eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
The Story of Civilization, Volume VII: A history of European civilization in the period of Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Rembrandt, Galileo, and Descartes: 1558-1648. This is the seventh volume of the classic, Pulitzer Prize-winning series.
If there is a linchpin to understanding modern European history, it lies in the period of religious strife & scientific progress between the 1550s & 1650s. In The Age of Reason Begins, Will & Ariel Durant bring together a fascinating network of stories in their discussion of the bumpy road toward the Enlightenment. This is the age of great monarchs & greater artists: on the one hand, Elizabeth the First of England, Philip II of Spain & Henry IV of France; on the other, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne & Rembrandt. It also encompasses the heyday of Bacon, Galileo, Giordano Bruno & Descartes--the fathers of modern science & philosophy. But it is equally an age of extreme violence, a moment in which all Europe was embroiled in the horrible Thirty Years' War--in some respects, the real First World War. Whatever the case, this is a chapter in cultural history one can't set aside. "Mr & Mrs Durant are admirably lucid...This is a book that can be commended very warmly."--The New York Times.
A love story by murder and a comedy with horror. ". . . by turns hysterical, incoherent, and blasphemously original . . . loopy and outrageous".--"Washington Post" Starring Ryan O'Neal, Isabella Rossellini and Wings Hauser. Color, 110 minutes.
The Complete Story of Civilization by Will Durant represents the most comprehensive attempt in our times to embrace the vast panorama of man’s history and culture. This eleven volume set includes: Volume One: Our Oriental Heritage; Volume Two: The Life of Greece; Volume Three: Caesar and Christ; Volume Four: The Age of Faith; Volume Five: The Renaissance; Volume Six: The Reformation; Volume Seven: The Age of Reason Begins; Volume Eight: The Age of Louis XIV; Volume Nine: The Age of Voltaire; Volume Ten: Rousseau and Revolution; Volume Eleven: The Age of Napoleon
A provocative reassessment of the concept of an American golden age of European-born reason and intellectual curiosity in the years following the Revolutionary War The accepted myth of the “American Enlightenment” suggests that the rejection of monarchy and establishment of a new republic in the United States in the eighteenth century was the realization of utopian philosophies born in the intellectual salons of Europe and radiating outward to the New World. In this revelatory work, Stanford historian Caroline Winterer argues that a national mythology of a unitary, patriotic era of enlightenment in America was created during the Cold War to act as a shield against the threat of totalitarianism, and that Americans followed many paths toward political, religious, scientific, and artistic enlightenment in the 1700s that were influenced by European models in more complex ways than commonly thought. Winterer’s book strips away our modern inventions of the American national past, exploring which of our ideas and ideals are truly rooted in the eighteenth century and which are inventions and mystifications of more recent times.
This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.
