Philosophy & Social Aspects

In the future, we'll all be having sex with robots... won't we? Roboticists say they're a distracting science fiction, yet endless books, films and articles are written on the subject. Campaigns are even mounted against them. So why are sex robots...

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas...

How do we get to know air? Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds offers a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to reorient common understandings of air and air pollution as matter "out there." Aeropolis contests regimes of managing air...

In his new preface E. O. Wilson reflects on how he came to write this book: how The Insect Societies led him to write Sociobiology, and how the political and religious uproar that engulfed that book persuaded him to write another book that would better...

Half a century ago Adorno and Horkheimer argued, with great prescience, that our increasingly rationalized world was witnessing the emergence of a new kind of barbarism, thanks in part to the stultifying effects of the culture industries. What they could...

CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 BY WATERSTONES AND THE TIMES'Entertaining and original.' Guardian'Accessible and insightful, it's a thought-provoking read.' Observer' Highly readable.' The Times'Nothing less than brilliant.' Wall Street JournalWhat if...

This book is a long-awaited major statement by a pre-eminent analytic philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, on one of our biggest debates -- the compatibility of science and religion. The last twenty years has seen a cottage industry of books on this divide, but...

Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century, although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. Ian Hacking presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about...

Probability is increasingly important for our understanding of the world. What is probability? How do we model it, and how do we use it? Timothy Childers presents a lively introduction to the foundations of probability and to philosophical issues it...

A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or...

In this accessible analysis, a philosopher and a science educator look at biological theory and society through a synthesis of mechanistic and organicist points of view to best understand the complexity of life and biological systems. The search for a...

Paul Feyerabend is one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century and his book Against Method is an international bestseller. In this new book he masterfully weaves together the main elements of his mature philosophy into a gripping...

This book focuses on the phenomena of inertia and gravitation, one objective being to shed some new light on the basic laws of gravitational interaction and the fundamental nature and structures of spacetime. Chapter 1 is devoted to an extensive, partly...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781250798725Author George DysonFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Picador USAPublisher Picador USAWeight(grams) 426gDimensions(mm) 224mm * 147mm * 27mm

Albert Einstein is an icon of the twentieth century. Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, he is most famous for his theory of relativity, which is considered the founding principle of modern physics. He also made enormous contributions to quantum mechanics and...

Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the...

There is an underlying assumption in the social sciences that consciousness and social life are ultimately classical physical/material phenomena. In this ground-breaking book, Alexander Wendt challenges this assumption by proposing that consciousness is,...

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched...

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year"It is a radiantly original contribution to a conversation gravely in need of new thinking."-Ben Tarnoff, The New YorkerA visionary reexamination of the value of privacy in today's hypermediated world-not just as a...

The modern world is passing through a time of critical change on many levels: cultural, political, ecological and spiritual. We are witnessing the decline and dissolution of the old order, the tumult and uncertainty of a new birth. Against this...

'Dripping with delicious detail' - Aditya Chakrabortty Taking the reader on a journey through North East Scotland, Merseyside, South Wales, the Thames Estuary and London, this is the story of Britain's oil-soaked past, present and future. Travelling...

The first thing children ask about sex is typically, "Where do babies come from?" This, the most perplexing scientific question of all time, was hailed by the ancient Greeks as "the mystery of mysteries". Throughout history the most intelligent and...

Nautilus Award Gold Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment In Matter and Desire, internationally renowned biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber rewrites ecology as a tender practice of forging relationships, of yearning for connections, and of...

What should a vet do when a client can't pay for their animal's treatment? Or when asked their opinion on the killing of wildlife for disease control? Or when observing an animal welfare problem whilst off duty? Ethical problems are an everyday part...

The experience of illness is a universal and substantial part of human existence. Like death, illness raises important philosophical issues. But unlike death, illness, and in particular the experience of being ill, has received little philosophical...

Our gadgets are getting smarter. Technology can log what we buy, customize what we consume and enable us to save and share every aspect of our existence. In the future, we're told, it will even make public life - from how we're governed to how we record...

From Amazon to Tinder, from Google to Deliveroo, there is no facet of human life which the digital revolution has not streamlined and dematerialised. Its objective was to reduce the cost of physical interactions by forgoing face-to-face interactions, a...

Bonnie Steinbock presents The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics - an authoritative, state-of-the-art guide to current issues in bioethics. Thirty-four contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity that is characteristic of bioethics, and its increasingly...

This exploration of the newly emerging, diverse, and controversial area of animal lawpresents a basic survey of the laws designed to protect animals, analyzing and critiquing them, and proposing a future where the legal regime properly recognizes and...

In The One, particle physicist Heinrich Pas presents a bold idea: fundamentally, everything in the universe is an aspect of one unified whole.This idea, called monism, has a rich 3,000-year history: Plato believed that 'all is one', but monism was later...

Building on the influential book The Social Construction of Technological Systems, this volume carries forward the project of creating a theory of technological development and implementation that is strongly grounded in both sociology and history...

What is consciousness? How does the subjective character of consciousness fit into an objective world? How can there be a science of consciousness? In this sequel to his groundbreaking and controversial The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers develops a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780345379184Author Carl SaganFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 283gDimensions(mm) 211mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780874778564Author James BurkeFormat PaperbackPage Count 348Imprint Tarcher/Putnam,USPublisher Tarcher/Putnam,USWeight(grams) 1g

TRUST IS FUNDAMENTAL TO EVERY ACTION, EVERY RELATIONSHIP, EVERY TRANSACTIONAND IT MATTERS NOW MORE THAN EVER BEFORE...In this ground-breaking book world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest...

A practical guide to making good decisions in a world of missing dataIn the era of big data, it is easy to imagine that we have all the information we need to make good decisions. But in fact the data we have are never complete, and may be only the tip...

Taxidermy, once the province of natural history and dedicated to the pursuit of lifelike realism, has recently resurfaced in the world of contemporary art,culture, and interior design. In Speculative Taxidermy, Giovanni Aloi offers a comprehensive...

Walter J. Ong's classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought.This thirtieth anniversary edition...

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the "device"-core ideas of modern literary theory-were all...

In this book of ""trialogues,"" the late psychedelic visionary and shamanologist Terence McKenna, acclaimed biologist and originator of the morphogenetic fields theory Rupert Sheldrake, and mathematician and chaos theory scientist Ralph Abraham explore...