Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative (Vol. 1-3)

Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative (Vol. 1-3)
Author: Herbert Spencer
Publisher: e-artnow
Total Pages: 1257
Release: 2020-10-27
Genre: Science
ISBN:

This 3-volume book features a comprehensive collection of most significant scientific, political and speculative essays by Herbert Spencer. The first volume is made up of essays in which the idea of evolution, general or special is dominant. In the second volume essays dealing with philosophical questions, with abstract and concrete science, and with aesthetics, are brought together; but though all of them are tacitly evolutionary, their evolutionism is an incidental rather than a necessary trait. The ethical, political, and social essays composing the third volume, though mostly written from the evolution point of view, have for their more immediate purposes the enunciation of doctrines which are directly practical in their bearings._x000D_ Volume 1:_x000D_ The Development Hypothesis_x000D_ Progress: Its Law and Cause_x000D_ Transcendental Physiology_x000D_ The Nebular Hypothesis_x000D_ Illogical Geology_x000D_ Bain on the Emotions and the Will_x000D_ The Social Organism_x000D_ The Origin of Animal Worship_x000D_ Morals and Moral Sentiments_x000D_ The Comparative Psychology of Man_x000D_ Mr. Martineau on Evolution_x000D_ The Factors of Organic Evolution_x000D_ Volume 2:_x000D_ The Genesis of Science_x000D_ The Classification of the Sciences_x000D_ Reasons for Dissenting From the Philosophy of M. Comte_x000D_ On Laws in General, and the Order of Their Discovery_x000D_ The Valuation of Evidence_x000D_ What is Electricity?_x000D_ Mill versus Hamilton – The Test of Truth_x000D_ Replies to Criticisms_x000D_ Prof. Green's Explanations_x000D_ The Philosophy of Style_x000D_ Use and Beauty_x000D_ The Sources of Architectural Types_x000D_ Gracefulness_x000D_ Personal Beauty_x000D_ The Origin and Function of Music_x000D_ The Physiology of Laughter_x000D_ Volume 3:_x000D_ Manners and Fashion_x000D_ Railway Morals and Railway Policy_x000D_ The Morals of Trade_x000D_ Prison-ethics_x000D_ The Ethics of Kant_x000D_ Absolute Political Ethics_x000D_ Over-legislation_x000D_ Representative Government – What is It Good for?_x000D_ State-tamperings With Money and Banks_x000D_ Parliamentary Reform: the Dangers and the Safeguards_x000D_ "The Collective Wisdom"_x000D_ Political Fetichism_x000D_ Specialized Administration_x000D_ From Freedom to Bondage_x000D_ The Americans

Plants in Science Fiction

Plants in Science Fiction
Author: Katherine E. Bishop
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2020-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786835614

This is the first volume of its kind Plants in Science Fiction shows how considerations of plant-life in SF can transform our understanding of institutions and boundaries, erecting – and dismantling – new visions of utopian and dystopian futures. Its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life.

Speculative Everything

Speculative Everything
Author: Anthony Dunne
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-12-06
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262019841

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Uneven Futures

Uneven Futures
Author: Ida Yoshinaga
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2022-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 026254394X

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In this edited collection, more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. The essays, international in scope, demonstrate the diversity of SF through a balance of popular mass-market novels, comics, films, games, TV shows, creepypastas, and more niche works. SF works explored range from Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, 2084: The End of the World by Boualem Sansal, Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman, Watchmen and X-Men comics, and the Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, to the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin, and the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson. In an era in which ecological disaster and global pandemics regularly expose and intensify deep political-economic inequalities, what futures has SF anticipated? What survival strategies has it provided us? Can it help us to deal with, and grow beyond, the inequalities and injustices of our times? Unlike other books of speculative/science fiction criticism, Uneven Futures uses a think piece format to make its critical insights engaging to a wide audience. The essays inspire visions of better possible futures—drawing on feminist, queer, and global speculative engagements with Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro- and African futurisms—while imparting important lessons for political organizing in the present. Contributors: Ben Abraham, Emmet Asher-Perrin, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Gerry Canavan, Andrew Ferguson, Fabio Fernandes, Dexter Gabriel, M. Elizabeth Ginway, Sean Guynes, Ouissal Harize, David M. Higgins, Veronica Hollinger, Allanah Hunt, Nicola Hunte, Nathaniel Isaacson, Ayana Jamieson, Darshana Jayemanne, Gwyneth Jones, Brendan Keogh, Sami Ahmad Khan, Cameron Kunzelman, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Isiah Lavender III, Caryn Lesuma, Karen Lord, Sarah Marrs, Farah Mendlesohn, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Hugh Charles O’Connell, B. Pladek, John Rieder, Lysa Rivera, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steven Shaviro, Rebekah Sheldon, Alison Sperling, Alfredo Suppia, Bogi Takács, Taryne Jade Taylor, Sherryl Vint, Kirin Wachter-Grene, Ida Yoshinaga.

The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man

The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man
Author: Henri Frankfort
Publisher:
Total Pages: 424
Release: 1946
Genre: History
ISBN:

"An Oriental institute essay.""Contains lectures given as a public course in the Division of the humanities of the University of Chicago."--Pref. Includes bibliographies. Introduction: Myth and reality, by H. and H.A. Frankfort. -- Egypt: The nature of the universe. The function of the state. The values of life. By J.A. Wilson. -- Mesopotamia: The cosmos as a state. The function of the state. The good life. By Thorkild Jacobsen. -- The Hebrews: God. Man. Man in the world. Nation, society, and politics. By W.A. Irwin. Conclusion: The emancipation of thought from myth, by H. and H.A. Frankfort.