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Author
Language
English
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Description
The best-selling author of The Island at the Center of the World chronicles the more than three-hundred-year debate between religion and science as revealed through the long and momentous odyssey of the skeletal remains of French philosopher René Descartes, creator of the famous phrase "I think, therefore I am."
Author
Physical Desc
xvii, 412 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
"Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it explain why there seems to be so much irrationality in the world, including, let's be honest, in each of us? These are the goals of Steven Pinker's follow-up to Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates's "new favorite book of all time"). Humans today are often portrayed as cavemen out of time, poised to react to a lion in the grass with a suite of biases, blind spots, fallacies, and illusions. But this, Pinker...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
It's a story we can't stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the "rational animal." But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today -- from the fifth-century...
Author
Physical Desc
xxxiv, 398 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
A revelatory and game-changing narrative that rewrites everything we thought we knew about the modern history of the Islamic world. With majestic prose, Christopher de Bellaigue presents an absorbing account of the political and social reformations that transformed the lands of Islam in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Flying in the face of everything we thought we knew, The Islamic Enlightenment becomes an astonishing and revelatory...
Author
Physical Desc
xv, 286 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
"A biography of the great astronomer and scientist, and an examination of the faith vs. science question, then and now, written by a noted astrophysicist and author"--
At present, we face enormous crises, such as the minimization of the dangers of climate change because the science behind these threats is erroneously questioned or ignored. Galileo encountered this problem 400 years ago. His discoveries contradicted the teachings of the church at...
Author
Physical Desc
308 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
An analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has created an environment dangerously hostile to reason. We live in an age when the 30-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in...
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