Author: Kevin P. Keating Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0804169276 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
From a startling new voice in American fiction comes a dark, powerful novel about a tragic city and its inhabitants over the course of one Halloween weekend. Set in a decaying Midwestern urban landscape, with its goings-on and entire atmosphere dominated and charged by one Jesuit prep school and its students, parents, faculty, and alumni, THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS is a window into the human condition. From the opening chapter and its story of the doomed quarterback, Frank McSweeney, aka The Minotaur, for whom prayers prove not enough, to the end, wherein the school's former headmaster is betrayed by his peers in the worst way possible, we see people and their oddness and ambitions laid out bare before us.
Author: António Lobo Antunes Publisher: Grove Press ISBN: 9780802138132 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
"He [the author] draws us into a labyrinth of disparate lives whose connections become clear only gradually ... a diabetic teenage girl in Lisbon, her father, an officer in the pre-revolutionary armey and a secret policeman."--Jacket.
Author: Shaun C. Henson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317915011 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
In God and Natural Order: Physics, Philosophy, and Theology, Shaun Henson brings a theological approach to bear on contemporary scientific and philosophical debates on the ordered or disordered nature of the universe. Henson engages arguments for a unified theory of the laws of nature, a concept with monotheistic metaphysical and theological leanings, alongside the pluralistic viewpoints set out by Nancy Cartwright and other philosophers of science, who contend that the nature of physical reality is intrinsically complex and irreducible to a single unifying theory. Drawing on the work of theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg and his conception of the Trinitarian Christian god, the author argues that a theological line of inquiry can provide a useful framework for examining controversies in physics and the philosophy of science. God and Natural Order will raise provocative questions for theologians, Pannenberg scholars, and researchers working in the intersection of science and religion.
Author: Lawrence Cahoone Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438444176 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
Winner of the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America Reviving and modernizing the tradition of post Darwinian naturalism, The Orders of Nature draws on philosophy and the natural sciences to present a naturalistic theory of reality. Conceiving of nature as systems, processes, and structures that exhibit diverse properties that can be hierarchically arranged, Lawrence Cahoone sketches a systematic metaphysics based on the following orders of nature: physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural. Using recent work in the science of complexity, hierarchical systems theory, and nonfoundational approaches to metaphysics, Cahoone analyzes these orders with explanations of the underlying science, covering a range of topics that includes general relativity and quantum field theory; chemistry and inorganic complexity; biology and telenomic explanation, or "purpose"; the theory of mind and mental causation as an animal phenomenon; and the human mind's unique cultural abilities. The book concludes with an exploration of what answers such a theory of naturalism can provide to questions about values and God.
Author: Brian Francis Publisher: Anchor Canada ISBN: 0385671555 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Joyce Sparks has lived the whole of her 86 years in the small community of Balsden, Ontario. As a girl, Joyce allowed herself to imagine a future of adventure in the arms of her friend Freddy Pender, whose chin bore a Kirk Douglas cleft and who danced the cha-cha divinely. Though troubled by the whispered assertions of her sister and friends that he wasn't 'normal,' Joyce adored Freddy for all that was un-Balsden in his flamboyant ways. When Freddy led the homecoming parade down the main street, his expertly twirled baton and outrageous white suit gleaming in the sun, Joyce fell head over heels in unrequited love. Years later, Joyce married Charlie, who was nothing like Freddy, and bore a son who very much reminded her of Freddy. Tragic news of her childhood love arrived and Joyce was forced to face how far she should to go to protect the fate and life of her son and the implications her decision had. Today, as her life ebbs away in the bed at Chestnut Park Nursing Home, Joyce ponders the terrible choices she made as a mother and wife and doubts that she can be forgiven, or that she deserves to be. When a young nursing home volunteer named Timothy appears, so much like her long lost son, Joyce wonders if there be some grace in her life after all. Voiced by an unforgettable and heartbreakingly flawed narrator, Natural Order is a masterpiece of empathy, a wry and tender depiction of the end-of-life remembrances and reconciliations that one might undertake when there is nothing more to lose, and no time to waste.
