The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History PDF Download

Author: Philip McShane
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 0978094581
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

View

Book Description
This book intimates the movement of theology into respectable companionship with the general explanatory drive of the mature sciences. At the same time it is an invitation to seed a strange effective Han Dynasty of the well of loneliness. The first brief Han Dynasty in China (206 BCE - 220 CE), spanned the Galilean time of Jesus. The new permanent Han Dynasty of global care is to be slowly and patiently weaved round the minding of the Wholly Frail that is the Unknown Real Jesus of the symphony of history.

Author: Philip McShane
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 1988457041
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

View

Book Description
The book is an invitation to a chemical revolution, one that lifts us towards the positive Anthropocene, leaving behind the sick killing and dying days of the negative Anthropocene so neatly identified in 1940 by Charlie Chaplin at the conclusion of The Great Dictator: “Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.” For those familiar with Lonergan’s book, Method in Theology, The Future aims at a new, creative reading. The author’s central message is to focus on theology ASAFACT—to come to our senses and ASsemble our AFfirmed ACTing to change history. Assembly includes self-assembly, an assembly of a piece of a lonely cosmic chemistry, a supermolecule whose reality in history is weaved round a complex W-enzyme.

Author: Philip McShane
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 1988457068
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

View

Book Description
McShane's broad interest is in finding a full effective cultural basis of a future humanity. In The Future: Core Precepts in Supramolecular Method and Nanochemistry (2019), he expressed what he considers the effective road forward. The present book enlarges on that reach. The effective road involves a clear operative distinction between the negative Anthropocene, in which we presently live shabbily and destructively, and the positive Anthropocene towards which we must work slowly and democratically, against empires of idiocy, by tuning into the chemistry of our desires. This little book moves along with many twists and turns, but it is also a straightforward help to begin to read properly the two main treatments by Lonergan of the topic of Interpretation: Section 3 of chapter 17 of Insight, and chapter 7 of Method in Theology.

Author: Philip McShane
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 1988457025
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184

View

Book Description
The present state of economics is a very fixed culture of one-flow analysis, symbolized in the culture by talk of GDP. Lonergan’s breakthrough was to identify, after a more than a decade of historical and theoretic work, the historical reality and scientific identity of two flows. So, very simply, where Newton leaped from 2 to 1, Lonergan leaped from 1 to 2. The operable heuristic comes from a clear leap, e.g., from viewing economic output as GDP to arrive at an empirically defined GDP' and GDP", where the single prime points to consumer goods and the double prime points to producer goods. The leap seems simple but it requires very precise thinking about the relations between the two economic flows, a relation that, when not understood and controlled, gives rise to the booms and slumps named and studied by Kondratieff, Juglar, Kitchin, Schumpeter, and later authors. Why should a reader buy this book? It offers a long-term optimistic view of how transformations of the current mess in pseudo-economics—whether in the form of abusive textbooks and well-intentioned abusive teachers, or in the form of the daily “business news,” which has more to do with gambling than business—will lead to a just and shared greatness way beyond current proclamations about America being or becoming great. The Preface to the 3rd edition adds a key simple exercise that can get the reader right into the ball-park of the new economics. The first two chapters should bring a serious reader to the startling conviction that we have been trapped in an alchemy of money for centuries.

Author: Philip McShane
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 1988457106
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

View

Book Description
There is a growing interest in the character and the challenge of the Anthropocene. Although efforts to pin down beginning dates of this epoch have been debated, there is a broad consensus that humanity is facing an unprecedented challenge to surviving on Earth, a challenge which humans have created ourselves. Undeniably, we have had and continue to have impacts on the planet as a whole. These include ravaging bushfires and unprecedented flooding caused by climate change, spiking levels of carbon dioxide levels, and widespread loss of biodiversity. The challenge has been expressed in various ways: the larger challenges of climate change or ocean garbage toxicity, the subtler challenges that would support such large efforts by cultivating a new aesthetic. The present book asks of us to reach for the deeper grounding of all such efforts. Perhaps that asking is best hinted at by pluralizing the word character in a paradoxical non-question: “What is to be the 'character' of the characters transforming the Anthropocene from its present negativity to a positive period of human flourishing.” What is missing, what we are in the dark about, is the apparently simple turn that would have us asking, “What’s what?” The focus must be concrete: so we are to think of miners and farmers and reformers and economists and educators, but primarily of ourselves as whats. Might we begin the positive Anthropocene’s success by beginning to sow what comprehendingly?

