Christopher Phillips has devoted his life to carrying the torch of Socrates and his quest to "Know Thyself." Yet upon the death of his beloved father and mentor, the originator of the burgeoning global Socrates Cafe movement had little choice but to confront the inescapable truth: that there are some things we cannot know for sure. This moving, insightful and ultimately hopeful and helpful blend of memoir and philosophical exploration begins in Phillips' native stomping grounds of the tiny volcanic island of Nisyros, Greece and unfurls through space and time as the author explores the connections between his immediate circumstances and the eternal wisdom of popular philosophers. - In this personal and probing book, the acclaimed 'philosopher for the people' shares lessons gleaned from his intimate and often unexpected encounters with uncommonly perceptive human beings both living and long deceased, in the form of weary travelers and some of history's greatest thinkers, from Heraclitus to Dr. Cornel West. Along the way, he charts a pathway for sculpting what Shakespeare describes as a "soul of goodness," which meshes with Plato's paradigm-shattering conception of the "healthiness of soul." For those struggling to overcome the hopelessness that can result from grievous loss, setback, or betrayal - what Phillips' touchstone Percy Blythe Shelley calls life circumstances "darker than death or night" - the author spotlights, with philosophical prescriptions both timely and timeless, how to cultivate a 'Socratic spirit' that leads to renewed love, forbearance, and hope at the other end of the tunnel.

Whether through government propaganda or popular transnational satellite television channels, Arab citizens encounter a discourse that reinforces a sense of belonging to their own state and a broader Arab world on a daily basis. Looking through the lens of nationalism theory, this book examines how and why Arab identity continues to be reproduced in today's Middle East, and how that Arab identity interacts with strengthening ties to religion and the state. Drawing on case studies of two ideologically different Arab regimes, Syria and Jordan, Christopher Phillips explores both the implications this everyday Arab identity will have on western policy towards the Middle East and its real life impact on international relations. Offering an original perspective on this topical issue, this book will be of interest to academics and practitioners working on the Arab world and political affairs, as well as students of International Relations, Political Science and the Middle East, notably Syria and Jordan, and policymakers in the region.

Updated with two new chapters, this book exposes the profound influence of the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar in Syria's bloody conflict and explores the implications of the perceived decline of American power in the Middle East. "One of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published."-Patrick Cockburn, Independent

As the UK enters a period of intense public introspection in the wake of Brexit, this book takes on one of the key questions emerging from the divisive process: what is Britain's place in the world? The Middle East is one of the regions the UK has been most engaged in historically. This book assesses the drivers of foreign policy successes and failures and asks if there is a way to revitalise British influence in the region, and if this is even desirable. The book analyses the values, trade and security concerns that drive the UK's foreign policy. There are separate chapters on the non- Arab powers - Israel, Turkey and Iran - as well as chapters on the Middle Eastern Arab states and regions including the Gulf, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria and the Levant. The contributions are from leading specialists in the field: Rosemary Hollis, Michael Clarke, Ian Black, Bill Park, Christopher Phillips, Sanam Vakil, Michael Stephens and Louise Kettle. They each explain and re-assess the declining western influence and continued instability in the region and what this means for the UK's priorities and strategy towards the MENA. This is an essential book for policy makers, journalists and researchers focused on foreign policy towards the Middle East.

This book collects the notes of the lectures given at an Advanced Course on Dynamical Systems at the Centre de Recerca Matematica (CRM) in Barcelona. The notes consist of four series of lectures. The first one, given by Andrew Toms, presents the basic properties of the Cuntz semigroup and its role in the classification program of simple, nuclear, separable C*-algebras. The second series of lectures, delivered by N. Christopher Phillips, serves as an introduction to group actions on C*-algebras and their crossed products, with emphasis on the simple case and when the crossed products are classifiable. The third one, given by David Kerr, treats various developments related to measure-theoretic and topological aspects of crossed products, focusing on internal and external approximation concepts, both for groups and C*-algebras. Finally, the last series of lectures, delivered by Thierry Giordano, is devoted to the theory of topological orbit equivalence, with particular attention to the classification of minimal actions by finitely generated abelian groups on the Cantor set.

Freeness of an action of a compact Lie group on a compact Hausdorff space is equivalent to a simple condition on the corresponding equivariant K-theory. This fact can be regarded as a theorem on actions on a commutative C*-algebra, namely the algebra of continuous complex-valued functions on the space. The successes of "noncommutative topology" suggest that one should try to generalize this result to actions on arbitrary C*-algebras. Lacking an appropriate definition of a free action on a C*-algebra, one is led instead to the study of actions satisfying conditions on equivariant K-theory - in the cases of spaces, simply freeness. The first third of this book is a detailed exposition of equivariant K-theory and KK-theory, assuming only a general knowledge of C*-algebras and some ordinary K-theory. It continues with the author's research on K-theoretic freeness of actions. It is shown that many properties of freeness generalize, while others do not, and that certain forms of K-theoretic freeness are related to other noncommutative measures of freeness, such as the Connes spectrum. The implications of K-theoretic freeness for actions on type I and AF algebras are also examined, and in these cases K-theoretic freeness is characterized analytically.

Whether through government propaganda or popular transnational satellite television channels, Arab citizens encounter a discourse that reinforces a sense of belonging to their own state and a broader Arab world on a daily basis. Looking through the lens of nationalism theory, this book examines how and why Arab identity continues to be reproduced in today s Middle East, and how that Arab identity interacts with strengthening ties to religion and the state.

Drawing on case studies of two ideologically different Arab regimes, Syria and Jordan, Christopher Phillips explores both the implications this everyday Arab identity will have on western policy towards the Middle East and its real life impact on international relations.

