Author: Jacob BronowskiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
The Ascent Of Man
Author: Henry DrummondPublisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849644189
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Though its stand-point is Evolution and its subject Man, this book is far from being designed to prove that Man has relations, compromising or otherwise, with lower animals. Its theme is Ascent, not Descent. It is a History, not an Argument. And Evolution, in the narrow sense in which it is often used when applied to Man, plays little part in the drama outlined here. So far as the general scheme of Evolution is introduced--and in the Introduction and elsewhere this is done at length --the object is the important one of pointing out how its nature has been misconceived, indeed how its greatest factor has been overlooked in almost all contemporary scientific thinking.
The Ascent of Money
Author: Niall FergusonPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440654026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498
Book Description
The 10th anniversary edition, with new chapters on the crash, Chimerica, and cryptocurrency "[An] excellent, just in time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis." —The Washington Post "Fascinating." —Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek In this updated edition, Niall Ferguson brings his classic financial history of the world up to the present day, tackling the populist backlash that followed the 2008 crisis, the descent of "Chimerica" into a trade war, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, with his signature clarity and expert lens. The Ascent of Money reveals finance as the backbone of history, casting a new light on familiar events: the Renaissance enabled by Italian foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution traced back to a stock market bubble, the 2008 crisis traced from America's bankruptcy capital, Memphis, to China's boomtown, Chongqing. We may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street but, as Ferguson argues, the evolution of finance has rivaled the importance of any technological innovation in the rise of civilization. Indeed, to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.
The Ascent of Humanity
Author: Charles EisensteinPublisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1583946365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self Our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse. Fortunately, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth pangs of an earth in crisis. Our journey of separation hasn't been a terrible mistake but an evolutionary process and an adventure in self-discovery. Even in our darkest hour, Eisenstein sees the possibility of a more beautiful world—not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control but by fundamentally reimagining ourselves and our systems. We must shift away from our Babelian efforts to build ever-higher towers to heaven and instead turn out attention to creating a new kind of civilization—one designed for beauty rather than height.
The Ascent of Information
Author: Caleb ScharfPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087259
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.
The Ascent to Truth
Author: Thomas MertonPublisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547537077
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
The author of The Seven Storey Mountain explores the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross. The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. . . . The desire for unworldliness, detachment, and union with God is the most fundamental expression of this revolutionary spirit. In Ascent to Truth, author and Trappist Monk Thomas Merton makes an impassioned case for the importance of contemplation. Drawing on a range of thinkers—from Carl Jung to Pope Pius XII—Merton defines the nature of contemplative experience and shows how the Christian mysticism of sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite Saint John of the Cross offers essential answers to our disquieting and troubling times. “For any who have the desire to look into meditation and contemplation . . . this is the book for which they have waited.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review “For those who may be curious about mysticism, and for those who may be called to a life of contemplation, this is an excellent book.” —Catholic World
Author: Jacob BronowskiThe Ascent of Gravity
Author: Marcus ChownPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681775948
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
Why the force that keeps our feet on the ground holds the key to understanding the nature of time and the origin of the universe. Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognized and described yet it is the least understood. It is a "force" that keeps your feet on the ground yet no such force actually exists. Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: what is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from? Award-winning writer Marcus Chown takes us on an unforgettable journey from the recognition of the "force" of gravity in 1666 to the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015. And, as we stand on the brink of a seismic revolution in our worldview, he brings us up to speed on the greatest challenge ever to confront physics.
Author: Mathilde BlindThe Ascent of Man
Author: James F. HarrisPublisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412847605
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
The Ascent of Man develops a comprehensive theory of human nature. James F. Harris sees human nature as an emergent property that supervenes a cluster of properties. Despite significant overlap between individuals that have human nature and those that are biologically human, the concept of human nature developed in this book is different. Whether biologically human or not, an individual may be said to possess human nature. This theory of human nature is called the "cluster theory." Harris takes as his point of departure Plato's comment that in learning what a thing is we should look to the ways in which it acts upon or is acted upon by other things. He commits to a methodological naturalism and draws upon current views from the social and biological sciences. The cluster theory he develops represents one of the very few completely novel theories of human nature developed in the post-Darwin era. It will prove most useful in dealing with philosophical questions involving such contemporary issues as cloning, cybernetics, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The fundamental conceptual issue is how plastic and elastic is the nature of human nature. Just how different might we imagine human beings to be and still be human in the sense that they still possess whatever it is that accounts for a unique nature? The theory of human nature developed in this book is a descriptive, dynamic, bottom-up, non-essentialist, naturalist theory. Harris is well versed in classical philosophy and contemporary behavioral science. He writes in a graceful, open-ended way that both educates and illuminates renewed interest in what it means to be human.
