A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, 'Germanus
Incredibilis': With a Selection of His Unpublished Correspondence
and an Annotated Translation of His Autobiography by John Edward Fletcher and Elizabeth Fletcher
(Aries Book: Brill Academic)
Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit in 17th-century Rome, was an enigma.
Intensely pious and a prolific author, he was also a polymath fascinated with everything from
Egyptian hieroglyphs to the tiny creatures in his microscope.
His correspondence with popes, princes and priests was a window into the restless energy of the period.
It showed first-hand the seventeenth-century’s struggle for knowledge in astronomy, microscopy, geology,
chemistry, musicology, Egyptology, horology… The list goes on.
Kircher’s books reflect the mind-set of 17th-century scholars - endless curiosity and a … read more substantial larding of naiveté:
Kircher scorned alchemy as the wishful thinking of charlatans, yet believed in dragons.
His life and correspondence provide a key to the transition from the Middle Ages to a new scientific age. This book, though unpublished, has been long quoted and referred to.
Awaited by scholars and specialists of Kircher, it is finally available with this edition.
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Critical Discourse Studies in Context and Cognition edited by Christopher Hart (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture Series: John Benjamins Publishing Company) Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), under the general editors of Ruth Wodak and Greg Myers and associate editor Johann Unger, University of Lancaster, is an exciting research enterprise in which scholars are concerned with the discursive reproduction of power and inequality. However, researchers in CDS are increasingly recognizing the need to investigate the cognitive dimensions of discourse and context if they want to fully account for any connection between language, legitimization and social action. Critical Discourse Studies in Context and Cognition, edited by Christopher Hart, Northumbria University, presents a collection of papers in CDS concerned with various ideological discourses. Analyses are firmly rooted in linguistics and cognition constitutes a major focus of attention. The chapters, which are written by prominent researchers in CDS, come from a broad range of theoretical perspectives spanning pragmatics, cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. More
Transforming Self and Others Through Research: Transpersonal Research Methods and Skills for the Human Sciences and Humanities by Rosemarie Anderson and William Braud (SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology: SUNY Press) Research approaches in the field of transpersonal psychology can be transformative for researchers, participants, and the audience of a project. Transforming Self and Others Through Research offers these transformative approaches to those conducting research across the human sciences and the humanities. Rosemarie Anderson and William Braud first described such methods in their book Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences (1998). Since that time, in hundreds of empirical studies, these methods have been tested and integrated with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method research designs. Anderson, Professor of Transpersonal Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and Braud, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, writing with a contribution from Jennifer Clements, invite scholars to bring multiple ways of knowing and personal resources to their scholarship. While emphasizing established research conventions for rigor, Anderson and Braud encourage researchers to plumb the depths of intuition, imagination, play, mindfulness, compassion, creativity, and embodied writing as research skills. Experiential exercises to help readers develop these skills are provided. More
Preparing for Tantra: Creating the Psychological Ground for Practice by Rob Preece (Snow Lion Publications) The preliminary practices of Tantra are not a hurdle to be gotten through in order to get somewhere else; they are an extraordinarily rich collection of practices which have much to offer as a means of cultivating and maturing the practitioner's psychological ground. They can enable experiences to unfold, and they can clear the way when there seem to be problems or hindrances practitioners are struggling with. More
Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights,
1750-1790 [Hardcover] by Jonathan I. Israel (Oxford
University Press) That the Enlightenment shaped modernity is
uncontested. Yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have
attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and
social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day.
This is precisely what Jonathan Israel now does.
In Democratic Enlightenment, Israel demonstrates that the
Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by
philosophical debate. The American Revolution and its concerns
certainly acted as a major factor in the intellectual ferment that
shaped the wider upheaval that followed, but the radical
philosophes were no less critical than enthusiastic about the
American model. From 1789, the General Revolution's impetus came
from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires, men such
as Mirabeau, Sieyes, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and Brissot. Not
aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French
National assembly, they nonetheless forged "la philosophie
moderne"--in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas--into a
world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin
America, Canada and eastern Europe as well as France, Italy,
Germany, and the Low Countries. In addition, Israel argues that
while all French revolutionary journals powerfully affirmed that
la philosophie moderne was the main cause of the French
Revolution, the main stream of historical thought has failed to
grasp what this implies. Israel sets the record straight,
demonstrating the true nature of the engine that drove the
Revolution, and the intimate links between the radical wing of the
Enlightenment and the anti-Robespierriste "Revolution of reason."
