The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door — crushing the cockroach — and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in brazilian literature…

The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in  what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone--or something--seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain , Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction" brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life, we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions - that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. This fascinating work argues that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.

In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves -- including one Jack Shaftoe, aka King of the Vagabonds, aka Half-Cocked Jack -- devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues -- a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold. In Europe, the exquisite and resourceful Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, is stripped of her immense personal fortune by France's most dashing privateer. Penniless and at risk from those who desire either her or her head (or both), she is caught up in a web of international intrigue, even as she desperately seeks the return of her most precious possession. Meanwhile, Newton and Leibniz continue to propound their grand theories as their infamous rivalry intensifies, stubborn alchemy does battle with the natural sciences, dastardly plots are set in motion ... and Daniel Waterhouse seeks passage to the Massachusetts colony in hopes of escaping the madness into which his world has descended. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight. It is a chronicle of the breathtaking exploits of "Half-Cocked Jack" Shaftoe -- London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds -- risking life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox. And it is the tale of Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem to become spy, confidante, and pawn of royals in order to reinvent Europe through the newborn power of finance. A gloriously rich, entertaining, and endlessly inventive novel that brings a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life, Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most original and important literary talents of our time. And it's just the beginning ...

<i>The System of the World,</i> the third and concluding volume of Neal Stephenson's shelf-bending Baroque Cycle (<i>Quicksilver</i> and <i>The Confusion</i>), brings the epic historical saga to its thrilling - and truly awe-inspiring - conclusion.<br /><br />Set in the early 18th century and featuring a diverse cast of characters that includes alchemists, philosophers, mathematicians, spies, thieves, pirates, and royalty, <i>The System of the World</i> follows Daniel Waterhouse, an unassuming philosopher and confidant to some of the most brilliant minds of the age, as he returns to England to try and repair the rift between geniuses Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. After reluctantly leaving his family in Boston, Waterhouse arrives in England and is almost killed by a mysterious Infernal Device. Having been away from the war-decimated country for two decades, Waterhouse quickly learns that although many things have changed, there is still violent revolution simmering just beneath the surface of seemingly civilized society. With Queen Anne deathly ill and Tories and Whigs jostling for political supremacy, Waterhouse and Newton vow to figure out who is trying to kill certain scientists and decipher the riddle behind the legend of King Solomon's gold, a mythical hoard of precious metal with miraculous properties.<br /><br />Arguably one of the most ambitious -- and most researched -- stories ever written, Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is set in one of the most turbulent and exciting times in human history. Filled with wild adventure, political intrigue, social upheaval, civilization-changing discoveries, cabalistic mysticism, and even a little romance, this massive saga is worth its weight in (Solomon's) gold. <br /><i>Paul Goat Allen</i>

Neoreaction is not your grandfather's conservatism, but the web 2.0 era marriage between modern engineering principles and classical anti-democratic thought. Its central tenet is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and in The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land burns progressivism to the ground, salts the earth around its ashes, and raises an altar to anti-humanism in its place.
Land explicates the main ideas of neoreaction-the Cathedral, neocameralism, formalism, etc.-always viewing democracy, liberalism, and politics in general through the lens of Darwinism. The result is something like Thomas Hobbes as ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft. Included in this volume is an unreleased essay by Land on the writing and impact of The Dark Enlightenment.
Absolutely none of this incendiary work has been proven wrong in the ten years since it was written. No doubt it will remain relevant for many years to come.

An impassionate and fearless study of Georges Bataille which goes beyond analysis and criticism to actually engage with him.

Fanged Noumena brings together the writings of Nick Land for the first time. During the 1990s Land's unique philosophical work, variously described as 'rabid nihilism', 'mad black deleuzianism' and 'cybergothic', developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of 'continental philosophy' - a route which was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British 'speculative realist' philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers - artists, musicians, filmmakers, bloggers - who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.
Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume then collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s - long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print) - in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids.
Fanged Noumena allows a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and will introduce his unique voice to a new generation of readers.

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella - astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields “pseudo” is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements - both of which display allegations of “pseudoscience” on all sides - there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.
Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?
Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Focuses on the scientific and mathematical principles underlying the science of complexity
Shows how many processes in nature can be understood using complexity
Explores a series of examples to highlight and explain the various types of complex systems
Includes examples from the physical and biological sciences, as well as the applications in economics and management
Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series - over six million copies sold worldwide
The importance of complexity is well-captured by Hawking's comment: "Complexity is the science of the 21st century". From the movement of flocks of birds to the Internet, environmental sustainability, and market regulation, the study and understanding of complex non-linear systems has become highly influential over the last 30 years.
In this Very Short Introduction, one of the leading figures in the field, John Holland, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the highly diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he combines simple, well-known examples — Adam Smith's pin factory, Darwin's comet orchid, and Simon's 'watchmaker' — with an account of the approaches, involving agents and urn models, taken by complexity theory.

