Humankind is the product of millions of years of evolution. The question is, has human evolution reached a peak, or can we develop even further? Many signposts indicate that the answer is yes, we can go further. While the bulk of human evolution has been a blind, unconscious process, rather than sit back and allow nature to take its course, it is time to take matters into our own hands and usher in the next stage of human progress. Thousands of individuals have attained this conscious evolution of the selfenlightenment over the centuries. Defying the conventional wisdom of scientists and those who hold to conventional forms of religion, these individuals have followed well-trodden paths toward illumination, proving that neither life nor nature can be bound by any scientific theory or religious dogma. This book is oriented toward those who count themselves among the free thinkers of the world, those who are willing to explore the reality of the unknown rather than deny the existence of regions of the mind, body, and spirit simply because they do not conform to preconceived ideas. This does not mean that our essence, our basic identity, has to be replaced or destroyed. Rather, it implies re-examining ourselves so that we are able to conceive of a universe that is infinitely more complex and varied than we have imagined. To this end, the book employs both poetry and discourses to awaken the dormant higher self. FURTHER EVOLUTION IS POSSIBLE, PROVIDED WE ARE WILLING TO EMBARK ON THE QUEST FOR truth

Conceptualising images as images in use, this title considers the agencies behind visual communication and its impact on society. It engages critically with traditional approaches to visual analysis, socially situated analyses of images and demonstrates the explanatory force of thinking through images in use in a series of case studies.

This Guide provides an ambitious state-of-the-art survey of the fundamental themes, problems, arguments and theories constituting the philosophy of computing. A complete guide to the philosophy of computing and information. Comprises 26 newly-written chapters by leading international experts. Provides a complete, critical introduction to the field. Each chapter combines careful scholarship with an engaging writing style. Includes an exhaustive glossary of technical terms. Ideal as a course text, but also of interest to researchers and general readers.

From ancient philosophy to the big bang, quantum physics, and cosmology, Titus Joseph takes us on a mind-stretching journey through time and space to unveil a new law, positional symmetry (requisite mirror image), that explains how all things come into existence through the curious symmetries found everywhere in nature. This exciting new model of the universe draws on concepts from ancient philosophy and weaves together quantum mechanics with relativity, through the observable symmetries found in nature. Our Curious World of Mirror Images sheds new light on what it means to be human in a world in which all things are interrelated. - Introducing a whole new way of looking at our world - A universal theory combining profound scientific facts seamlessly with philosophy - Written in an easy to read format with many illustrations so that anyone may understand - Reconciles the intractable problem of duality - Marries quantum theory with relativity in a relationship that works to explain reality - Provides a compelling account of spacetime that makes sense of the arrow of time - Demonstrates how all things come into being - Provides a broad overview of the cosmos as a whole entity - An eye-opener to the meaning of God - Reconciles eastern paradigms with western views - This book could change the way you see the world

Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity. Arguing that visual mental images regularly assisted many of these scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated molecules were interconnected. These portrayals of “chemical structures,” both as mental images and as paper tools, gradually became an accepted part of science during these years and are now regarded as one of the central defining features of chemistry. In telling this fascinating story in a manner accessible to the lay reader, Rocke also suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative thinking in all fields. Image and Reality is the first book in the Synthesis series, a series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Angela N. H. Creager, John E. Lesch, Stuart W. Leslie, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan Rocke, E.C. Spary, and Audra J. Wolfe, in partnership with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

This is the first book to explore all central issues surrounding the relationship between the film-image and philosophy. It tackles the work of particular philosophers of film (Žižek, Deleuze and Cavell) as well as general philosophical positions (Cognitivist and Culturalist), and analyses the ability of film to teach and create philosophy.

Steiner (English, Univ. of Pennsylvania) delivers a lucidly written elaboration of "interactive aesthetics" first broached in her examination of the revival of beauty in contemporary art, Venus in Exile (2001). Here the focus is the artist's model, broadly conceived as a paradoxical site of reality/artificiality and power/lack of power. Steiner incorporates a wide range of material to explain early history (the Pygmalion myth, Galatea, Eve, and Pandora), the postmodernist turn (Edie Sedgwick, muse of Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan), and recent developments (Second Life, blogging, Wikipedia, bioethics). Concepts (mimesis, spectacle), literature (Kathleen Rooney's Live Nude Girl of 2008, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year of 2007, Milton, Keats, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Vladamir Nabokov, Nathaniel Hawthorne); art (Michelangelo, Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Mapplethorpe, Hannah Wilke, Vanessa Beecroft, Gillian Wearing, Oron Catts, Helena Almeida, Ann Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Frederick Hart, John Kindness, Peter Eisenman, Rachel Whiteread), theory (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Rene Girard), and art history (Michael Fried, Sir Kenneth Clark) are woven into a rich tapestry informed by Steiner's favorite semioticians, Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. General Readers; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by E. K. Mix.