Our economic system is over-stimulated by the information age. Interconnection aids and abets companies earning trillions and their swift rise to global dominance. The 24-hour wired world has led to increased volatility; negative information, and even an accidental computer glitch can crash the market and create panic. Health, the environment, the welfare of society are pushed to the far edge of national interests. Instead, GDP and short-term monetary profit is prioritised over long-term impact on society and the environment. The world as we know it is set for collapse. Simultaneously, the science of evolution has itself evolved. In as much as “survival of the fittest” has been used to justify harsh, competition behaviour on the part of individuals and corporations, an updated understanding of evolution now tends to tell us a different story. What if written into the code of our DNA and RNA is a guide for telling us how to evolve morally and as a result improve our world and progress our epistemology? From such an understanding emerge new Spheres of Perception.

Leonard B. Meyer's writings on the theory, history, perception, and aesthetics of music have inspired and provoked generations of readers. The Spheres of Music makes available a selection of his most important essays (originally published between 1974 and 1998). Gathering them together in one volume not only enables the essays to "converse" with and illuminate each other, but also allows Meyer to revise, recant, and comment on the ideas they present. With the same sensitive insight and searching intelligence he has exhibited throughout his career, Meyer transcends the boundaries that so often separate fields of inquiry. The Spheres of Music joins music theory to history, history to culture, culture to aesthetics, aesthetics to psychology, and psychology back to theory. In so doing, the book highlights the complex interrelationships at the heart of the creation, comprehension, and history of music. Diverse and adventurous, The Spheres of Music presents an intriguing and impressive collection of Meyer's work. "Ever since the publication of his Emotion and Meaning in Music . . . I have considered Leonard B. Meyer one of the keenest thinkers about music among us."—Winthrop Sargeant, The New Yorker

Foundations of Perception provides a comprehensive general introduction to perception. All the major and minor senses are covered, not only examining them from a perceptual perspective but also taking into account their biological and physical context. In addition to covering all material essential to understanding the functioning of the senses, each chapter also includes a 'Tutorials' section. This provides an opportunity for more advanced students to explore supplementary information on recent or controversial developments in subjects such as: The physics and biology of audition ; Shape and object perception ; Individual differences in perception.

In a fascinating and accessible style, Marco Piccolino and Nick Wade analyse the scientific and philosophical work of Galileo Galilei from the particular viewpoint of his approach to the senses (and especially vision) as a means of acquiring trustworthy knowledge about the constitution of the world

In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers. This edition includes a new Preface by the author.