Download Free Enigmas Of Agency Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Enigmas Of Agency and write the review.

First published in 2002. This is Volume XVI of seventeen in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology series. Written in 1972, this is a collection of studies in the philosophy of Human Action.
Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene? Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book, Mike Davis’s first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx’s inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause—and solution—of the planetary environmental crisis? Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx’s theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a “lost Marx,” whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the “middle landscape” of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the “anthropocene,” which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism’s failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880–1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.
History is replete with unanswered questions regarding our own past and that of the world in which we live. Some of these questions are mere curiosities; others are of the profoundest importance to our cultural identity and have a serious bearing on our future. Each self-contained chapter in The Enigmas of History covers a particular mystery, ranging across the globe and throughout history: from Atlantis to the Amazons; from the Ark of the Covenant to the enigma of the Black Madonnas; and from the weird mystery of Spring-heeled Jack to visions of the Virgin Mary. Among the topics explored are: • The strange history of the Dogon tribe of Mali in West Africa, who believe that they were visited in the distant past by amphibious beings from another star • The legend of the lost Himalayan kingdom of Shambhala • The mystery of the crystal skulls • The enigma of the indecipherable Voynich manuscript The Enigmas of History is an entertaining, informative compendium of strange events and weird encounters with the unexplained. It is packed with information on historical mysteries, puzzles and bewildering discoveries, and will intrigue the historian and general reader alike.
In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.
Arising from the 2020 Darwin College Lectures, this book presents eight essays from prominent public intellectuals on the theme of Enigmas. Each author examines this theme through the lens of their own particular area of expertise, together constituting an illuminating and diverse interdisciplinary volume. Enigmas features contributions by professor of physics Sean M. Carroll, author Jo Marchant, writer and broadcaster Adam Rutherford, professor of earth sciences Tamsin A. Mather, professor of the history of the book Erik Kwakkel, reader in cultural history Tiffany Watt Smith, mathematician and public speaker James Grime, assistant professor of positive AI J. Derek Lomas, and explorer Albert Y.- M. Lin. This volume will appeal to anyone fascinated by puzzles and mysteries, solved and unsolved.
The science fiction genre maintains a remarkable hold on the imagination and enthusiasm of the filmgoing public, captivating large audiences worldwide and garnering ever-larger profits. Science fiction films entertain the possibility of time travel and extraterrestrial visitation and imaginatively transport us to worlds transformed by modern science and technology. They also provide a medium through which questions about personal identity, moral agency, artificial consciousness, and other categories of experience can be addressed. In The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, distinguished authors explore the storylines, conflicts, and themes of fifteen science fiction film classics, from Metropolis to The Matrix. Editor Steven M. Sanders and a group of outstanding scholars in philosophy, film studies, and other fields raise science fiction film criticism to a new level by penetrating the surface of the films to expose the underlying philosophical arguments, ethical perspectives, and metaphysical views. Sanders's introduction presents an overview and evaluation of each essay and poses questions for readers to consider as they think about the films under discussion.The first section, "Enigmas of Identity and Agency," deals with the nature of humanity as it is portrayed in Blade Runner, Dark City, Frankenstein, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Total Recall. In the second section, "Extraterrestrial Visitation, Time Travel, and Artificial Intelligence," contributors discuss 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, 12 Monkeys, and The Day the Earth Stood Still and analyze the challenges of artificial intelligence, the paradoxes of time travel, and the ethics of war. The final section, "Brave Newer World: Science Fiction Futurism," looks at visions of the future in Metropolis, The Matrix, Alphaville, and screen adaptations of George Orwell's 1984.
In this tightly plotted debut novel, an unlikely detective, armed only with an umbrella and a singular handbook, must untangle a string of crimes committed in and through people's dreams.
First printed in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, this book has been out of print for several years and is highly sought after by researchers in the field of Medieval cultural studies. "Double Agents" was the first book length study of women in Anglo-Saxon written culture that took on board the insights of contemporary critical theory, especially feminist theory, in order to elucidate the complex challenges of both the absence and presence of women in the historical record. That is to say, unlike the two earlier books on women in this period (by Fell, 1984, and by Chance, 1986), this is not a book about only those women in the written record (whether we think of it as historical or literary) of Anglo-Saxon England, it also tackles the question of how the feminine is modelled, used, and metaphorised in Anglo-Saxon texts, even when women themselves are absent.This book spans the entire Anglo-Saxon period from Aldhelm and Bede in the earliest centuries to Alfric and the anonymous homilists and hagiographers of the later tenth and eleventh centuries; it draws on Anglo-Saxon vernacular texts as well as Latin ones, and on those works most familiar to literary scholars (such as the "Exeter Book Riddles" or "Cadmon's Hymn", the first so-called poem in English, or the female "Lives of Saints") as well as historians (wills, charters, the cult of relics); it deliberately reconsiders, from the perspective of gender and women's agency, some of the key conceptual issues that studying Anglo-Saxon England presents (the relation of orality to literacy; that of poetry and sanctity to belief; and, the cultural significance of names, naming, and metaphors in Anglo-Saxon writing).