How do we know that the earth travels around the sun, the universe is billions of years old, and stars are trillions of miles away? Rocky Kolb tells the fascinating story of the people and ideas that have brought us such knowledge of our planet and the universe, giving realistic portraits of astronomers like Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Herschel and Hubble. Beginning in 1572 with Tycho's discovery that the heavens can change and ending with the Big Bang of the 20th Century, this is a hugely entertaining and witty account of the quest to discover the universe.
The Early Universe has become the standard reference on forefront topics in cosmology, particularly to the early history of the Universe. Subjects covered include primordial nubleosynthesis, baryogenesis, phases transitions, inflation, dark matter, and galaxy formation, relics such as axions, neutrinos and monopoles, and speculations about the Universe at the Planck time. The book includes more than ninety figures as well as a five-page update discussing recent developments such as the COBE results.
Since the first appearance of Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare's drama in 1765, its Preface has often been published separately, while the Notes have been treated as miscellaneous and fragmentary. As a result, few modern readers realize that the Notes in fact contain coherent interpretations of most of the plays and that many portions of the Preface are generalizations related to those readings. Scholars who have examined the Notes carefully have almost always used them in studies of larger issues, such as Johnson's morality or rhetoric. In this book, Edward Tomarken provides the first full-length study of the Notes to Shakespeare, showing how they raise issues of direct concern to modern critics and theoreticians. While referring to Johnson's notes on all the Shakespearean dramas, Tomarken focuses on eight plays--Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Tempest, Hamlet, and Macbeth--to demonstrate the range of Johnson's editorial and critical abilities. Each chapter, devoted to a single play, moves from the particular to the general-from specific remarks about the play in the Notes, to related theoretical statements in the Preface, and finally to an axiom of literary theory. Ranging from a formulation concerning ideology in criticism to a reconsideration of aesthetic empathy, these axioms are, Tomarken contends, essential to literary criticism as a discipline and manifest Johnson's relevance to modern criticism. The conception of criticism that emerges in this book goes well beyond the theoretical premises of the eighteenth century. Tomarken submits that the ethical dimension of criticism-the moral aspect so fundamental to Johnson but so foreign to modern critics-can point to a way of mediating between the ideological differences that have become so divisive in modern criticism and theory.
An Introduction to Sociology presents the theoretical approaches, the methods of inquiry, and the concepts with which sociologists attempt to order the intricate phenomena of social interaction. This book provides an illustration of particular investigations that may provide some insights into substantive features of society and social behavior. Organized into six chapters, this book starts with an overview of scientific proposition, which is the statement of a relationship between specified properties of events and objects. This text then explains the fundamental concepts that appear in the empirical and theoretical writings of sociologists. Other chapters present a discussion of what sociologists actually study, which includes the substantive areas of investigation and the aims of the investigation. This book discusses as well the institutionalized areas of society, including the family, the economy, and the polity. The final chapter deals with the theories of the middle-range. This book is a valuable resource for sociologists.
An insightful look at the philosophy of language. Philosophers have traditionally approached questions of meaning as part of the philosophy of language. In this book David Cooper broadens the analysis beyond linguistic meaning to offer an account of meaning in general. He shows that not only words, sentences, and utterances in the linguistic domain can be described as meaningful but also items in such domains as art, ceremony, social action, and bodily gesture. Unlike much of the recent work in the philosophy of meaning, Cooper is not concerned with trying to develop a theory of (linguistic) meaning but with examining the meaning of meaning through an overview of the behaviour and scope of meaning and its cognates, addressing questions about the import, function, and status of meaning. This fuller account of meaning not only addresses questions of the meaning of meaning but also the issues or problems that answers to those questions generate, such as, Is meaning just a misleading folk term for something more basic, such as the causal conditions governing the production of certain noises and movements? Is meaning something that we should strive for or should we let our lives just be, rather than mean? By taking the problem of meaning out of the technical philosophy of language and providing a more general account Cooper is able to offer new insights into the meaning of meaning that will be of interest not only to philosophers of language but to philosophers working in other areas, such as epistemology and metaphysics.
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