The story of over three thousand words that today are forgotten, unfamiliar and increasingly rare. A funny and fascinating window on the rich history of the English language.

Focusing on contemporary debates in moral and political theory, Situating the Self argues that a non-relative ethics, binding on us in virtue of out humanity, is still a philosophically viable project. This intersting new book should be read by all those concerned with the problems of critical theory, the analysis of modernity, and contemporary ethics, as well as students and professionals in philosophy, sociology and political science.

A fascinating history of the international human rights movement as seen by one of its founders During the past several decades, the international human rights movement has had a crucial hand in struggles against totalitarian regimes and crimes against humanity. Today, it grapples with the war against terror and subsequent abuses of government power. In The International Human Rights Movement, Aryeh Neier—a leading figure and a founder of the contemporary movement—offers a comprehensive, authoritative account of this global force, from its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its essential place in world affairs today. Neier combines analysis with personal experience, and gives an insider’s perspective on the movement’s goals, the disputes about its mission, its rise to international importance, and the challenges to come. This updated edition includes a new preface by the author.

The value of true belief has played a central role in history of philosophy—consider Socrates' slogan that the unexamined life is not worth living, and Aristotle's claim that everyone naturally wants knowledge—as well as in contemporary epistemology, where questions about the value of knowledge have recently taken center stage. It has usually been assumed that accurate representation—true belief—is valuable, either instrumentally or for its own sake. In A Luxury of the Understanding, Allan Hazlett offers a critical study of that assumption, and of the main ways in which it can be defended. Hazlett defends the conclusion that true belief is at most sometimes valuable. In the first part of the book, he targets the view that true belief is normally better for us than false belief, and argues that false beliefs about ourselves—for example, unrealistic optimism about our futures and about other people, such as overly positive views of our friends—are often valuable vis-à-vis our wellbeing. In the second part, he targets the view that truth is "the aim of belief," and argues for anti-realism about the epistemic value of true belief. Together, these arguments comprise a challenge to the philosophical assumption of the value of true belief, and suggest an alternative picture, on which the fact that some people love truth is all there is to "the value of true belief".

Rich information-theoretic structure in out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics exists in both the classical and quantum regimes, leading to the fruitful interplay among statistical physics, quantum information theory, and mathematical theories such as matrix analysis and asymptotic probability theory. The main purpose of this book is to clarify how information theory works behind thermodynamics and to shed modern light on it. The book focuses on both purely information-theoretic concepts and their physical implications. From the mathematical point of view, rigorous proofs of fundamental properties of entropies, divergences, and majorization are presented in a self-contained manner. From the physics perspective, modern formulations of thermodynamics are discussed, with a focus on stochastic thermodynamics and resource theory of thermodynamics. In particular, resource theory is a recently developed field as a branch of quantum information theory to quantify “useful resources” and has an intrinsic connection to various fundamental ideas of mathematics and information theory. This book serves as a concise introduction to important ingredients of the information-theoretic formulation of thermodynamics.