World History Philosophy

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War transformed hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge.

In researching one of history's greatest scientific quests, a mission to measure the Earth and define the meter, Ken Alder stumbled on a 200-year-old secret: The meter, it turns out, is in error. This is a story of two men, a secret, and a timeless human dilemma: is it permissible to perpetuate a small lie in the service of a larger truth?

The world has never been so unstable. Now, more than ever, we need to understand our history, learn from our mistakes, and embrace science and technology as we push into the future. In his debut book, New Thinking: The Technology and Science That Transformed Our World, Dagogo Altraide of YouTube's ColdFusion breaks down the history of gamechanger breakthroughs in the world of science and technology that have shaped our modern world and will impact the future.

The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven's Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science. There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall.

If you want to discover the captivating history of ancient Mediterranean civilizations, then pay attention....

Leading-edge empirical observations are increasingly difficult to reconcile with "scientific" materialism, with analytic idealism—the notion that reality, while equally amenable to scientific inquiry, is fundamentally mental—a leading contender to replace it. In this book, the broad body of empirical evidence and reasoning in favor of analytic idealism is reviewed in an accessible manner. The resulting argument anticipates a historically imminent transition to a scientific worldview that regards mind, not matter, as the ground of all reality.

Here, leading social philosopher Roman Krznaric unearths fascinating insights and inspiration from the last 1000 years of world history that could help us confront the most urgent challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. From bridging the inequality gap and keeping AI under control, to reviving our faith in democracy and avoiding ecological collapse, History for Tomorrow shows that history is not simply a means of understanding the past but a way of reimagining our relationship with the future.

Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.

From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

A cataclysmic planetary phenomenon is gathering force deep within the Earth. The magnetic North Pole will eventually trade places with the South Pole. Satellite evidence suggests to some scientists that the move has already begun, but most still think it won't happen for many decades. All agree that it has happened many times before and will happen again. But this time it will be different. It will be a very bad day for modern civilization.

This riveting audiobook takes the listener around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain.

Warriors of the Cloisters tells how key cultural innovations from Central Asia revolutionized medieval Europe and gave rise to the culture of science in the West. Medieval scholars rarely performed scientific experiments, but instead contested issues in natural science, philosophy, and theology using the recursive argument method. This highly distinctive and unusual method of disputation was a core feature of medieval science, the predecessor of modern science.

Les grands drames vécus lors d'une guerre relèguent habituellement les événements moins tragiques, au second rang. Bien que ces derniers passent inaperçus durant les combats, ils ne méritent pas moins d'être connus du public à cause du sentiment de bienveillance, de compassion, d'amour et d'innombrables preuves d'humanité dont ils ont fait preuve. Ce livre audio ne s'attarde donc pas sur les protagonistes des grandes batailles.

Rene Descartes, mathematician, scientist, and first "modern philosopher", wrote Meditations on First Philosophy, a six-part treatise first published in Latin in 1641, to deconstruct "belief" and, using reason and science, discuss the only things we can truly know for sure. Each of the six parts of this book represents six of Descartes’ meditations that occurred on six subsequent days, making it also, in no small part, an autobiographical piece of work.

The story of the rise of modern navigation technology, from radio location to GPS—and the consequent decline of privacy. What does it mean to never get lost? You Are Here examines the rise of our technologically aided era of navigational omniscience—or how we came to know exactly where we are at all times. Filled with tales of scientists and astronauts, inventors and entrepreneurs, You Are Here tells the story of how humankind ingeniously solved one of its oldest and toughest problems—only to herald a new era in which it’s impossible to hide.

We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But this is wrong. Science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavour. Horizons pushes beyond Europe, exploring the ways in which scientists from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific fit into the history of science, and arguing that it is best understood as a story of global cultural exchange.

Immerse yourself in the history of medicine - a colorful story of skill, serendipity, trial and error, moments of genius, and dogged determination.

Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy.

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

Lost princesses, a queen who dethroned her own husband, the country that defeated Napoleon, and a dog who went to space—these are just a few of the fascinating aspects of Russian history.