World History Philosophy

Miyamoto Musashi wrote the master text on being a well-trained and competent soldier-samurai, entitled The Book of Five Rings. This book covers the tactics, strategies, and philosophy of the singular master warrior. Along with Musashi's work, we have provided the Tao Te Ching, one of the philosophical text that contributed to the development of martial arts.

This collection of 24 essays is a perfect introduction to the world of Lewis Thomas. Topics ranging from the riddle of smelling to nuclear proliferation carry the gentle, unassuming persuasiveness that characterizes the author’s work. Here we are also introduced to the concerns that have distinguished Thomas’ literary career: the natural altruism of organisms; the inter-relatedness of all creatures; the fragility of the human species; the uneasiness of life on a threatened planet.

Es beginnt mit einem gewaltigen Knall: Der Ausbruch des Vulkans Krakatau 1883 ist wie ein Sinnbild für die ungeheure Kraft der utopischen Energien, die das 20. Jahrhundert prägen werden. Nietzsches Übermensch und Wittgensteins Revolution der Sprache, die bahnbrechende Kunst von Käthe Kollwitz, Freuds Eroberung des Unbewussten und Fukuyamas Traum vom Ende der Geschichte – all dies erweckt Peter Neumann in Geschichten und Porträts meisterhaft zum Leben. Er nimmt uns mit auf eine fesselnde Zeitreise ins Land der Utopien, die mit ihrer disruptiven Energie bis heute faszinieren und Visionen für unsere Gegenwart bieten.

Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgments about the past. History and Morality draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author's insights as a practicing historian.

As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past 300 years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now.

As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the bomb's strategic implications.

Un tempo si studiava il cielo dall'alto dei templi. Oggi con telescopi spaziali. Un tempo si credeva che l'universo fosse una cupola sopra la Terra piatta. Oggi sappiamo di essere una briciola nello spazio-tempo che si espande dopo il Big Bang. Un tempo ogni civiltà aveva la sua cosmologia. Oggi tutto il mondo ha una sola scienza. In ogni caso, dai miti più ingenui alle teorie scientifiche più ardite, quello dell'Universo resta il "racconto" più affascinante che ha accompagnato l'evoluzione culturale dell'uomo.

The Enlightenment has been nothing if not divisive, being blamed for bloody disasters - Auschwitz, the gulags, Islamic terrorism - as well as being heralded as the harbinger of reason and equality. To this day historians disagree over when it was, where it was, and what it was. Kieron O’Hara deftly traverses these conflicts, presenting the history, ideology, culture, and social life of the Enlightenment, not as a simple set of easily enumerated ideas, but rather as an evolving conglomerate that spawned a diverse set of thinkers.

In his most important book to date, award-winning author Timothy Ferris — “the best popular science writer in the English language today” (Christian Science Monitor) — makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of liberalism and democracy.

Volume two is based on the Jungian interpretation of the 12 steps for the initiation of a capacity the two-hemisphere brain achieved 100,000 years ago, leaping to a new qualium level of consciousness by integrating its subjective and objective cognitive modes (gnosis and science). A critical mass of humanity is already inventing and building a new self-reflective, living system that can meet the challenge of the environment to turn vision into action - though time is running short.

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.

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.

We may imagine that science is a process of breakthroughs and light bulb moments. But in reality, science goes wrong 99% of the time. Almost every idea a scientist comes up with is quickly disproved by a failed experiment or rival research. Science moves at a rate of inches per decade and we like it that way. But occasionally, just occasionally, a complete fluke happens and changes everything. This is a rip-roaring adventure through science gone wrong, accidentally changing humanity for the better.

La espléndida biografía de Alexander von Humboldt, el héroe perdido de la ciencia y padre de la ecología.

In this engaging history, James MacGregor Burns brings to vivid life the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, during which audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, bringing down governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments that would ultimately reach every corner of the globe. Unlike most historians, Burns pays particular attention to America's intellectual revolution, beginning and ending his story on American soil.

The epic story of the invention of a global network of weights, scales, and instruments for measurement.

Millions of transactions each day depend on a reliable network of weights and measures. This network has been called a greater invention than the steam engine, comparable only to the development of the printing press.

Alles ist messbar: Kaffee und Galaxien ebenso wie Quarks und Schwarze Löcher, der Mensch, die Natur, die Städte–kurz, alles, was uns umgibt. Das Einzige, was man dafür braucht, sind die sieben Maßeinheiten Meter, Kilogramm, Sekunde, Ampere, Kelvin, Mol und Candela.

The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving".

Long before the U.S. government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and long before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced—and hotly debated the ethics of—the use of human subjects in medical experiments. In Subjected to Science, Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of biomedical research with human subjects in the earlier period, from 1890 to 1940.

However, there is much more to World War I than Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and the clash of the Entente and Central Powers. It was a conflict deeply rooted in hateful rivalries of the world’s most powerful states, and came as a somewhat logical conclusion to the endless balancing and political maneuvering of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it would change the course of history forever.