The Organic Machine

Author: Richard White
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1429952423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics. In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest for both whites and Native Americans. He concentrates on what brings humans and the river together: not only the physical space of the region but also, and primarily, energy and work. For working with the river has been central to Pacific Northwesterners' competing ways of life. It is in this way that White comes to view the Columbia River as an organic machine--with conflicting human and natural claims--and to show that whatever separation exists between humans and nature exists to be crossed.

The Organic Machine

Author: Richard White
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Columbia River
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Talk With Self

Author: Shyamal Barman
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN: 1638505802
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 83

Book Description
This is a book of fiction which can be understood easily. Here all the characters are created by the author but are actually created, nurtured, influenced and controlled by nature. In this book, the author shows us that there is an intimate and unbroken relationship between our lives and nature. In this book, the author wants to say that the greatest powers in this universe are love, respect and care (for others as well as oneself). Ultimate happiness is also hidden in this. The author makes a beautiful and excellent presentation of one character which is the source of all characters and represents the conversations of all the characters. Actually this is about one character’s self-talk.

Existence and Machine

Author: Fabio Grigenti
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319453661
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
The aim of this work is to provide a preliminary analysis of a much more far-reaching investigation into the relationship between technology and philosophy. In the context of the contemporary German thought, the author compares the different positions of Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Ernst and Friedrich Jünger, Arnold Gehlen and Gunther Anders. The term “machine” is used precisely to mean that complex material device assembled in the last quarter of the 18th century as a result of the definitive modern refinement of certain fundamental technologies, i.e. metallurgy, precision mechanics and hydraulics. The “machine” discussed here arrived on the scene of man’s history when the processes of spinning and weaving were entrusted to semi-automatic means; when the water wheels used in mills, hitherto always made of wood, were supplanted by the metal levers of the steam engine; and especially when the steam engine was connected to the weaving frames, to the metalworking hammers, and to other machines used to manufacture other machines in an endless reiteration of assemblies and applications, the enormous outcome of which is what subsequently came to be described as “mass production”. The philosophers discussed here were also dealing with the type of machine described above and in their works she we can identify three model images of this idea of machine. These images have been drawn on at various times, also outside the realms of philosophy, and they still provide the backdrop for our knowledge of the machine, which has circulated in a great variety of languages.

Film Figures

Author: Warwick Mules
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501361228
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Film Figures develops a figural account of the memory structure of films. Employing theoretical concepts drawn from a range of sources, including French post-humanist philosophy and German Idealism, the book undertakes an organology of film guided by the work of Bernard Stiegler whose philosophy of mnemotechnesis provides the framework of analysis. Situating films in the quantum field of spacetime relativity as a field of cosmic views, inquiry into film figures begins with disturbances in the experience of films themselves, posing questions of the relation between the dead past and the living future in film story-telling. By breaking the façade of the continuing present through self-questioning, we open films to their figural dimensions in the counter-movement of drive as negentropic resistance. Following the back-movement of drive switches our perception to the figural register in which characters become figures probing blindly for what the film will have been in another time – a time yet to be lived. By following the anterior possibilities of this other time, we open films to the archival future in which a new future comes forth. This book provides theoretical and analytical concepts as well as strategies for taking a step into this future, guided by questions of the right path to take given the relativity of views in which the film can be experienced. Films analysed include Murnau's The Last Laugh, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Hitchcock's Rear Window, Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, Fellini's Intervista, Antonioni's L'Eclisse, Bresson's Une Femme Douce, and Zeller's The Father.

Bioregional Assessments

Author: K. Norman Johnson
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 9781610913867
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
In diverse regions around the country, impending crises over dwindling natural resources and conflicts over land use have given birth to a new approach to environmental management and policymaking. Known as bioregional assessment, the approach gives science and scientists a crucial role in the policymaking process, bringing together experts on a range of issues to assess existing ecological and social conditions and to provide a base of knowledge from which to develop policy options and management decisions. A number of high-profile assessments have been conducted, and while much has been written on individual projects, little has been done to compare assessments or integrate the lessons they provide. Bioregional Assessments synthesizes the knowledge from many regions by examining the assessment process and detailing a series of case studies from around the country. Each case study, written by knowledgeable leaders from the region, features a detailed description of the project followed by reviews from the perspectives of science, management, and policy. Case studies examined are the Forest Ecosystem Management Assess ment Team (FEMAT) Assessment; the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Assessments; the Everglades-South Florida Assessments; the Northern Forest Lands Assessments; Southern California Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP); the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project; and the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project. In addition, the book features introductory chapters that examine the challenges inherent in the assessment of complex regional systems, and the role of science in the assessment process. The concluding chapter provides a synthesis and analysis of the assessment process. Bioregional assessments are quickly becoming an essential part of ecosystem management. This book provides a unique look at the theory and practice of bioregional assessments, and is an essential volume for resource managers, scientists, policymakers, and anyone involved with formulating or implementing strategies for regional planning and ecosystem management.

Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz

Author: Justin E. H. Smith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400700415
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
In recent decades, there has been much scholarly controversy as to the basic ontological commitments of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The old picture of his thought as strictly idealistic, or committed to the ultimate reduction of bodies to the activity of mind, has come under attack, but Leibniz's precise conceptualization of bodies, and the role they play in his system as a whole, is still the subject of much controversy. One thing that has become clear is that in order to understand the nature of body in Leibniz, and the role body plays in his philosophy, it is crucial to pay attention to the related concepts of organism and of corporeal substance, the former being Leibniz's account of the structure of living bodies (which turn out, for him, to be the only sort of bodies there are), and the latter being an inheritance from the Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition which Leibniz appropriates for his own ends. This volume brings together papers from many of the leading scholars of Leibniz's thought, all of which deal with the cluster of questions surrounding Leibniz's philosophy of body.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Leibniz

Author: Brandon C. Look
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472524853
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
The Bloomsbury Companion to Leibniz presents a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to the life, thought and work of one of the great polymaths of the modern world, G.W. Leibniz. This guide enriches the reader's understanding of Leibniz by establishing the philosophies of, and Leibniz's reactions to, his most important philosophical contemporaries from Descartes to Malebranche. While addressing current philosophical research in Leibniz studies such as his metaphysics, logic and theory of free will, a leading team of experts in the field demonstrate that Leibniz's work was wider in scope. Examining new directions in this field they cover a number of Leibniz's concerns outside of philosophy including mathematics, physics, and the life sciences. The Companion concludes by offering analysis of Leibniz's legacy; his impact on further study, particularly on his successor Immanuel Kant, and how he has subsequently been understood. Together with extended biographical sketches and an up-to-date and fully comprehensive bibliography, The Bloomsbury Companion to Leibniz is an extremely valuable study tool for students and scholars interested in Leibniz and the era in which he wrote.

Dust Bowl

Author: Janette-Susan Bailey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137589078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
This book takes the Dust Bowl story beyond Depression America to describe the ‘dust bowl’ concept as a transnational phenomenon, where during World War Two, US and Australian national mythologies converged. Dust Bowl begins with Depression America, the New Deal and the US Dust Bowl where massive dust storms darkened the skies of the Great Plains and triggered a major national and international media event and generated imagery describing a failed yeoman dream, Dust Bowl refugees, and the coming of a new American Desert. Dust Bowl traces the evolution of this imagery to Australia, World War Two and New Deal-inspired stories of conservation-mindedness, soil erosion and enemies, sheep-farmers and traitors, creeping deserts and human extinction, super-human housewives and natural disaster and finally, grand visions of a nation-building post-war scheme for Australia’s iconic Snowy River‒that vision became the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme.

Science and Sensibility

Author: Michael Vincent McGinnis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520960750
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
If humans are to understand and discover ways of addressing complex social and ecological problems, we first need to find intimacy with our particular places and communities. Cultivating a relationship to place often includes a negotiating process that involves both science and sensibility. While science is one key part of an adaptive and resilient society, the cultivation of a renewed sense of place and community is essential as well. Science and Sensibility argues for the need for ecology to engage with philosophical values and economic motivations in a political process of negotiation, with the goal of shaping humans' treatment of the natural world. Michael Vincent McGinnis aims to reframe ecology so it might have greater “trans-scientific” awareness of the roles and interactions among multiple stakeholders in socioecological systems, and he also maintains that deep ecological knowledge of specific places will be crucial to supporting a sustainable society. He uses numerous specific case studies from watershed, coastal, and marine habitats to illustrate how place-based ecological negotiation can occur, and how reframing our negotiation process can influence conservation, restoration, and environmental policy in effective ways.