The Evolution of Central Banks employs a wide range of historical evidence and reassesses current monetary analysis to argue that the development of non-profit-maximizing and noncompetitive central banks to supervise and regulate the commercial banking system fulfils a necessary and natural function.Goodhart surveys the case for free banking, examines the key role of the clearing house in the evolution of the central bank, and investigates bank expansion and fluctuation in the context of the clearing house mechanism. He concludes that it is the noncompetitive aspect of the central bank...

The assembly of an archive of longitudinal data on the world's nation-states was undertaken by the Center for Comparative Political Research in 1968, with computer-facilitated procedures for the storage, reassembly, and retrieval of its content. The present volume is a cathode-ray-tube printout of a substantial portion of the CCPR file.The period chosen dates from 1815 (immediately after the Congress of Vienna and the establishment of the modern international system) to 1966, and excludes the years of the two major wars, 1914-1918 and 1940-1945. Virtually all independent nation-states...

The cognitive neuroscience of human vision draws on two kinds of evidence: functional imaging of normal subjects and the study of neurological patients with visual disorders. Martha Farah's landmark 1990 book Visual Agnosia presented the first comprehensive analysis of disorders of visual recognition within the framework of cognitive neuroscience, and remains the authoritative work on the subject. This long-awaited second edition provides a reorganized and updated review of the visual agnosias, incorporating the latest research on patients with insights from the functional...

Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the founders of art history as a discipline. This is the first general introduction to the work of the celebrated Austrian who brought complex philosophical considerations to bear on art and its history. Ranging easily over diverse fields and among a large group of thinkers, Margaret Iversen establishes Riegl's relevance to recent critical thinking while clearly delineating his extraordinary critical powers.Iversen contextualizes Riegl's thought among the wider cultural crosscurrents of his time, pointing for example to his denunciation of the...

What can humans do? What can machines do? How do humans delegate actions to machines? In this book, Harry Collins and Martin Kusch combine insights from sociology and philosophy to provide a novel answer to these increasingly important questions.The authors begin by distinguishing between two basic types of intentional behavior, which they call polimorphic actions and mimeomorphic actions. Polimorphic actions (such as writing a love letter) are ones that community members expect to vary with social context. Mimeomorphic actions (such a swinging a golf club) do not vary. Although machines...

Hao Wang (1921-1995) was one of the few confidants of the great mathematician and logician Kurt Godel. A Logical Journey is a continuation of Wang's Reflections on Godel and also elaborates on discussions contained in From Mathematics to Philosophy. A decade in preparation, it contains important and unfamiliar insights into Godel's views on a wide range of issues, from Platonism and the nature of logic, to minds and machines, the existence of God, and positivism and phenomenology.

The impact of Godel's theorem on twentieth-century thought is on par with that of...

Cellular Biophysics is a quantitatively oriented basic physiology text for senior undergraduate and graduate students in bioengineering, biophysics, physiology, and neuroscience programs. It will also serve as a major reference work for biophysicists.

Developed from the author's notes for a course that he has taught at MIT for many years, these books provide a clear and logical explanation of the foundations of cell biophysics, teaching transport and the electrical properties of cells from a combined biological, physical, and engineering viewpoint. Each volume contains...