Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Philosophy

From the beginning of history, measurement has been interwoven into the human experience, shaping our understanding of nature, personal relationships, and the supernatural. We measure the world to know our past, comprehend the present, and plan the future.

John Brockman, editor of This Will Make You Smarter, presents his latest thought-provoking audiobook, featuring insights from leading thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Lisa Randall, Matt Ridley, and Daniel C. Dennett. Drawing from the horizons of science, today's leading thinkers reveal the hidden threats nobody is talking about - and expose the false fears everyone else is distracted by. Encompassing neuroscience, economics, philosophy, physics, psychology, biology, and more - here are 150 ideas that will revolutionize your understanding of the world.

The debate between science and religion is never out of the news: Emotions run high, fueled by polemical best sellers like The God Delusion and, at the other end of the spectrum, high-profile campaigns to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools. Yet there is much more to the debate than the clash of these extremes. As Thomas Dixon shows in this balanced and thought-provoking introduction, many have seen harmony rather than conflict between faith and science.

What's sexy about saving the planet? Funny you should ask. Because that is precisely - or, perhaps, broadly - what Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have spent many years bringing to light in their live art, exhibitions, and films. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality as they became lovers with the Earth and made their mutual pleasure an embodied expression of passion for the environment.

On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities - those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means - and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism.

In this wide-ranging examination of the micro and macro, world-renowned scholar Thomas S. Mullaney reflects on the deaths of his parents, and on how human lives "disappear." Lyrical and poignant, his erudite, inspiring meditation offers eye-opening insight on the miracle of existence, and on what it means to forge meaning from a chaotic universe.

What is Now? This immediate moment, what we're experiencing right now . . . it bathes us like air, or gravity. Yet when we try to grasp this quality, to scrutinize it or bring it into focus, it vanishes, slipping through our fingers like a dream. And worse, according to the most trusted models of physics, Now doesn't even exist. If all this is so, then what, exactly, are we experiencing? How do we carve out time, sensation, self, and meaning from a blank, Now-less canvas?

AI is at the forefront of everyone's minds: from students and artists, to CEO's and service workers. But what exactly is AI, and how does it influence our everyday lives? And more than that, what does it mean for our future? Is there a way for us to retain our "humanness" in a world ever-reliant on tech? This groundbreaking book argues that the key technology we use to make strategic, political, and ethical decisions is flawed.

Not Just For the Boys looks back at how society has historically excluded women from the scientific sphere and discourse, what progress has been made, and how more is still needed. Athene Donald, herself a distinguished physicist, explores societal expectations during both childhood and working...

Vaccine hesitancy in America didn't begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination were about more than diseases or injections. Kieffer argues that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression—not as the product of scientific misinformation.

Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis: these attributes of the paranormal mind are widely dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of such pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions, Derek Lee traces...

At stake in the "Science Wars" that have raged in academe and in the media is nothing less than the standing of science in our culture. One side argues that science is a "social construct," that it does not discover facts about the world, but rather constructs artifacts disguised as objective truths. This view threatens the authority of science and rejects science's claims to objectivity, rationality, and disinterested inquiry. Drawing Out Leviathan examines this argument in the light of some major debates about dinosaurs.

Most of us are familiar with probiotics added to milk or yogurt to improve gastrointestinal health. In this ambitious and original work, Jamie Lorimer offers a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches and an insightful critique of their promise and limitations.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: Climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects.

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: Life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. In the 19th century, however, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything - and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit.

North America was not empty nor were its inhabitants savages when Europeans arrived in 1492. Quite the opposite, North America was thickly populated by indigenous people who lived in clean cities, had a thriving economy, and transformed the landscape into bountiful productivity. Forgotten Landscapes reveals the incredible extent to which Native Americans manipulated and shaped their surrounding environs through agricultural practices and urban engineering, resulting in one of the most prosperous civilizations of their time.

The impact of an asteroid led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Could another giant cosmic missile soon be heading our way? In Target Earth, acclaimed Dutch astronomy writer Govert Schilling provides a full account of what we know, and need to know, about all the extraterrestrial matter constantly bombarding our planet—from microscopic dust particles and space debris to massive meteorites, comets, and asteroids.

Twentieth century science completely revolutionized human understanding of the world, rewriting the story of the universe with exciting discoveries and theories—the big bang, the relativity of space and time, the accelerating expansion of the universe, along with increasingly refined ideas of evolution and the origin of life.