Thinking Matter was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This book, a reevaluation of a major issue in modern philosophy, explores the controversy that grew out of John Locke's suggestion, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), that God could give to matter the power of thought. The concept of "thinking matter," as Locke's notion came to be described, offered a threat to those who held orthodox beliefs, especially to their views on the nature and immortality of the soul. In Thinking Matter,John Yolton traces this controversy from theologian Ralph Cudworth's 1678 manifesto, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: Wherein, All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and Its Impossibility Demonstrated — an attack on ancient versions of naturalism—down to the philosophical and scientific studies of Joseph Priestley in the late eighteenth century.

Thinking Matter is an original and provocative look at the nature of consciousness. While many contemporary philosophers have downplayed the significance of the body and subscribed to a brain/body dualism in human consciousness, Joseph S. Catalano argues that it is the entire fleshy body that thinks; the body of the dancer, the hands of the writer, and the eyes of the reader are not merely instruments of thought, but forms of thought itself. Calling for a thorough rethinking of philosophic traditions from Aristotle to Sartre, Catalano offers a holistic view of the bodily nature of consciousness--one that focuses on the total organic body rather than the brain alone.

Since the first edition sold out in less than a year, we now present the revised second edition of Mainzer's popular book. The theory of nonlinear complex systems has become a successful problem-solving approach in the natural sciences from laser physics, quantum chaos, and meteorology to computer simulations of cell growth in biology. It is now recognized that many of our social, ecological, and political problems are also of a global, complex, and nonlinear nature. And one of the most exciting contemporary topics is the idea that even the human mind is governed largely by the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems. In this wide-ranging but concise treatment, Prof. Mainzer discusses, in a nontechnical language, the common framework behind these endeavors. Emphasis is given to the evolution of new structures in natural and cultural systems and we see clearly how the new integrative approach can give insights not available from traditional reductionistic methods.

The ancient Roman orator Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) wrote, 'Control your mind or it will control you.' In today's society we are faced with more information, and more complex information, than ever. Faced with making decisions, we can feel overwhelmed and helpless. One way to become less helpless — to gain control over our lives — is to gain control over our own thinking. We can feel helpless when faced with this barrage of information, opinions, data, and conflicting arguments if we lack the skills to quickly grasp and critically evaluate them. This book is designed to impart these kinds of skills.Any course in a university should do more than teach information — in nearly every field, 'facts' become obsolete quickly. The goals of Thinking Matters are to help you: The text is punctuated with exercises or 'personal experiments' to challenge and stimulate your curiosity. These exercises may take the form of an inventory to be taken, a puzzle to be solved, or some thoughts to ponder.The first module Thinking Matters: Critical Thinking as Creative Problem Solving introduces the student to all the above topics — logic, probability, argument forms and fallacies, ethical reasoning, algorithms, and computational thinking — through logic puzzles and games and mathematical magic tricks.

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic uses the books of the Trump era to argue that our response to this presidency reflects the same failures of imagination that made it possible. As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read some 150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his presidency reveals about our nation. Many of these, he’s found, are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. In What Were We Thinking, Lozada uses these books to tell the story of how we understand ourselves in the Trump era, using as his main characters the political ideas and debates at play in America today. He dissects works on the white working class like Hillbilly Elegy; manifestos from the anti-Trump resistance like On Tyranny and No Is Not Enough; books on race, gender, and identity like How to Be an Antiracist and Good and Mad; polemics on the future of the conservative movement like The Corrosion of Conservatism; and of course plenty of books about Trump himself. Lozada’s argument is provocative: that many of these books—whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, Trump’s true believers or his harshest critics—are vulnerable to the same blind spots, resentments, and failures that gave us his presidency. But Lozada also highlights the books that succeed in illuminating how America is changing in the 21st century. What Were We Thinking is an intellectual history of the Trump era in real time, helping us transcend the battles of the moment and see ourselves for who we really are.

From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines. All failed—but that does not mean we cannot learn from the trail of ideas, correspondence, machines, and arguments they left behind. In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew L. Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved in imagining, elaborating, testing, and building calculating machines. He explores the writings of philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople, showing how they thought about technical novelty, their distinctive areas of expertise, and ways they could coordinate their efforts. In doing so, Jones argues that the conceptions of creativity and making they exhibited are often more incisive—and more honest—than those that dominate our current legal, political, and aesthetic culture.