Author: Edward Allen Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198036663 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
Illustrated with hundreds of illuminating line drawings, this classic guide reveals virtually every secret of a building's function: how it stands up, keeps its occupants safe and comfortable, gets built, grows old, and dies--and why some buildings do this so much better than others. Drawing on things he's learned from the many buildings he himself designed (and in some cases built with his own hands), Edward Allen explains complex phenomena such as the role of the sun in heating buildings and the range of structural devices that are used for support, from trusses and bearing walls to post-tensioned concrete beams and corbeled vaults. He stresses the importance of intelligent design in dealing with such problems as overheating and overcooling, excessive energy use, leaky roofs and windows, fire safety, and noisy interiors. He serves up some surprises: thermal insulation is generally a better investment than solar collectors; board fences are not effective noise barriers; there's one type of window that can be left open during a rainstorm. The new edition emphasizes "green" architecture and eco-conscious design and construction. It features a prologue on sustainable construction, and includes new information on topics such as the collapse of the World Trade Center, sick building syndrome, and EIFS failures and how they could have been prevented. Allen also highlights the array of amazing new building materials now available, such as self-cleaning glass, photovoltaics, transparent ceramics, cloud gel, and super-high-strength concrete and structural fibers. Edward Allen makes it easy for everyone--from armchair architects and sidewalk superintendents to students of architecture and construction--to understand the mysteries and complexities of even the largest building, from how it recycles waste and controls the movement of air, to how it is kept alive and growing.
Author: Eric Watkins Publisher: ISBN: 0199934401 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
This volume contains ten new essays focused on the exploration and articulation of a narrative that considers the notion of order within medieval and modern philosophy—its various kinds (natural, moral, divine, and human), the different ways in which each is conceived, and the diverse dependency relations that are thought to obtain among them. Descartes, with the help of others, brought about an important shift in what was understood by the order of nature by placing laws of nature at the foundation of his natural philosophy. Vigorous debate then ensued about the proper formulation of the laws of nature and the moral law, about whether such laws can be justified, and if so, how-through some aspect of the divine order or through human beings-and about what consequences these laws have for human beings and the moral and divine orders. That is, philosophers of the period were thinking through what the order of nature consists in and how to understand its relations to the divine, human, and moral orders. No two major philosophers in the modern period took exactly the same stance on these issues, but these issues are clearly central to their thought. The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature is devoted to investigating their positions from a vantage point that has the potential to combine metaphysical, epistemological, scientific, and moral considerations into a single narrative.
Author: Asger Jorn Publisher: Routledge ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
In The Natural Order and Other Texts, Peter Shield presents the first English translations of the artist Asger Jorn's three philosophical texts - The Natural Order, Value and Economy and Luck and Chance. Offering a unique insight into an artist's attempt to make sense of a contemporary world which would accommodate his practice, these texts present an important contribution to aesthetics for modern art and an attempt at philosophical reconciliation of modern science and modern art. In 1961 Jorn resigned from the Situationist International and took the ideas of thinkers in many fields and amalgamated them into 'the first complete revision of the existing philosophical system' from the point of view of an artist. He developed a theory of artistic value and the place of the creative elite and adapted his previous ideas of extreme aesthetics to fit into this 'natural order'. Including a comprehensive introduction, Peter Shield's translations of Asger Jorn's classic texts offer invaluable new perspectives to readers crossing the boundaries of philosophy, art history and theory, and cultural studies. Peter Shield is an art historian, whose book Comparative Vandalism on these and other works by Jorn is also published by Ashgate.
Author: Lorraine Daston Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262353814 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 88
Book Description
A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders. In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder. Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.
Author: Kevin P. Keating
Author: António Lobo Antunes
Author: Shaun C. Henson
Author: Lawrence Cahoone
Author: Brian Francis
Author: Lucas Foglia
Author: Edward Allen
Author: Eric Watkins
Author: Asger Jorn
Author: Lorraine Daston