Following the success of his book My Part of the Day, first published in 1981, Peter Byrne's second collection of stories, From the Press Box, provides fitting testimony to the most successful era in the history of Irish sport. From Gaelic Games and rugby to football and athletics, this book straddles the broad spectrum of sport as Byrne renews acquaintances with many of the personalities and places he got to know in a long career in search of the big story. A treasure trove of memories, recalled in a style to recreate the marvel of the moment, will ensure endless hours of enjoyment for both dedicated sports lovers and those who have monitored the outstanding achievements of Irish men and women from afar.
Peter Byrne presents a detailed study of the role of the concept of God in Kant's Critical Philosophy. After a preliminary survey of the major interpretative disputes over the understanding of Kant on God, Byrne explores his critique of philosophical proofs of God’s existence. Examining Kant’s account of religious language, Byrne highlights both the realist and anti-realist elements contained within it. The notion of the highest good is then explored, with its constituent elements - happiness and virtue, in pursuit of an assessment of how far Kant establishes that we must posit God. The precise role God plays in ethics according to Kant is then examined, along with the definition of religion as the recognition of duties as divine commands. Byrne also plots Kant’s critical re-working of the concept of grace. The book closes with a survey of the relation between the Critical Philosophy and Christianity on the one hand and deism on the other.
Peter Byrne tells the story of Hugh Everett III (1930-1982), whose "many worlds" theory of multiple universes has had a profound impact on physics and philosophy. Using Everett's unpublished papers (recently discovered in his son's basement) and dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, and surviving family members, Byrne paints, for the general reader, a detailed portrait of the genius who invented an astonishing way of describing our complex universe from the inside. Everett's mathematical model (called the "universal wave function") treats all possible events as "equally real", and concludes that countless copies of every person and thing exist in all possible configurations spread over an infinity of universes: many worlds. Afflicted by depression and addictions, Everett strove to bring rational order to the professional realms in which he played historically significant roles. In addition to his famous interpretation of quantum mechanics, Everett wrote a classic paper in game theory; created computer algorithms that revolutionized military operations research; and performed pioneering work in artificial intelligence for top secret government projects. He wrote the original software for targeting cities in a nuclear hot war; and he was one of the first scientists to recognize the danger of nuclear winter. As a Cold Warrior, he designed logical systems that modeled "rational" human and machine behaviors, and yet he was largely oblivious to the emotional damage his irrational personal behavior inflicted upon his family, lovers, and business partners. He died young, but left behind a fascinating record of his life, including correspondence with such philosophically inclined physicists as Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and John Wheeler. These remarkable letters illuminate the long and often bitter struggle to explain the paradox of measurement at the heart of quantum physics. In recent years, Everett's solution to this mysterious problem - the existence of a universe of universes - has gained considerable traction in scientific circles, not as science fiction, but as an explanation of physical reality.
Peter Byrne’s study of God and realism offers a critical survey of issues surrounding the realist interpretation of theism and theology. Byrne presents a general argument for interpreting the intent of talk about God in a realist fashion and argues that judging the intent of theistic discourse should be the primary object of concern in the philosophy of religion. He considers a number of important ideas and thinkers supporting global anti-realism, and finds them all wanting. After the refutation of global anti-realism, Byrne considers a number of important arguments in favour of the notion that there is something specific to talk about God which invites an anti-realist interpretation of it. Here he looks at verificationism, the writings of Don Cupitt, forms of radical feminist theory and the ideas of D.Z. Phillips. The book concludes with a discussion of whether theology as a discursive, academic discipline can be interpreted realistically. Offering a comprehensive survey of the topic and of the leading literature in the field, this book presents key arguments for exploring issues brought to bear upon the realism debate. Students and scholars of philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, metaphysics, theory of knowledge and theology, will find this an invaluable new contribution to the field.
This study is an introduction to the problems of moral philosophy designed particularly for students of theology and religious studies. It offers an account of the nature and subject matter of moral reasoning and of the major types of moral theory current in contemporary moral philosophy. The account aims to bring out the major issues in moral theory, to present a clear, non-technical articulation of the structure of moral knowledge and to explore the relation between religious belief and morality.
This book examines a range of important conceptual, ethical, social, and religious issues arising from mental handicap. It contains a vigorous defense of the contention that mentally handicapped human beings are persons. It attacks both the contemporary philosophical attempts to dismiss the personhood of mentally handicapped people and the genocidal policies which those attempts suggest. It explores the logic of the attitudes which have lead to the marginalization and oppression of the mentally handicapped.
Peter Byrne has led the life most of us can only dream about. After WW II he returned to Ireland, but being restless, he decided to find a job that would take him to exotic lands. Using his family's connections, he was hired as a manager on a huge Indian tea plantation in the Himalayan foothills--a posh job that came with 17 servants and a mansion. Almost immediately on arrival he was plunged into Indian jungle hunting, his primary love, when the local villagers turned to him with a plea to eliminate a rogue boar. Read his exciting description of how he jumped from a tree and sliced the boar's skull in two while half the adult males of the village stayed in the trees to watch and cheer him on. Share his many adventures in India with tiger, elephant, and leopard, and see how a fortuitous championing of a member of the ruling elite of Nepal during a bar brawl prompted Peter to move to Nepal and become a professional hunter there. Move with him to Nepal where he was, for years, the only authorized professional hunter to operate in that country. In the unspoiled wilderness of the White Grass Plains area of Nepal, where there were virtually no roads and the natives did not even know the name of the capital of the country, he hunted tiger right up till the close of tiger hunting in 1969. Follow his exploits in the Terai (forested southlands of Nepal) where he encountered a man-eater . . . that was eventually killed by a train! This is the true-life story about a time that now is completely gone--a time when virtually no cars were seen in the remote areas of India and Nepal, a time when tiger, gaur, leopard, sambar, and many other jungle denizens were plentiful beyond description. Those days are truly gone. Foreword by Charlton Heston.
Hugh Everett III was an American physicist best known for his many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which formed the basis of his PhD thesis at Princeton University in 1957. Although counterintuitive, Everett's revolutionary formulation of quantum mechanics offers the most direct solution to the infamous quantum measurement problem--that is, how and why the singular world of our experience emerges from the multiplicities of alternatives available in the quantum world. The many-worlds interpretation postulates the existence of multiple universes. Whenever a measurement-like interaction occurs, the universe branches into relative states, one for each possible outcome of the measurement, and the world in which we find ourselves is but one of these many, but equally real, possibilities. Everett's challenge to the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics was met with scorn from Niels Bohr and other leading physicists, and Everett subsequently abandoned academia to conduct military operations research. Today, however, Everett's formulation of quantum mechanics is widely recognized as one of the most controversial but promising physical theories of the last century. In this book, Jeffrey Barrett and Peter Byrne present the long and short versions of Everett's thesis along with a collection of his explanatory writings and correspondence. These primary source documents, many of them newly discovered and most unpublished until now, reveal how Everett's thinking evolved from his days as a graduate student to his untimely death in 1982. This definitive volume also features Barrett and Byrne's introductory essays, notes, and commentary that put Everett's extraordinary theory into historical and scientific perspective and discuss the puzzles that still remain.
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