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The Restless Clock

The Restless Clock PDF Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022630292X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 571

Book Description
A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena. "The Restless Clock" examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals--dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency. "The Restless Clock "reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.

The Restless Clock

The Restless Clock PDF Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022630292X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 571

Book Description
A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena. "The Restless Clock" examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals--dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency. "The Restless Clock "reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.

Restless

Restless PDF Author: William Boyd
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408835185
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.

The Restless City

The Restless City PDF Author: Joanne Reitano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136964436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present is a short, lively history of the world’s most exciting and diverse metropolis. It shows how New York’s perpetual struggles for power, wealth, and status exemplify the vigor, creativity, resilience, and influence of the nation’s premier urban center. The updated second edition includes nineteen images and brings the story right up through the mayoral election of 2009. In these pages are the stories of a broad cross-section of people and events that shaped the city, including mayors and moguls, women and workers, and policemen and poets. Joanne Reitano shows how New York has invigorated the American dream by confronting the fundamental economic, political, and social challenges that face every city. Energized by change, enriched by immigrants, and enlivened by provocative leaders, New York City’s restlessness has always been its greatest asset.

Misconceiving Merit

Misconceiving Merit PDF Author: Mary Blair-Loy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226820149
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
An incisive study showing how cultural ideas of merit in academic science produce unfair and unequal outcomes. In Misconceiving Merit, sociologists Mary Blair-Loy and Erin A. Cech uncover the cultural foundations of a paradox. On one hand, academic science, engineering, and math revere meritocracy, a system that recognizes and rewards those with the greatest talent and dedication. At the same time, women and some racial and sexual minorities remain underrepresented and often feel unwelcome and devalued in STEM. How can academic science, which so highly values meritocracy and objectivity, produce these unequal outcomes? Blair-Loy and Cech studied more than five hundred STEM professors at a top research university to reveal how unequal and unfair outcomes can emerge alongside commitments to objectivity and excellence. The authors find that academic STEM harbors dominant cultural beliefs that not only perpetuate the mistreatment of scientists from underrepresented groups but hinder innovation. Underrepresented groups are often seen as less fully embodying merit compared to equally productive white and Asian heterosexual men, and the negative consequences of this misjudgment persist regardless of professors’ actual academic productivity. Misconceiving Merit is filled with insights for higher education administrators working toward greater equity as well as for scientists and engineers striving to change entrenched patterns of inequality in STEM.

The Restless Clock

The Restless Clock PDF Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description


The Restless Clock

The Restless Clock PDF Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022630308X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 571

Book Description
A “wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned” scientific and cultural history of the concept of the capacity to act in nature (London Review of Books). Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines. The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive. Praise for The Restless Clock “A wonderful contribution—and much needed corrective—to the history of European ideas about life and matter.” —Evelyn Fox Keller, author of The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture “Engrossing and illuminating.” —Nature “A sweeping survey of the search for answers to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking.” —Times Higher Education (UK)

Forces of Nature

Forces of Nature PDF Author: Adrian Renner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110783827
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Um 1800 diskutierte man über Naturkräfte in verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Zusammenhängen: Anziehung und Abstoßung, Lebenskräfte und elektrische Ströme, der "Bildungstrieb" und biologische Organismen wurden als Kräfte untersucht, die sich auf „natürliche" Prozesse zurückführen lassen. Literatur, Wissenschaft und Philosophie der deutschsprachigen Romantik von Schelling bis zu Günderrode und Hölderlin arbeiteten sich an Konzepten von Kräften ab, die als dynamisch und in beständiger Tätigkeit begriffen wurden – Kräfte, die auch menschliche Handlungen, soziale Strukturen und kulturelle Entwicklungen einzuschließen schienen. Der Band erkundet Vor- und Darstellungen von Naturkräften in der Romantik an der Schnittstelle von Naturwissenschaft und kulturellen Vorstellungswelten.

The American Robot

The American Robot PDF Author: Dustin A. Abnet
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022669271X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Although they entered the world as pure science fiction, robots are now very much a fact of everyday life. Whether a space-age cyborg, a chess-playing automaton, or simply the smartphone in our pocket, robots have long been a symbol of the fraught and fearful relationship between ourselves and our creations. Though we tend to think of them as products of twentieth-century technology—the word “robot” itself dates to only 1921—as a concept, they have colored US society and culture for far longer, as Dustin A. Abnet shows to dazzling effect in The American Robot. In tracing the history of the idea of robots in US culture, Abnet draws on intellectual history, religion, literature, film, and television. He explores how robots and their many kin have not only conceptually connected but literally embodied some of the most critical questions in modern culture. He also investigates how the discourse around robots has reinforced social and economic inequalities, as well as fantasies of mass domination—chilling thoughts that the recent increase in job automation has done little to quell. The American Robot argues that the deep history of robots has abetted both the literal replacement of humans by machines and the figurative transformation of humans into machines, connecting advances in technology and capitalism to individual and societal change. Look beneath the fears that fracture our society, Abnet tells us, and you’re likely to find a robot lurking there.

Early Modern Things

Early Modern Things PDF Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351055720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

Book Description
Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.

The Clock

The Clock PDF Author: Alekseĭ Remizov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description