Offering an original perspective on this topical issue, this book will be of interest to academics and practitioners working on the Arab world and political affairs, as well as students of International Relations, Political Science and the Middle East, notably Syria and Jordan, and policymakers in the region.

An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor in order to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players. Tracing baseball's story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest and most consequential fields for the introduction of numerical analysis. New technologies and methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to quantify the drafting and managing of players-replacing scouting with scoring. But that's not how things turned out. Over the decades, scouting and scoring started looking increasingly similar. Scouts expressed their judgments in highly formulaic ways, using numerical grades and scientific instruments to evaluate players. Scorers drew on moral judgments, depended on human labor to maintain and correct data, and designed bureaucratic systems to make statistics appear reliable. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, the history of baseball reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science. A unique consideration of the role of quantitative measurement and human judgment, Scouting and Scoring provides an entirely fresh understanding of baseball by showing what the sport reveals about reliable knowledge in the modern world.

An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players. Tracing baseball's story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest fields to introduce numerical analysis, and new methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to replace scouting with scoring. But that's not how things turned out. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, Scouting and Scoring reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science, and offers an entirely fresh understanding of baseball.

Although you don't need a large computing infrastructure to process massive amounts of data with Apache Hadoop, it can still be difficult to get started. This practical guide shows you how to quickly launch data analysis projects in the cloud by using Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), the hosted Hadoop framework in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Authors Kevin Schmidt and Christopher Phillips demonstrate best practices for using EMR and various AWS and Apache technologies by walking you through the construction of a sample MapReduce log analysis application. Using code samples and example configurations, you'll learn how to assemble the building blocks necessary to solve your biggest data analysis problems. Get an overview of the AWS and Apache software tools used in large-scale data analysis Go through the process of executing a Job Flow with a simple log analyzer Discover useful MapReduce patterns for filtering and analyzing data sets Use Apache Hive and Pig instead of Java to build a MapReduce Job Flow Learn the basics for using Amazon EMR to run machine learning algorithms Develop a project cost model for using Amazon EMR and other AWS tools

As the UK enters a period of intense public introspection in the wake of Brexit, this book takes on one of the key questions emerging from the divisive process: what is Britain's place in the world? The Middle East is one of the regions the UK has been most engaged in historically. This book assesses the drivers of foreign policy successes and failures and asks if there is a way to revitalise British influence in the region, and if this is even desirable. The book analyses the values, trade and security concerns that drive the UK's foreign policy. There are separate chapters on the non- Arab powers - Israel, Turkey and Iran - as well as chapters on the Middle Eastern Arab states and regions including the Gulf, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria and the Levant. The contributions are from leading specialists in the field: Rosemary Hollis, Michael Clarke, Ian Black, Bill Park, Christopher Phillips, Sanam Vakil, Michael Stephens and Louise Kettle. They each explain and re-assess the declining western influence and continued instability in the region and what this means for the UK's priorities and strategy towards the MENA. This is an essential book for policy makers, journalists and researchers focused on foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Energized by the initial optimism surrounding Obama's presidency and, conversely, the fierce partisanship in Congress, Christopher Phillips has set out to engage Americans in discussions surrounding our must fundamental rights and freedoms, with some help from Thomas Jefferson. A radical in his own day, Jefferson believed that the Constitution should be revised periodically to keep up with the changing times. Instead, it has become a sacred, immutable text-and in Phillips's opinion, it's in need of some shaking up.

From a high school in West Virginia to People's Park in Berkeley, California; from Burning Man to the Mall of America, Phillips gathered together Americans from all walks of life, moderating dialogues inspired by Jefferson's own populist political philosophy, formulating new Constitutional articles. With contagious passion and conviction, Philips has taken up Jefferson's cause for a truly participatory democracy at a time when our country needs it most.

Spanning some fifty-four years, The Union on Trial is a fascinating look at the journals that William Barclay Napton (1808-1883), an editor, Missouri lawyer, and state Supreme Court judge, kept from his time as a student at Princeton to his death in Missouri. Although a northerner by birth, Napton, the owner or trustee of forty-six slaves, embraced a proslavery analysis of American society. Focusing on events between the 1850s and 1870s, especially those that led to the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Union on Trial contains Napton's political reflections, offering the important perspective of an educated northern-cum-southern rightist on the key issues that turned Missouri toward the South during the Civil War era. Although Napton's journals offer provocative insights into the process of southernization on the border, their real value lies in their author's often penetrating analysis of the political, legal, and constitutional revolution that the Civil War generated. Yet the most obvious theme that emerges from Napton's journals is the centrality of slavery in Missourians' perceptions of themselves and the nation and, ultimately, in how border states measured their southernness. Napton's impressions of the constitutional crises surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction offer essential arguments with which to consider the magnitude of the nation's most transforming conflict. A lengthy introduction contextualizes Napton's life and beliefs, assessing his transition from northerner to southerner largely as a product of his political transformation to a proslavery, states' rights Democrat but also as a result of his marriage into a southern family. Napton's tragic Civil War experience was a watershed in his southern evolution, a process that mirrored his state's evolution and, by way of memory and politics, ultimately defined his family and his home region. Students and scholars of American history, Missouri history, and Civil War studies will find this volume to be of great interest.

Christopher Phillips goes to the heart of philosophy and Socratic discourse to discover what we re all looking for: the kind of love that makes life worthwhile. That is, love not defined only as eros, or erotic love, but in all its classical varieties. Love of neighbor, love of country, love of God, love of life, and love of wisdom each is clarified and invigorated in Phillips s Socratic dialogues with people from all walks of life and from all over the world.