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World Literature Today Editor's Pick "Enchanting...The Poetic Species is a wonderful read in its entirety, short yet infinitely simulating." --MARIA POPOVA, Brain Pickings In this shimmering conversation (the outgrowth of an event co-sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and Poets House), Edward O. Wilson, renowned scientist and proponent of "consilience" or the unity of knowledge, finds an ardent interlocutor in Robert Hass, whose credo as United States poet laureate was "imagin...

We live in a world that's constantly redesigned. Today's redesign is tomorrow's vintage look. But times of crisis rapidly change the picture. Suddenly, the whole world is in dire need of a proper redesign. From capitalism to communication, from work to supply chains, from cities to office space - it's hard to find an area of our lives that's not due for an overhaul. This is a challenge, but also a huge opportunity: to design a better world.

Integrated Truth and Existential Phenomenology: A Thomistic Response to Iconic Anti-Realists in Science relates an existential phenomenology to modal reasoning. By this reasoning, rooted in a consciousness of phenomena in themselves, a Thomistic realism is advanced wherein scientific inquiry yields objective truth and presupposes a causal principle. This principle, as an inferably true modality, strictly implies a first cause. And this cause as a supreme norm, causally created human nature as it...

David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Morton's approach to the topic differs from most previous works, which have examined the technology's social impact, but not the...

This book explores the "avisual" and its effect on the visual world. Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and "invisible men" are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. "Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)" reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the "avisual" as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshi...

A leading theologian presents a hopeful account of the universe after Einstein, exploring it as a meaningful drama of awakening "This book is a deep and provocative piece of theology that proposes we engage with the universe as a kind of narrative of awakening and unfolding, as well as an important and useful approach for thinking about theology with respect to modern cosmology."-Matthew Stanley, New York University Before the early twentieth century, scientists and theologians knew almost no...

'Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?' remains the most curious and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated essayist Jim Holt now enters this fascinating debate with his broad, lively and deeply informed narrative that traces all our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. With sly humour and a highly original personal approach Holt takes on the role of cosmologi...

Die Physik ist bei der Jagd nach der Weltformel in einer Sackgasse gelandet. Immer wieder wird verkundet, die Formel sei fast gefunden. Nur: Wo bleibt sie dann? Der Autor zeichnet nach, wie die theoretische Physik vom Weg abkam und nun mit immer grosseren Spekulationsblasen in die Esoterik abdriftet. Witzig-bissig und mit unterhaltsamen Anekdoten, aber auch fundiert bis ins Detail nimmt er die heutige Mode der Physik aufs Korn und erinnert an die unbeantworteten Fragen, die die wirklichen Grosse...