Published By
Created On
12 Jan 2021 22:04:34 UTC
Transaction ID
Cost
Safe for Work
Free
Yes
Causation and Universals
Author: Evan Fales
File Type: pdf
The world contains objective causal relations and universals, both of which are intimately connected. If these claims are true, they must have far-reaching consequences, breathing new life into the theory of empirical knowledge and reinforcing epistemological realism. Without causes and universals, Professor Fales argues, realism is defeated, and idealism or scepticism wins. Fales begins with a detailed analysis of David Humes argument that we have no direct experience of necessary connections between events, concluding that Hume was mistaken on this fundamental point. Then, adopting the view of Armstrong and others that causation is grounded in a second-order relation between universals, he explores a range of topics for which the resulting analysis of causation has systematic implications. In particular, causal identity conditions for physical universals are proposed, which generate a new argument for Platonism. The nature of space and time is discussed, with arguments against backward causation and for the view that space and time can exist independently of matter or causal process. Many of Professor Faless conclusions seem to run counter to received opinion among contemporary empiricists. Yet his method is classically empiricist in spirit, and a chief motive for these metaphysical explorations is epistemological. The final chapters investigate the perennial question of whether an empiricist, internalist and foundational epistemology can support scientific realism.Review`Fales has obviously given a great deal of thought to the topics he covers, and his book deserves to be widely read and discussed. - mind
File Type: pdf
The world contains objective causal relations and universals, both of which are intimately connected. If these claims are true, they must have far-reaching consequences, breathing new life into the theory of empirical knowledge and reinforcing epistemological realism. Without causes and universals, Professor Fales argues, realism is defeated, and idealism or scepticism wins. Fales begins with a detailed analysis of David Humes argument that we have no direct experience of necessary connections between events, concluding that Hume was mistaken on this fundamental point. Then, adopting the view of Armstrong and others that causation is grounded in a second-order relation between universals, he explores a range of topics for which the resulting analysis of causation has systematic implications. In particular, causal identity conditions for physical universals are proposed, which generate a new argument for Platonism. The nature of space and time is discussed, with arguments against backward causation and for the view that space and time can exist independently of matter or causal process. Many of Professor Faless conclusions seem to run counter to received opinion among contemporary empiricists. Yet his method is classically empiricist in spirit, and a chief motive for these metaphysical explorations is epistemological. The final chapters investigate the perennial question of whether an empiricist, internalist and foundational epistemology can support scientific realism.Review`Fales has obviously given a great deal of thought to the topics he covers, and his book deserves to be widely read and discussed. - mind
Author
Content Type
Unspecified
application/pdf
Language
English
More from the publisher
THE I
29325
Author: Sharon Weinberger
File Type: epub
Based on exclusive interviews with senior Pentagon officials and previously unseen declassified documents, this is thedefinitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years. Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agencys original mission was to create the unimagined weapons of the future. Over the decades, DARPA has been responsible for countless inventions and technologies that extend well beyond military technology. Sharon Weinberger gives us a riveting account of DARPAs successes and failures, its remarkable innovations, and its wild-eyed schemes. We see how the threat of nuclear Armageddon sparked investment in computer networking, leading to the Internet, as well as to a proposal to power a missile-destroying particle beam by draining the Great Lakes. We learn how DARPA was responsible during the Vietnam War for both Agent Orange and the development of the worlds first armed drones, and how after 911 the agency sparked a national controversy over surveillance with its data-mining research. And we see how DARPAs success with self-driving cars was followed by disappointing contributions to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Weinberger has interviewed more than one hundred former Pentagon officials and scientists involved in DARPAs projectsmany of whom have never spoken publicly about their work with the agencyand pored over countless declassified records from archives around the country, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and exclusive materials provided by sources. The Imagineers of War is a compelling and groundbreaking history in which science, technology, and politics collide. **
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/epub+zip
English
Controlling
ROBIN
24407
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson
File Type: epub
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets.No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson, James Dickey has observed. Robinsons lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjectsthe downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood. Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity. With his keen understanding of ordinary people and a gift for harnessing the rhythms of conversational speech, Robinson created the vivid character portraits for which he is best known, among them Aunt Imogen, Isaac and Archibald, Miniver Cheevy, and Richard Cory. Most of his poems are set in the fictive Tilbury Townbased on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Mainebut his work reaches far beyond its particular locality in its focus on struggle and redemption in human experience.**
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/epub+zip
English
Controlling
COURS
59301
Author: Paul W. Gooch
File Type: pdf
Course Correction engages in deliberation about what the twenty-first-century university needs to do in order to re-find its focus as a protected place for unfettered commitment to knowledge, not just as a space for creating employment or economic prosperity. The universitys business, Paul W. Gooch writes, is to generate and critique knowledge claims, and to transmit and certify the acquisition of knowledge. In order to achieve this, a university must have a reputation for integrity and trustworthiness, and this, in turn, requires a diligent and respectful level of autonomy from state, religion, and other powerful influences. It also requires embracing the challenges of academic freedom and the effective governance of an academic community.Course Correction raises three important questions about the twenty-first-century university. In discussing the dominant attention to student experience, the book asks, Is it now all about students? Secondly, in questioning What knowledge should undergraduates gain? it provides a critique of undergraduate experience, advocating a Socratic approach to education as interrogative conversation. Finally, by asking What and where are well-placed universities? the book makes the case against placeless education offered in the digital world, in favour of education that takes account of its place in time and space. **