Author: Philip McShane
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 1988457084
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

View

Book Description
In Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence, McShane illustrates how classical and statistical procedures complement one another. One of the conclusions he draws in Randomness is that emergence and evolution are explained in terms of probabilities of emergence and probabilities of survival of recurrence-schemes. To arrive at a principle of emergence, McShane focuses on actual procedures of empirical investigators and the type of explanation they seek. Those doing the relevant sciences—biophysics and biochemistry are his focus in the last four chapters—can verify objective randomness and emergence by attending to their performance. McShane also makes beginnings in heuristics of biological and scientific growth and development. The first edition of this book was first published in 1970. The second edition includes a second preface, “The Riverrun to God,” written by McShane in the fall of 2012. It also includes an editor’s introduction written by Terrance Quinn, author of Invitation to Generalized Empirical Method in Philosophy and Science and The (Pre-) Dawning of Functional Specialization in Physics.

Author: Robert Henman
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 097809459X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 78

View

Book Description
The three articles printed here point towards the need for a form of collaboration that is presently inoperative in neuroscience and is not functioning in the current sciences at all. The New Science is a division of labor and tasks that has the potential to increase the probabilities of cumulative and progressive results.

Author: Cathal Nolan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199910995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 701

View

Book Description
History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Cannae, Konigsberg, Austerlitz, Midway, Agincourt-all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But these legendary battles may or may not have determined the final outcome of the wars in which they were fought. Nor has the "genius" of the so-called Great Captains - from Alexander the Great to Frederick the Great and Napoleon - play a major role. Wars are decided in other ways. Cathal J. Nolan's The Allure of Battle systematically and engrossingly examines the great battles, tracing what he calls "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and wars brief. As he proves persuasively, however, such has almost never been the case. Even the major engagements have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating the erosion of the other side's defences. Massive conflicts, the so-called "people's wars," beginning with Napoleon and continuing until 1945, have consisted of and been determined by prolonged stalemate and attrition, industrial wars in which the determining factor has been not military but matériel. Nolan's masterful book places battles squarely and mercilessly within the context of the wider conflict in which they took place. In the process it help corrects a distorted view of battle's role in war, replacing popular images of the "battles of annihilation" with somber appreciation of the commitments and human sacrifices made throughout centuries of war particularly among the Great Powers. Accessible, provocative, exhaustive, and illuminating, The Allure of Battle will spark fresh debate about the history and conduct of warfare.

Author: Patrick Brown
Publisher: Axial Publishing
ISBN: 1988457009
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

View

Book Description
Seeding Global Collaboration presents essays written for “Functional Collaboration in the Academy,” a conference held at the University of British Columbia, in July, 2014. The essays attempt to explore and advance Bernard Lonergan’s central achievement, a revolutionary method for collaborative inquiry relevant to both the natural sciences and the human sciences. Each essay is an exercise focusing on a specific collaborative task in a particular area of interest. These range from research in neuroscience to interpreting space and time, from forging new housing policies and communicating macroeconomic dynamics to performing distinct collaborative tasks as part of a unified process of caring for ecosystems. The essays attempt to illustrate the power of the method. But they also seek to seed a new ethos of efficient collaboration and effective meaning. Functional collaboration amounts to a novum organon for scientific and academic inquiry, one potentially capable of meeting the daunting problems and global challenges of our time.

Author: Cathal Nolan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199874654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 729

View

Book Description
History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Cannae, Konigsberg, Austerlitz, Midway, Agincourt-all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But these legendary battles may or may not have determined the final outcome of the wars in which they were fought. Nor has the "genius" of the so-called Great Captains - from Alexander the Great to Frederick the Great and Napoleon - play a major role. Wars are decided in other ways. Cathal J. Nolan's The Allure of Battle systematically and engrossingly examines the great battles, tracing what he calls "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and wars brief. As he proves persuasively, however, such has almost never been the case. Even the major engagements have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating the erosion of the other side's defences. Massive conflicts, the so-called "people's wars," beginning with Napoleon and continuing until 1945, have consisted of and been determined by prolonged stalemate and attrition, industrial wars in which the determining factor has been not military but matériel. Nolan's masterful book places battles squarely and mercilessly within the context of the wider conflict in which they took place. In the process it help corrects a distorted view of battle's role in war, replacing popular images of the "battles of annihilation" with somber appreciation of the commitments and human sacrifices made throughout centuries of war particularly among the Great Powers. Accessible, provocative, exhaustive, and illuminating, The Allure of Battle will spark fresh debate about the history and conduct of warfare.