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Placing the philosopher John Dewey and the poet William Carlos Williams together—two important figures of twentieth-century American culture—this book examines the ambitions and failings of progressive liberal culture during the first half of the twentieth century. This book shows that, while their work ostensibly shares little in common, Williams and Dewey share the ambition to realize the radical potential of a democratic cultural politics. Including close readings of texts like Williams's Spring and All, In the American Grain, and Paterson, and Dewey's Individualism Old and New and Art as Experience, Beck offers an important contribution to current debates over the relationship between politics and cultural production.
To understand the history, accomplishments, failures, and meanings of astronomy requires a knowledge of what has been said about astronomy by philosophers, novelists, playwrights, poets, scientists, and laymen. Astronomically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations on Astronomy and Physics serves as a guide to what has been said about astronomy through the ages, from the past to the present. Containing approximately 1,550 quotations and numerous illustrations, this resource is the largest compilation of astronomy and astrophysics quotations published to date. A quick glance through the table of contents illustrates the variety of topics discussed. Readers can quickly and easily access the wit and wisdom of several hundred scientists, writers, philosophers, poets, and academics using the comprehensive indexes.
"Who are we to suppose we are capable of comprehending the world of which we are a part, and what is the world to suppose it can be understood by us, minuscule and insignificant spatiotemporal warps contained within it?" This provocative question opens Floyd Merrell's study of postmodernism and the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, part of the author's ongoing effort to understand our contemporary cultural and intellectual environment. The specific focus in this interdisciplinary study is the modernism/postmodernism dichotomy and Peirce's precocious realization that the world does not lend itself to the simplistic binarism of modernist thought. In Merrell's examination of postmodern phenomena, the reader is taken through various facets of the cognitive sciences, philosophy of science, mathematics, and literary theory. Merrell's consideration of Peirce's complex and inadequately understood concept of the sign is enhanced through numerous charts and figures. Theories, hypotheses, and speculation in the physical sciences are then brought to bear on Peircean semiotics. The final chapter critiques the often undiscriminating acceptance of postmodern practices in today's academic world.
Literature and Modern Time is a collection of essays that explore literature in the context of a wave of challenges to linear conceptions of time introduced by thinkers such as Bergson, Einstein, McTaggart, Freud and Nietzsche. These challenges were not uniform in character. The volume will demonstrate that literature of the era under scrutiny was not simply reacting to new theories of time—in some cases it is actually inspiring and anticipating them. Thus Literature and Modern Time promises to offer a genuine dialogue between literature and time theory and in doing so will uncover and examine influences and connections— sometimes unexpected—between philosophers and writers of the era....
"A vivid sense of strangeness": Einstein's path to the Zionist movement -- A different kind of nationalism: Einstein's induction and mobilization into the Zionist movement -- The "prize-winning ox" in "Dollaria": Einstein's fundraising trip to the United States in 1921 -- Secular pilgrim or Zionist tourist?: Einstein's tour of Palestine in 1923 -- The "botched university": Einstein's involvement in the Hebrew University, 1924-1929 -- "A genuine symbiosis": Einstein on the 1929 clashes in Palestine -- The "bug-infested house": Einstein's involvement in the Hebrew University, 1930-1933.
Our thinking is inhabited by images-images of sometimes curious and overwhelming power. The mushroom cloud, weird rays that can transform the flesh, the twilight world following a nuclear war, the white city of the future, the brilliant but mad scientist who plots to destroy the world-all these images and more relate to nuclear energy, but that is not their only common bond. Decades before the first atom bomb exploded, a web of symbols with surprising linkages was fully formed in the public mind. The strange kinship of these symbols can be traced back, not only to medieval symbolism, but still deeper into experiences common to all of us. This is a disturbing book: it shows that much of what ...
Canaday, a poet and playwright who has been a Watson Fellow and a Starbuck Fellow in Poetry at Boston University, analyzes a variety of texts produced by physicists before, during, and after WWII, including Niels Bohr's "The Quantum Postulate"; the technical lectures used for training at Los Alamos; scientist's descriptions of their work and of the Trinity test; and Leo Szilard's postwar novella, The Voice of the Dolphins. He looks at physicists' use of figurative language in the development of quantum theory, and examines the role played by the rhetorics of exploration and religion in the construction of the Los Alamos community. Includes bandw historical photos. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
A wide-ranging and novel study of metaphor as the generative principle giving shape and substance to Eliot's poetic imagination.
From Isaacson, the bestselling author of "Benjamin Franklin," comes the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all his papers have become available--a fully realized portrait of a premier icon of his era.
Drawing on a colloquium held at St Deniol's library in 2005, this book focuses on the contemporary possibilities inherent in medical science and the challenges that this raises for an understanding of human identity. It offers philosophical and scientific debates as to how far there can be any claim for the existence of human nature as such.