Addresses and Lectures
Author | : Ralph Waldo Emerson |
Publisher | : Tredition Classics |
Total Pages | : 196 |
Release | : 2013-08 |
Genre | : |
ISBN | : 9783849561604 |
Join Huck and Jim as they journey down the Mississippi in this beloved companion to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer "and a standalone classic in its own right, with a fresh new cover and interior illustrations. "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"; but that ain't no matter," declares Huck at the start of one of the greatest books in American literature. Filled with all the humor, suspense, and sheer excitement of its predecessor, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"--a nostalgic portrayal of a world Mark Twain knew intimately--tells the moving story of a boy who must make his own way in an often cruel society that counts it a sin to help a runaway slave. This edition includes a modern cover and new illustrations from Iacopo Bruno. This new look coincides with a new edition of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer "and the publication of "The Absolutely Truthful Adventures of Becky Thatcher."
The Best Read Naturalist"
Author | : Ralph Waldo Emerson |
Publisher | : University of Virginia Press |
Total Pages | : 310 |
Release | : 2017-02-03 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 0813939534 |
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in American nature writing, yet until now readers have had no book devoted to this central theme in his work. "The Best Read Naturalist" fills this lacuna, placing several of Emerson’s lesser-known pieces of nature writing in conversation with his canonical essays. Organized chronologically, the thirteen selections—made up of sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays—reveal an engagement with natural history that spanned Emerson’s career. As we watch him grapple with what he called the "book of nature," a more environmentally connected thinker emerges—a "green" Emerson deeply concerned with the physical world and fascinated with the ability of science to reveal a correspondence between the order of nature and that of the mind. "The Best Read Naturalist" illuminates the vital influence that the study of natural history had on the development of Emerson’s mature philosophy.
Nature, Addresses, and Lectures
Author | : Ralph Waldo Emerson |
Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
Total Pages | : 316 |
Release | : 1971 |
Genre | : American essays |
ISBN | : 9780674139701 |
Nature, the Artful Modeler
Author | : Nancy Cartwright |
Publisher | : Open Court Publishing |
Total Pages | : 161 |
Release | : 2019-05-07 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0812694724 |
How fixed are the happenings in Nature and how are they fixed? These lectures address what our scientific successes at predicting and manipulating the world around us suggest in answer. One—very orthodox—account teaches that the sciences offer general truths that we combine with local facts to derive our expectations about what will happen, either naturally or when we build a device to design, be it a laser, a washing machine, an anti-malarial bed net, or an auction for the airwaves. In these three 2017 Carus Lectures Nancy Cartwright offers a different picture, one in which neither we, nor Nature, have such nice rules to go by. Getting real predictions about real happenings is an engineering enterprise that makes clever use of a great variety of different kinds of knowledge, with few real derivations in sight anywhere. It takes artful modeling. Orthodoxy would have it that how we do it is not reflective of how Nature does it. It is, rather, a consequence of human epistemic limitations. That, Cartwright argues, is to put our reasoning just back to front. We should read our image of what Nature is like from the way our sciences work when they work best in getting us around in it, non plump for a pre-set image of how Nature must work to derive what an ideal science, freed of human failings, would be like. Putting the order of inference right way around implies that like us, Nature too is an artful modeler. Lecture 1 is an exercise in description. It is a study of the practices of science when the sciences intersect with the world and, then, of what that world is most likely like given the successes of these practices. Millikan's famous oil drop experiment, and the range of knowledge pieced together to make it work, are used to illustrate that events in the world do not occur in patterns that can be properly described in so-called "laws of nature." Nevertheless, they yield to artful modeling. Without a huge leap of faith, that, it seems, is the most we can assume about the happenings in Nature. Lecture 2 is an exercise in metaphysics. How could the arrangements of happenings come to be that way? In answer, Cartwright urges an ontology in which powers act together in different ways depending on the arrangements they find themselves in to produce what happens. It is a metaphysics in which possibilia are real because powers and arrangement are permissive—they constrain but often do not dictate outcomes (as we see in contemporary quantum theory). Lecture 3, based on Cartwright's work on evidence-based policy and randomized controlled trials, is an exercise in the philosophy of social technology: How we can put our knowledge of powers and our skills at artful modeling to work to build more decent societies and how we can use our knowledge and skills to evaluate when our attempts are working. The lectures are important because: They offer an original view on the age-old question of scientific realism in which our knowledge is genuine, yet our scientific principles are neither true nor false but are, rather, templates for building good models. Powers are center-stage in metaphysics right now. Back-reading them from the successes of scientific practice, as Lecture 2 does, provides a new perspective on what they are and how they function. There is a loud call nowadays to make philosophy relevant to "real life." That's just what happens in Lecture 3, where Cartwright applies the lesson of Lectures 1 and 2 to argue for a serious rethink of the way that we are urged—and in some places mandated—to use evidence to predict the outcomes of our social policies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations (LOA #70)
Author | : Ralph Waldo Emerson |
Publisher | : Library of America Ralph Waldo |
Total Pages | : 680 |
Release | : 1994-08 |
Genre | : Literary Collections |
ISBN | : |
Contains Emerson's published poetry, plus selections of his unpublished poetry from journals and notebooks, and some of his translations of poetry from other languages, notably Dante's La vita nuova.