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The Existence of God: An Exposition and Application of Fregean Meta-Ontology by Stig Børsen Hansen (Quellen Und Studien Zur Philosophie: De Gruyter) This study breaks new ground on the question of the existence of God. It innovatively combines biblical scholarship with an analysis of existence drawn from the writings of the philosopher Gottlob Frege. It shows that the strength of Frege's approach is its emphasis on the notions of proper name and predicate; this in turn sheds new light on important elements of theological language. Finally, the Fregean approach in this book is defended against objections drawn from readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. More
Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics, 19th edition: Expert Consult Premium Edition – Enhanced Online Features and Print by Robert M. Kliegman, MD, Bonita F. Stanton, MD, and Richard E. Behrman, MD; Joseph W. St. Geme III, MD, and Nina F. Schor, MD, PhD, (Elsevier Saunders) Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics has been the world's most trusted pediatrics resource for nearly 75 years. Drs. Robert Kliegman, Bonita Stanton, Richard Behrman, and two new editors – Joseph St. Geme, III, MD and Nina Schor, MD, who contribute on the key subspecialties, including pediatric infectious disease and pediatric neurology – continue to provide the most authoritative coverage of the best approaches to care. This streamlined 19th edition covers the latest on genetics, neurology, infectious disease, melamine poisoning, sexual identity and adolescent homosexuality, and psychosis associated with epilepsy. The expanded online access features the regularly updated text, case studies, new references and journal articles, Clinics articles, and exclusive web-only content. More
Plants As Persons: A Philosophical Botany by Matthew Hall and Harold Coward (SUNY Series on Religion and the Environment: State University of New York, SUNY) Plants are people too? Not exactly, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought, as well as modern science and botanical history, for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some Indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipients of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them. More
Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo
by Dogen Dogen and Kazuaki Tanahashi (Shambhala) represents
the collective San Francisco Zen Center community endeavor at
translating and understanding the work in its entirety. It lacks the
scholarly extras of
BDK English Tripitaka Series but used in conjunction with the
Standard translation can offer essential insight about what the text
is getting at. below the table of contents I offer examples of
translations of chapter 1 (of the 75 chapter version) or 3 (of the
95 chapter version) The Genjo-Koan so one can compare for oneself.
Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shobo Genzo, in
Japanese) is a monumental work, considered to be one of the
profoundest expressions of Zen wisdom ever put on paper, and also
the most outstanding literary and philosophical work of Japan. It is
a collection of essays by Eihei Dogen (1200–1253), founder of Zen’s
Soto school.
Kazuaki Tanahashi and a team of translators that represent a
Who’s Who of American Zen have produced a translation of the
great work that combines accuracy with a deep understanding of
Dogen’s voice and literary gifts. The finely produced, two-volume
boxed set includes a wealth of materials to aid understanding,
including maps, lineage charts, a bibliography, and an exhaustive
glossary of names and terms—and, as a bonus, the most renowned of
all Dogen’s essays, “Recommending Zazen to All People.”
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The Postconventional Personality: Assessing, Researching, and Theorizing Higher Development by Angela H. Pfaffenberger, Paul W. Marko and Allan Combs (SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology: State University of New York Press, SUNY) Cutting-edge volume devoted to optimal adult development. Postconventional stages of personality development involve growth well beyond the average, and have become a rapidly growing subject of research not only in developmental psychology circles but also in areas such as executive leadership development. This book is the first to bring together many of the major researchers in the field, showcasing diverse perspectives ranging from the spiritual to the corporate. The contributors present research on essential questions about the existence and prevalence of high levels of personal growth, whether such achievement is correlated with other types of psychological growth, whether high levels of growth actually indicate happiness, what kinds of people exhibit these higher levels of development, how they may have developed this expanded perspective, and the characteristics of their viewpoints, abilities, and preoccupations. For anyone interested in Ken Wilber's integral psychology, as well as those in executive coaching, this volume is an invaluable resource and will be a standard reference for years to come. More
Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato by
Sandra Peterson (Cambridge University Press) In Plato's Apology, Socrates says he spent his life examining and questioning people on how best to live, while avowing that he himself knows nothing important. Elsewhere, however, for example in Plato's Republic, Plato's Socrates
presents radical and grandiose theses.
In this book Sandra Peterson
offers a new hypothesis which explains the puzzle of Socrates' two
contrasting manners. She argues that the apparently confident
doctrinal Socrates is in fact conducting the first step of an
examination: by eliciting his interlocutors' reactions, his
apparently doctrinal lectures reveal what his interlocutors believe
is the best way to live. She tests her hypothesis by close reading
of passages in the Theaetetus, Republic, and Phaedo. Her provocative
conclusion, that there is a single Socrates whose conception and
practice of philosophy remain the same throughout the dialogues, will be of
interest to a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and
classics. More
A Companion to Greek Mythology by Ken Dowden
and Niall Livingstone (Blackwell Companions to
the Ancient World: Wiley-Blackwell) approaches the
richly diverse phenomenon of Greek myth from a
distinctive new angle -- one that delves deeply into its
origins in shared Indo-European story patterns and the
Greeks’ contacts with their Eastern Mediterranean
neighbours. Contributions from a team of international
experts trace the development of Greek myth into a
shared language, heritage, and way of thinking
throughout the entire Greco-Roman world.
Individual essays address such topics as how myths were
presented in stories, poems, dramas and all forms of
visual art, as well as theiK3%)= ;wZ⧏kc}jJ DNIamu$)hII|A,;6\$[ڸ虬\DRB"cWZA29N mߗ4 ?|K[Д-:ID-BM*_͓O>~ JiX&~
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