Philosophy Academic

John James Audubon's The Birds of America stands as an unparalleled achievement in American art. With that work, Audubon became one of the most adulated artists of his time, and America's first celebrity scientist. A self-made man incessantly striving to secure his place in American society, Audubon made himself into a skilled painter, a successful entrepreneur, and a prolific writer, whose words went well beyond birds and scientific description.

Pioneering oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer unravels the mystery of marine currents, uncovers the astonishing story of flotsam, and changes the world's view of trash, the ocean, and our global environment. Curtis Ebbesmeyer is no ordinary scientist. He's been a consulting oceanographer for multinational firms and a lead scientist on international research expeditions, but he's never held a conventional academic appointment.

In 2002, New York City's newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg made a historic announcement: His administration had won control of the city's school system in a first step toward reversing its precipitous decline. In a controversial move, he appointed Joel Klein, an accomplished lawyer from outside the education establishment, to lead this ambitious campaign. Lessons of Hope is Klein's inside account of his eight-year mission of improvement.

The first full-length biography of George Ingle Finch - maverick Australian mountaineer, scientist, concert pianist and father of actor Peter Finch. George Ingle Finch, mountaineer, soldier, scientist, rebellious spirit, boy from the bush, was in his day one of the most famous men in the world. In 1922 he stood at the highest point on Everest, a feat not bettered for 30 years. He invented the predecessor to the puffer jacket and pioneered the use of oxygen in climbing.

Unravelling the Double Helix covers the most colourful period in the history of DNA, from the discovery of 'nuclein' in the late 1860s to the publication of Watson's The Double Helix in 1968. This is a saga packed with awful mistakes as well as brilliant science, with a wonderful cast of heroes and villains. Surprisingly, much of it is unfamiliar because the early history is largely neglected by books which focus on the episode of the double helix.

Ecce Homo, subtitled How One Becomes What One Is, is the final original book written by Friedrich Nietzsche before he succumbed to the insanity which lasted until his death in 1900. In this extraordinary autobiography, Nietzsche chronicles his life and development as a philosopher, his tastes as an individual, and his vision for humanity.

读完这本书，吸收马云一生的处世之道，明悉待人接物、做人做事的各种规则，让你忍得住、站得稳、走得远，最终成就一番巅峰事业。…… 讀完這本書，吸收馬雲一生的處世之道，明悉待人接物、做人做事的各種規則，讓你忍得住、站得穩、走得遠，最終成就一番巔峰事業。

不了解李嘉诚的人，更多的只是看到他的财富。其实财富本身不足以让他显得不凡与高贵，李嘉诚之所以显得不凡与高贵，更在于他深谙做人的真谛与做事的法则。…… 不了解李嘉誠的人，更多的只是看到他的財富。其實財富本身不足以讓他顯得不凡與高貴，李嘉誠之所以顯得不凡與高貴，更在於他深諳做人的真諦與做事的法則。

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

In John Hunter’s classroom, students fearlessly tackle global problems and discover surprising solutions by playing his groundbreaking World Peace Game. These kids - from high school all the way down to fourth grade, in schools both well funded and underresourced - take on the roles of politicians, tribal leaders, diplomats, bankers, and military commanders. Through battles and negotiations, standoffs and summits, they strive to resolve dozens of complex, seemingly intractable real-world challenges.

By the end of World War I, Albert Einstein had become the face of the new science of theoretical physics and had made some powerful enemies. One of those enemies, Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, spent a career trying to discredit him. Their story of conflict, pitting Germany's most widely celebrated Jew against the Nazi scientist who was to become Hitler's chief advisor on physics, had an impact far exceeding what the scientific community felt at the time.

An explosive new look at the pressures on today's teachers and the pitfalls of school reform, Confessions of a Bad Teacher presents a passionate appeal to save public schools, before it's too late. When John Owens left a lucrative job to teach English at a public school in New York City's South Bronx, he thought he could do some good. Faced with a flood of struggling students, Owens devised ingenious ways to engage every last one. But as his students began to thrive under his tutelage, Owens found himself increasingly mired in a broken educational system.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Radical is this fearless advocate's incisive, intensely personal call-to-arms. Rhee combines the story of her own extraordinary experience with dozens of compelling examples from schools she's worked in and studied-from students from unspeakable home lives who have thrived in the classroom to teachers whose radical methods have produced unprecedented leaps in achievement. Radical chronicles Rhee's awakening to the potential of every child, her rage at the special interests blocking badly-needed change, and her recognition that it will take a grassroots movement to create outstanding public schools.

Jonathan Starr is not your traditional do-gooder, and in 2009, when he decided to found Abaarso, a secondary school in Somaliland, the choice seemed crazy to even his closest friends. Why, they wondered, would he turn down a life of relative luxury to relocate to an armed compound in a breakaway region of the world's number one failed state? To achieve his mission, Starr would have to overcome profound cultural differences, broken promises, and threats to his safety and that of his staff.

A squared plus b squared equals c squared. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet this familiar expression opens a gateway into the riotous garden of mathematics, and sends us on a journey of exploration in the company of two inspired guides, Robert and Ellen Kaplan. With wit, verve, and clarity, they trace the life of the Pythagorean theorem, from ancient Babylon to the present, visiting along the way Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, President James Garfield, and the Freemasons - not to mention the elusive Pythagoras himself.

Hailed by Oprah as a "warrior woman for our times", reviled by teachers unions as the enemy, Michelle Rhee, outgoing chancellor of Washington DC, public schools, has become the controversial face of school reform. She has appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and is currently featured as a hero in the documentary Waiting for Superman. This is the story of her journey from good-girl daughter of Korean immigrants to tough-minded political game-changer.

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the 20th century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars.

A thrilling scientific investigation and the portrait of an extraordinary genius, The Seashell on the Mountaintop gives us new insight into our planet, revealing how we learned to read the story told to us by the Earth itself, written in rock and stone.

The father of modern philosophy, Descartes is still one of the most widely discussed philosophers today. Putting rationalism above all else, he sought to base all knowledge of the world on a single idea: "I think, therefore I am." This introduction expertly summarises his thoughts on the dualism of mind and body, his proofs for God’s existence, and his responses to scepticism. Explaining how his life informed his philosophy, Bracken demonstrates the philosopher’s enduring significance.

René Descartes is one of the formative figures in Western philosophy, logic and mathematics. His famous statement: "I think, therefore I am," has become perhaps the most famous phrase in all of philosophy. Descartes’s ground-breaking writings attempted to establish unshakeable foundations of knowledge, and set a trend for subsequent Western philosophy, which has endlessly critiqued and expanded upon his ideas.