16和17世纪，人们对自然世界展开狂热探索，是为“科学革命”时期。或是出于宗教热情，或是出于实际需求，或是出于名与利的前景，或是仅仅出于求知的欲望，各色思想者和实干家探究并重新审视着身边的世界。哥白尼、伽利略、牛顿，这些人类整个科学史上*为耀眼的星辰，以及其他许多虽无盛名却同样重要的名字，不停地给出、抛弃、再给出各种解释体系。
在这本极简介绍中，劳伦斯•普林西比探索了科学革命时期天体科学、地球科学、物质与运动科学以及生命科学领域激动人心的革新与发展。在叙述中，作者采用了历史人物本身的视角，突出强调了他们的背景、环境、推理与动机，破除了科学史上的种种陈腐迷雾。

Shows the value of the Bayesian methodology for the addressing the core issues in the field
Provides clear, comprehensive, and accessible explanations
Discusses a wide range of questions, from philosophical foundations to practical applications in science
Combines mathematical modeling with conceptual analysis, simulations, case studies, and empirical results
How should we reason in science? Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann offer a refreshing take on classical topics in philosophy of science, using a single key concept to explain and to elucidate manifold aspects of scientific reasoning. They present good arguments and good inferences as being characterized by their effect on our rational degrees of belief. Refuting the view that there is no place for subjective attitudes in 'objective science', Sprenger and Hartmann explain the value of convincing evidence in terms of a cycle of variations on the theme of representing rational degrees of belief by means of subjective probabilities (and changing them by Bayesian conditionalization). In doing so, they integrate Bayesian inference—the leading theory of rationality in social science—with the practice of 21st century science. Bayesian Philosophy of Science thereby shows how modeling such attitudes improves our understanding of causes, explanations, confirming evidence, and scientific models in general. It combines a scientifically minded and mathematically sophisticated approach with conceptual analysis and attention to methodological problems of modern science, especially in statistical inference, and is therefore a valuable resource for philosophers and scientific practitioners.

Spellbinding--soaring theater--. For reasons that remain mysterious, it seems especially moving today.-- The New York Times
Eugene O'Neill mined the tragedies of his own life for this depiction of a seedy, skid row saloon in 1912, peopled by society's failures: worn-out anarchists, failed con artists, drifters, whores, pimps, and informers. The pipe-dreaming drunks of Harry Hope's bar numb themselves with rotgut gin and make grandiose plans, while waiting for the annual appearance of the big-spending, fast-talking salesman, Hickey. But this year's visit fails to bring the expected good times, as a changed Hickey tries to rouse the barflies from their soothing stupor with a proselytizing message of salvation through self-knowledge.

Considered by many to be the Nobel Prize-winning playwright's finest work, The Iceman Cometh exposes the human need for illusion as an antidote to despair. The recent gripping, critically acclaimed Broadway production, starring Kevin Spacey, has highlighted anew the subversive genius of O'Neill's play.

Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan--a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his.
"Science of Science and Reflexivity" will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal "An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology." In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research--that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit.
Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in "Science of Science and Reflexivity" are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths; he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century; and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces.
A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, "Science of Science and Reflexivity" is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology.

Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time.

A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper “Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product” and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, “The Presence of Past Science.” An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems.
Kuhn’s aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.

Defining the lives of a majority of the world’s population, the question of ‘the city’ has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time – uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute ‘the city’ today. Case studies range from the ‘laboratory urbanism' of an Austrian ski resort and a ‘sustainable’ Swedish shopping mall to the ‘urbicidal’ refurbishments of Haifa.
Review
This collection unfolds new urban research. The unlimited city extends to all urban practices: passers-by, tourists, sports players and the homeless who merge with indigenous people, settlers, prostitutes and workers to striate the common local space or resist administrative tasks. Research becomes central to this collective assemblage, transversing between times and hierarchies. A great experiment!
-- Anne Querrien, co-editor of the French journal Multitudes and former co-editor of Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine
From the Inside Flap
Author approvedAdd endorsementDispels the old question of what the city is, asking instead what it can doDefining the livelihood of a majority of the worlds population, the question of the city has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research.Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattaris philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute the city today.Dispelling the old question of what the city is, asking instead what it can do, this collection provides a nuanced mapping of situations emerging in concrete urban settings across the globe, ranging from the laboratory urbanism of an Austrian ski resort to a sustainable Swedish shopping mall.Hélène Frichot is Associate Professor in Critical Studies in Architecture. Catharina Gabrielsson is Assistant Professor in Urban Theory and Jonathan Metzger is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Studies. They are all based at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden.
From the Back Cover
Author approved Add endorsement Dispels the old question of what the city is, asking instead what it can do Defining the livelihood of a majority of the world’s population, the question of ‘the city’ has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time – uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute ‘the city’ today. Dispelling the old question of what the city is, asking instead what it can do, this collection provides a nuanced mapping of situations emerging in concrete urban settings across the globe, ranging from the ‘laboratory urbanism‘ of an Austrian ski resort to a ‘sustainable’ Swedish shopping mall. Hélène Frichot is Associate Professor in Critical Studies in Architecture. Catharina Gabrielsson is Assistant Professor in Urban Theory and Jonathan Metzger is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Studies. They are all based at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden.