Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Philosophy & Social Aspects

During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science. The response to incredible overseas encounters and to the profound technological, religious, economic, and intellectual changes occurring in Europe was one of nearly overwhelming wonder, expressed in a rich variety of texts. In the need to manage this wonder, to harness this imaginative overabundance, Mary Baine Campbell finds both the sensational beauty of early...

For the greater part of this century, most philosophers and social scientists have eschewed moral realism. According to their view, moral facts cannot be accommodated by a suitably scientific picture of the world. However, recent developments in moral theory, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language have undermined the standard arguments against moral realism and have led many to maintain that there are powerful reasons for believing in moral facts. As a result, moral realism is enjoying renewed vitality, while the arguments against it have of necessity become more...

-He was a man who often was incapable of conducting himself properly in the most elementary social interactions. His only continuing contacts with women were limited to his mother, nieces, and housekeepers. He was a man who knew the power of money and desired it, but refused to work for it, preferring to live off the sweat of his family and long-suffering friends, whom he often insulted even as they paid his bills.---from the book

This, then, was Oliver Heaviside, a pioneer of modern electrical theory. Born into a low social class of Victorian England, Heaviside made advances in...

Pre-Hispanic notions of heat and cold continue to shape native Mexican ideas about health and illness in humans and food plants. In The Hot and the Cold, Jacques Chevalier and Andres Sanchez Bain examine indigenous worldview and myth, and challenge the prevailing notion that hot-cold reasoning in Latin America is a product of the Hippocratic humoral doctrine brought by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century.

Based on extensive field work in southern Veracruz, this innovative study details folk tales and stories of illness from indigenous people, and provides explanations that...

Science Research at the Federal Level in Canada is designed to provide much-needed information about the intertwined relationship between science research and politics at the federal level in Canada. Social, economic, and political imperatives drive the direction and scope of the scientific and technical research conducted by federal agencies, but little is known about the knowledge base of government publications and the literature of Canadian science and technology.

Covering the federal departments of Agriculture, Environment (including the Canadian Wildlife Service and the...

Written by an international, interdisciplinary team of scholars sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation,...

Conrad Hyers offers a welcome respite from the counter-productive effects of extremism that surround the creation issue. Focusing on the creation texts from the book of Genesis, Hyers interprets the biblical account in light of its relationship to its culture, context, and purpose.

A masterful guide to human development that redefines the nature versus nurture debate

A much-needed antidote to genetic determinism, The Dependent Gene reveals how all traits-even characteristics like eye and hair color-are caused by complex interactions between genes and the environment at every stage of biological and psychological development, from the single fertilized egg to full-grown adulthood.

How we understand the nature versus nurture debate directly affects our thoughts about such basic issues as sex and reproduction, parenting, education, and crime,...

How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what...