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/pdf
English
Controlling
AVIAN
49177
Author: Horst E. Koenig
File Type: pdf
Bringing together annotated images and anatomical terms, this reference book is a unique combination of a practical, clinically oriented textbook and pictorial atlas of avian anatomy. Containing very high quality photographs, including histological and radiographic images, and schematic diagrams, this edition focuses on ornamental birds and poultry. Among the various species examined are chickens, ducks, and geese, as well as budgerigars, psitaccines and many others. Wild bird species, such as the common buzzard and falcon, are included. Raptors are featured in a dedicated new chapter. Translated from Anatomie der Voegel, first published by Schattauer, this edition of Avian Anatomy is an ideal book for veterinary practitioners and students. [Subject Veterinary Medicine, Avian Health] **
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/pdf
English
Controlling
SOCIA
115917
Author: Russell Jacoby
File Type: pdf
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/pdf
English
Controlling
AN IM
11144
Author: David Mattingly
File Type: epub
Part of the Penguin History of Britain series, An Imperial Possession is the first major narrative history of Roman Britain for a generation. David Mattingly draws on a wealth of new findings and knowledge to cut through the myths and misunderstandings that so commonly surround our beliefs about this period. From the rebellious chiefs and druids who led native British resistance, to the experiences of the Roman military leaders in this remote, dangerous outpost of Europe, this book explores the reality of life in occupied Britain within the context of the shifting fortunes of the Roman Empire.
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/epub+zip
English
Controlling
THE E
126625
Author: Mark Thornton
File Type: pdf
It is conventional wisdom that alcohol prohibition failed, but the economic reasons for this failure have never been as extensively detailed or analyzed as they are in this study by Mark Thornton. The lessons he draws apply not only to the period of alcohol prohibition but also to drug prohibition and any other government attempt to control consumption habits. The same pattern is repeated again and again. Thorntons treatment of the topic is methodical. He first examines the history of prohibition laws, primarily focusing on American implementation of prohibitionist policies. He examines the prime movers in the alcohol, narcotics, and marijuana prohibition movements. He then examines the theoretical premises upon which prohibition advocates depend, and thoroughly exposes them as fallacious. After examining the history and theory of prohibition, Thornton reveals the effects of such policies on the potency of illegal drugs. He explains how prohibition inevitably creates incentives for producers to increase the potency of drugs and alcohol products distributed via the black market. Also investigated in this book are the effects of prohibition policies on crime rates and government corruption rates. Finally, Thornton discusses the repeal of prohibition, offering both public policy alternatives and truly free-market solutions. According to Murray N. Rothbard, Thorntons book... arrives to fill an enormous gap, and it does so splendidly... The drug prohibition question is... the hottest political topic today, and for the foreseeable future... This is an excellent work making an important contribution to scholarship as well as to the public policy debate.**
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/pdf
English
Controlling
SYSTE
119350
Author: Clifford Siskin
File Type: pdf
A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the fourteen engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre -- a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called system to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileos message from the stars and Newtons system of the world to todays computational universe, Siskin illuminates the role that the genre of system has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. Previous engagements with systems have involved making them, using them, or imagining better ones. Siskin offers an innovative perspective by investigating system itself. He considers the past and present, moving from the system of the world to a world full of systems. He traces the turn to system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and describes this primary form of Enlightenment as a mediator of political, cultural, and social modernity -- pointing to the moment when people began to blame the system for working both too well (you cant beat the system) and not well enough (it always seems to break down). Throughout, his touchstones are what system is and how it has changed how it has mediated knowledge and how it has worked in the world.
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/pdf
English
Controlling
CHINE
55225
Author: Stephen Teo
File Type: pdf
The traditional martial arts genre known as wuxia (literally martial chivalry) became popular the world over through the phenomenal hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). This book unveils the rich layers of the wuxia tradition as it developed in the early Shanghai cinema of the late 1920s and in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries of the 1950s and beyond. Stephen Teo follows the tradition from its beginnings in Shanghai cinema to its rise as a serialized form in silent cinema and its prohibition in 1931. He shares the fantastic characteristics of the genre, their relationship to folklore, myth, and religion, and their similarities and differences with the kung fu sub-genre of martial arts cinema. He maps the protagonists and heroes of the genre, in particular the figure of the lady knight-errant, and its chief personalities and masterpieces. Directors covered include King Hu, Chu Yuan, Zhang Che, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou, and films discussed are Come Drink With Me (1966), The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), A Touch of Zen (1970-71), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), The Promise (2005), The Banquet (2006), and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006).ReviewThis book is a welcome addition to the flourishing literature on Chinese martial arts cinema. -- Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley, University of Leeds Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television This book is a welcome addition to the flourishing literature on Chinese martial arts cinema. About the AuthorStephen Teo is currently a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and a senior research associate of the RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Hong Kong Cinema The Extra Dimensions, Wong Kar-wai, King Hus A Touch of Zen, and Director in Action Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film.
Transaction
Created
3 weeks ago
Content Type
Language
application/pdf
English