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In the nineteenth century, the British Government spent money measuring the distance between the earth and the sun using observations of the transit of Venus. This book presents a narrative of the two Victorian transit programmes. It draws out their cultural significance and explores the nature of "big science" in late-Victorian Britain.
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Step by step the reader is introduced, through analysis of the fundamental problems of Being, the relation of thoughts to things, novelty, causation, and the Infinite, to the original philosophical synthesis that James called radical empiricism. This is the seventh volume to be published in The Works of William James.
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a man who sought to integrate life and holiness. He believed that the spiritual life needed to be lived in an active and dynamic way, touching a person's fundamental attitudes and actions. Although Newman rejected the title of spiritual director as such, it is obvious from his correspondence that directing others through various facets of the Christian life was one of his dominant concerns. Surprisingly, comparatively little has been written about Newman's idea of spiritual direction. This book investigates Newman's understanding of spiritual direction during his life as a Roman Catholic, 1845-1890. It examines the major areas in which Newman gave spiritual ...
Essays in Philosophy brings together twenty-one essays, reviews, and occasional pieces published by James between 1876 and 1910. They range in subject from a concern with the teaching of philosophy and appraisals of philosophers to analyses of important problems. Several of the essays, like "The Sentiment of Rationality" and "The Knowing of Things Together," are of particular significance in the development of the views of James's later works. All of them, as John McDermott says in his Introduction, are in a style that is "engaging and personal...witty, acerbic, compassionate, and polemical." Whether he is writing an article for the Nation of a definition of "Experience" for Baldwin's Dictionary or "The Mad Absolute" for the Journal of Philosophy, James is always unmistakably himself, and always readable.
Firm Heart and Capacious Mind: The Life and Friends of Etienne Dumont is the first full-length biography of a Renaissance man, the statesman/publicist/jurist/political writer/man of letters who was hailed by Goethe, Macauley and Stendhal as one of the great intellects of his time. Among other activities he advised Mirabeau (he leader of the National Assembly) in the French Revolution, introduced Jeremy Bentham to the world by publishing ten volumes edited and rewritten from Bentham's notes, and led the political struggle that turned Geneva into a democracy. Dumont also played a direct role in such social reforms as the abolition of slavery, corresponding with and advising Samuel Romilly, William Wiberforce and others. A confirmed bachelor, he was admired and at times loved by some of the most prominent women of his time: Lady Holland, Madame de Stael and Maria Edgeworth. There has been no other full-length work, and no book at all in English, on this remarkable man.
A grand and fascinating figure in Victorian politics, the charismatic Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) served as foreign secretary for fifteen years and prime minister for nine, engaged in struggles with everyone from the Duke of Wellington to Lord John Russell to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, engineered the defeat of the Russians in the Crimean War, and played a major role in the development of liberalism and the Liberal Party. This comprehensive biography, informed by unprecedented research in the statesman's personal archives, gives full weight not only to Palmerston's foreign policy achievements, but also to his domestic political activity, political thought, life as a landlord, and private life and affairs. Through the lens of the milieu of his times, the book pinpoints for the first time the nature and extent of Palmerston's contributions to the making of modern Britain.