussion of the transformation of the Collegio Romano under Athanasius Kircher into a place of curiosity and wonder and the centre of a global information gathering network, this book reveals how the Counter-Reformation goals of the Jesuits contributed to the shaping of modern experimental science.

This volume contains eighteen papers that have been collected by the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics. It showcases rigorously-reviewed contemporary scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics, as well as the teaching of the history of mathematics.   Some of the topics explored include Arabic editions of Euclid’s Elements from the thirteenth century and their role in the assimilation of Euclidean geometry into the Islamic intellectual tradition Portuguese sixteenth century recreational mathematics as found in the Tratado de Prática Darysmetica  A Cambridge correspondence course in arithmetic for women in England in the late nineteenth century The mathematical interests of the famous Egyptologist Thomas Eric (T. E.) Peet  The history of Zentralblatt für Mathematik and Mathematical Reviews and their role in creating a publishing infrastructure for a global mathematical literature The use of Latin squares for agricultural crop experiments at the Rothamsted Experimental Station The many contributions of women to the advancement of computing techniques at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s The volume concludes with two short plays, one set in Ancient Mesopotamia and the other in Ancient Egypt, that are well suited for use in the mathematics classroom. Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible not only to mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also to anyone with a general interest in mathematics.

The articulation between persistence and change is relevant to a great number of different disciplines. It is particularly central to the study of urban and rural forms in many different fields of research, in geography, archaeology, architecture and history. Resilience puts forward the idea that we can no longer be truly satisfied with the common approaches used to study the dynamics of landscapes, such as the palimpsest approach, the regressive method and the semiological analysis amongst others, because they are based on the separation between the past and the present, which itself stems from the differentiation between nature and society. This book combines spatio-temporalities, as described in archeogeography, with concepts that have been developed in the field of ecological resilience, such as panarchy and the adaptive cycle. Thus revived, the morphological analysis in this work considers landscapes as complex resilient adaptive systems. The permanence observed in landscapes is no longer presented as the endurance of inherited forms, but as the result of a dynamic that is fed by this constant dialogue between persistence and change. Thus, resilience is here decisively on the side of dynamics rather than that of resistance.

This book contextualizes David Hume’s philosophy of physical science, exploring both Hume’s background in the history of early modern natural philosophy and its subsequent impact on the scientific tradition. Drawing on Cartesian cosmology and Einstein’s special relativity, and taking in topics including experimentalism, causation, laws of nature, metaphysics of forces, mathematics’ relation to nature, and the concepts of space and time, this book deepens our understanding of Hume’s relation to natural philosophy. It does so in addition by situating Hume’s thought within the context of other major philosophers and scientists, including Descartes, Locke, Boyle, Kant, Newton, and Leibniz. Demonstrating above all Hume’s understanding of the fluid relationship between philosophy and science, Hume’s Natural Philosophy and Philosophy of Physical Science will provide new insights for historians and philosophers of science.