Philosophy & Social Aspects

Every day, we are presented with new technologies that can influence human thought and action, such as psychopharmaceuticals, new generation performance enhancing drugs, elective biotechnology, and gastric bypass surgery. Have we let technology go too...

Behind the headlines of our time stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors. Panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. But despite the enormous influence...

Biofortification - the enrichment of staple food crops with essential micronutrients - has been heralded as a uniquely sustainable solution to the problem of micronutrient deficiency or 'hidden hunger'. Considerable attention and resources are being...

In 2006, anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett set out to rethink the role that human sciences play in biological research, creating the Human Practices division of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center - a facility established to...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution that reject meme theory in favor of a complex understanding of dynamic change over time How do cultures change? In recent decades, the concept of the meme, posited as a basic unit of culture analogous...

Few issues cause academics to disagree more than gender and race, especially when topics are addressed in terms of biological differences. To conduct research in these areas or comment favorably on research can subject one to scorn.When these topics are...

There is a deep distrust of experts in America today. Influenced by populist politics, many question or downright ignore the recommendations of scientists, scholars, and others with specialized training. It appears that expertise, a critical component of...

Technology evolves at a dazzling speed, and nowhere more so than in the field of genetic engineering, where the possibility of directly changing the genes of one's children is quickly becoming a reality. The public is rightly concerned, but...

Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the...

Science, especially naturalistic science, has come under fire of late. No longer does it command the near universal respect it once held. From the right has come a fresh attack on Darwinism and arguments for intelligent design. From the left...

This book presents empirical studies of the rise, expansion, and influence of scientific discourse and organization throughout the world, over the past century. Using quantitative cross-national data, it shows the impact of this scientized world polity...

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology,...

Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the...

A geneticist tells the stories of men, women, and children whose genes have shaped their lives in unexpected ways. It was while listening to a colleague tell the parents of a newborn girl that their daughter was going to die that a lifelong interest in...

This is a superlative graphic guide described as 'warm, witty and wise' by Jonathan Ree to an enigmatic master of twentieth-century philosophy.About the AuthorJohn Heaton is a psychotherapist and was a colleague of R.D. Laing. He studied natural and...

Head hits cause brain damage - but not always. Should we ban sport to protect athletes? Exposure to electromagnetic fields is strongly associated with cancer development - does that mean exposure causes cancer? Should we encourage old fashioned...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781615197934Author David Robert GrimesFormat PaperbackPage Count 400Imprint ExperimentPublisher ExperimentWeight(grams) 381gDimensions(mm) 201mm * 140mm *...

Our sense-making capabilities and the relationship between our individual and collective intelligence and the comprehensibility of the world is both remarkable and deeply mysterious. Our capacity to make sense of the world and the fact that we pass our...

When making decisions, people naturally face uncertainty about the potential consequences of their actions due in part to limits in their capacity to represent, evaluate or deliberate. Nonetheless, they aim to make the best decisions possible. In...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062338792Author Katherine EbanFormat PaperbackPage Count 512Imprint Ecco PressPublisher Ecco PressWeight(grams) 454g

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? Making AI Intelligible shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in...

Biotechnologies already on the horizon will enable us to be smarter, have better memories, be stronger and quicker, have more stamina, live longer, be more resistant to diseases, and enjoy richer emotional lives. To some of us, these prospects are...

"Kuhn has the unmistakable address of a man, who, so far from wanting to score points, is anxious above all else to get at the truth of matters."-Sir Peter Medawar, NatureBook InformationISBN 9780226458069Author KuhnFormat PaperbackPage Count 390Imprint...

This user-friendly, comprehensive course in probability and statistics as applied to physical and social science explains the probability calculus, distributions and densities, and the rivals of Beyesianism - the classical, logical, and subjective...

"The old logic put thought in fetters, while the new logic gives it wings." For the past century, philosophers working in the tradition of Bertrand Russell - who promised to revolutionise philosophy by introducing the 'new logic' of Frege and Peano -...

From Homeric gods to galaxies, from love affairs to perspective in painting, Paul Feyerabend revelled in the physical and cultural abundance that surrounds us. He found it equally striking that human senses and human intelligence are able to take in only...

This book offers a unique perspective on one of the deepest questions about the world we live in: is reality multi-leveled, or can everything be reduced to some fundamental 'flat' level? This deep philosophical issue has widespread implications...

Modern physics has revealed the universe as a much stranger place than we could have imagined. The puzzle at the centre of our knowledge of the universe is time. Michael Lockwood takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the nature of things. He...

Our fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780593542361Author Carlo RovelliFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Riverhead Books,U.S.Publisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 204gDimensions(mm) 202mm...

A brand-new book from the award-winning SUNDAY TIMES journalist Brian Appleyard.Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From...

It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what does it mean to achieve this understanding? What...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781035845118Author W Robert GriffithsFormat HardbackPage Count 576Imprint Austin Macauley PublishersPublisher Austin Macauley Publishers

What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of...

Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) held the chair of theoretical physics at Bordeaux from 1894 to his death. He established a reputation in both the history and philosophy of science as well as in science itself (physics and physical chemistry). Much of his work...

Andrew Steane reconfigures the public understanding of science, by drawing on a deep knowledge of physics and by bringing in mainstream philosophy of science. Science is a beautiful, multi-lingual network of ideas; it is not a ladder in which ideas at...

An esteemed historian of science explores the diversity of scientific experimentation. The experiment has long been seen as a test bed for theory, but in Split and Splice, Hans-Joerg Rheinberger makes the case, instead, for treating experimentation as...

A suite of questions concerning fundamentality lies at the heart of contemporary metaphysics. The relation of grounding, thought to connect the more to the less fundamental, sits at the heart of those debates in turn. Since most contemporary...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781570620775Author Jeremy HaywardFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Shambhala Publications IncPublisher Shambhala Publications IncWeight(grams)...

The recent explosion of neuroscience techniques has been game-changing in terms of understanding the healthy brain, and in the development of neuropsychiatric treatments. One of the key techniques is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which...