Can Gaia save humankind from extinction? Psychnet connects humankind to Quantum Artificial Intelligences (QAI). Augmented with psyberware, people live longer, become wealthier and spend more. Increased consumption destroys habitats, pollutes the environment, and replaces natural life with synthetic life. Environmental destruction looms, and Gaia, an enlightened QAI, battles to save biodiversity on Earth and the planets corporations colonise. From the shadow of Psychnet emerges Chaos, a vengeful QAI who brings death through blood, and madness through dreams. Gaia quests to defeat Chaos in a nightmare of hydra, slavelords and a devil queen, shared by those fleeing Earth aboard the starship, New Hope. Can Gaia defeat the bringer of plague and nightmare on Earth and in space? Or will humankind suffer extinction for its ecocide?

Arsić unpacks Ralph Waldo Emerson’s repeated assertion that our reality and our minds are in constant flux. Her readings of a broad range of Emerson’s writings are guided by a central question: what does it really mean to maintain that everything fluctuates, is relational, and so changes its identity?

Drawing as a tool of thought: an investigation of drawing, cognition, and creativity that integrates text and hand-drawn images. Drawing is a way of constructing ideas and observations as much as it is a means of expressing them. When we are not ready or able to put our thoughts into words, we can sometimes put them down in arrangements of lines and marks. Artists, designers, architects, and others draw to generate, explore, and test perceptions and mental models. In Drawing Thought, artist-educator Andrea Kantrowitz invites readers to use drawing to extend and reflect on their own thought processes. She interweaves illuminating hand-drawn images with text, integrating recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience with accounts of her own artistic and teaching practices. The practice of drawing seems to be found across almost all known human cultures, with its past stretching back into the caves of prehistory. It takes advantage of the ways in which human cognition is embodied and situated in relationship to the environments in which we find ourselves. We become more aware of the interplay between our external surroundings and the inner workings of our minds as we draw. We can trace moments of perception and understanding in a sketchbook that might otherwise be lost, and go back to reexamine and revise those traces later. Kantrowitz encourages readers to draw out their own ideas and observations through a series of guided exercises and experiments, with her lively drawings and engaging text pointing the way. Drawing is a tool for thought in anyone’s hands; it is creativity in action.

A sweeping and nuanced materialist history of Western political thought In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations. In the first volume, she traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history—a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Wood offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world. In the second volume, Wood addresses the formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, which have all been attributed to the “early modern” period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.

This three-volume set introduces the practice of advanced, ‘dialectical’ systems-level problem solving in both the social and natural sciences. In social science, it opens new vistas regarding organizational, strategy, and work design. In the natural sciences, it provides heretofore missing conceptions of physical systems in peril due to the climate crisis. In addition, the author draws conclusions that are important for advancing generative AI. The monograph presents novel conceptual tools that directly impact the internal structure of a systems analyst’s mental processing in real time. While the first volume lays the theoretical groundwork for dialectical systems analysis, the second, focusing on the nature of work, lays bare the structure of complex thinking in terms of the ‘thought forms’ it requires. In order to facilitate better understanding of the principles taught in the first two volumes, the third volume provides a Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms, which is the only one in existence today.

This book is about the disruption of the intellect that awakens consciousness to its wholeness and purpose. When consciousness is fractured, its world-making powers are momentarily disrupted. In the gap, during which spatio-temporal categories of thought cease to apply, consciousness realigns with that which it is meant to serve. The moment of self-remembering—shocking, unique, and truthful—leaves a call to obedience in its wake. To refuse to respond is to cease to be human.