World History Philosophy

Under the shadow of an illustrious father, Sambhaji finds himself thrust into the Maratha-Mughal conflict from a tender age. His mistakes cost him dearly, and when his father suddenly dies and he becomes the chhatrapati, it is as if he has inherited a crown of thorns. In the nine years that follow, he faces a constant battle - internally, as palace intrigues simmer to kill him, and externally, as Aurangzeb descends on the Deccan with full military force. Even Chhatrapati Shivaji had never faced a full-blown Mughal aggression.

Dedicated as few men have been to the life of reason, Bertrand Russell has always been concerned with the basic questions to which religion also addresses itself - questions about man’s place in the universe and the nature of the good life, questions that involve life after death, morality, freedom, education, and sexual ethics. He brings to his treatment of these questions the same courage, scrupulous logic, and lofty wisdom for which his other work as philosopher, writer, and teacher has been famous.

Best-selling historian and philosopher Will Durant devoted his entire life to studying the most significant eras, individuals, and achievements of human history. Here is a summation of Durant's work, as he presents the best of world history. Filled with Durant's renowned wit, knowledge, and unique ability to explain events in simple and exciting terms, it is a concise liberal arts education.

The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the 20th century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, long-suppressed information has emerged on Heisenberg’s role in the Nazi atomic bomb project. In Beyond Uncertainty, Cassidy interprets this and other previously unknown material within the context of his vast research and tackles the vexing questions of a scientist’s personal responsibility and guilt when serving an abhorrent military regime.

An acclaimed journalist on contemporary China lays bare the country's two-decade quest for global dominance and how the Chinese Communist Party coopted what Western leaders have long considered their most powerful tool in the fight for liberal democracy—capitalism—to expand its influence worldwide.

Whether you are a scientist or a poet, pro-nuclear energy or staunch opponent, conspiracy theorist or pragmatist, James Mahaffey's books have served to open up the world of nuclear science like never before. With clear explanations of some of the most complex scientific endeavors in history, Mahaffey's new book looks back at the atom's wild, secretive past and then toward its potentially bright future.

Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: The Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, was presented by the Greek philosopher Plato to compare "[T]he effect of education and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor, Socrates, narrated by the latter.

David Bodanis demystifies the world's most famous equation, explaining its science and bringing it to life. He makes clear the astonishing array of discoveries and consequences it made possible and its impact on our daily lives. At last, the masses can understand that Einstein did nothing less than open the door to the inner structure of the universe.

In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. These Christian intellectuals - Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others - sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems compares the Copernican or Heliocentric system with the Ptolemaic or Peripatetic, system of the cosmos. Published in Florence in 1632, it resulted in him being tried before the Inquisition. Using the dialogue form, Galileo masterfully shows the truth of the Copernican system that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The Dialogue is one of the most important treatises ever written. A work of supreme clarity and accessibility, it remains as accessible now as when it was published.

Can psychedelic drugs help us tackle the biggest problems we face globally? Can they heal the cultural, spiritual, and political wounds we’re wrestling with? Psychedelics have hit the mainstream as powerful new mental health treatments. But as clinicians explore what these molecules can do for our individual minds, The Bigger Picture goes further to illuminate how psychedelics can help us find new ways to make sense of and come through the crises we face around the world.

In very recent times humanity has learnt a vast amount about the universe, the past and itself. But through our remarkable successes in acquiring knowledge we have learned how much we have yet to learn: the science we have, for example, addresses just five per cent of the universe, pre-history is still being revealed, with thousands of historical sites yet to be explored, and the new neurosciences of mind and brain are just beginning.

Why You Think the Way You Do traces the development of the worldviews that underpin the Western world. Professor and historian Glenn S. Sunshine demonstrates the decisive impact that the growth of Christianity had in transforming the outlook of pagan Roman culture into one that—based on biblical concepts of humanity and its relationship with God—established virtually all the positive aspects of Western civilization.

The world-renowned scholar and author of Vermeer’s Hat does for China what Mary Beard did for Rome in SPQR: Timothy Brook analyzes the last eight centuries of China’s relationship with the world in this magnificent history that brings together accounts from civil servants, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, migrant workers, invaders, visionaries, and traitors - creating a multifaceted portrait of this highly misunderstood nation.

The Craftsman explores the relation between the hand and the head. Richard Sennett argues that working with physical things stimulates people to think. Craftsmanship, says Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman's work. In this thought-provoking book, Sennett explores the work of craftsmen past and present.

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

Size explains the regularities—and peculiarities—of the key processes shaping life (from microbes to whales), the Earth (from asteroids to volcanic eruptions), technical advances (from architecture to transportation), and societies and economies (from cities to wages).