For a decade, Ecco has published the most outstanding science writing in America, collected in highly acclaimed annual volumes edited by some of the most impressive and most important names in science and science writing today: James Gleick, Timothy Ferris, Matt Ridley, Oliver Sacks, Dava Sobel, Alan Lightman, Atul Gawande, Gina Kolata, Sylvia Nasar, and Natalie Angier.

Now series editor Jesse Cohen invites the previous guest editors to select their favorite essays for this one-of-a-kind anthology. The result is an outstanding compendium--the best science writing of the new millennium, featuring an introduction by the series' 2010 editor and "New York Times" bestselling author of "How Doctors Think," Jerome Groopman.

Understand the phases of the moon, learn to navigate by the North Star and discover how to travel through space and time from your own window in this book which uncovers how humankind has its history woven into the constellations that light up our skies. Written by NASA science writer Noelia González and fully illustrated by Sara Boccaccini Meadows, this is the perfect introduction to the night sky for families everywhere.

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding.
In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology.
Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic inphilosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm.
Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds.

This book is intended as an introduction to the philosophical problems of space and time, suitable for any reader who has an interest in the nature of the universe and who has a secondary-school knowledge of physics and mathematics. In particular, it is hoped that the book may find a use in philosophy departments and physics departments within universities and other tertiary institutions. The attempt is always to introduce the problems from a twentieth-century point of view. It is preferable to introduce the history of the topic if and when that history becomes relevant to the development and solution of the problems, rather than to introduce a problem that was of importance in some previous age and to trace the development of it down the years.

Developed for the new International A Level specification, these new resources are specifically designed for international students, with a strong focus on progression, recognition and transferable skills, allowing learning in a local context to a global standard.

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