In this collection of essays, Stephen Watson turns to the writers who have endured for him; to the places that have formed him; and always to the nature of writing and literature itself. The range is remarkable: he moves from Leonard Cohen to Dante, from Albert Camus to Allen Ginsberg, not excepting Czeslaw Milosz and T.S. Eliot. Closer to home, there are essays on Robben Island and the meaning of the Cedarberg. More personally, movingly, a final section of the book returns to the site of a love affair, the birth of a daughter, and what it is that defines his native city, Cape Town. Whatever Watson touches on, he gives substance to the line from Pasternak that provides this collection with its title: 'the music in the ice'. In Watson's hands the essay form itself becomes an instance of that music. Here is a book that demonstrates again why Justin Cartwright has called Stephen Watson 'South Africa's foremost essayist'.
The “charming and terrifying” story of IBM’s breakthrough in artificial intelligence, from the Business Week technology writer and author of The Numerati (Publishers Weekly, starred review). For centuries, people have dreamed of creating a machine that thinks like a human. Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought—one that doesn’t just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant web page, but understands and communicates with us. With the creation of Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing computer, we are one step closer to that goal. In Final Jeopardy, Stephen Baker traces the arc of Watson’s “life,” from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson’s eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We see how Watson’s breakthroughs and the future of artificial intelligence could transform medicine, law, marketing, and even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses. As fast and fun as the game itself, Final Jeopardy shows how smart machines will fit into our world—and how they’ll disrupt it. “The place to go if you’re really interested in this version of the quest for creating Artificial Intelligence.” —The Seattle Times “Like Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, Baker’s book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It’s an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too.” —Kirkus Reviews “Like a cross between Born Yesterday and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Baker’s narrative is both . . . an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence—and a sobering glimpse of things to come.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Nineteen writers, nineteen views of Cape Town. Each recreate the city that has shaped them, going beyond the iconic picture postcard image of Cape Town. They explore, often with startling honesty, the complex personal relationship that each writer has with the city.
Taking on topics such as the hermeneutics of the self, the rationality of tradition, the pluralistic nature of historical interpretation, and the question of the "other," Watson emphasizes the importance of classical accounts of ethical and political discourse for twentieth-century philosophy and today's multicultural world. Watson extends his analysis of tradition to include the problems of meaning and narrative and the nature of the self. He also considers the meaning of the Good and how Good is dispensed in the world."--Jacket.
This work reveals an evolving theoretical constellation of interpretations and their questions that address and continually renew Klee's rich legacies.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely known for his emphasis on embodied perceptual experience. This emphasis initially relied heavily on the positive results of Gestalt psychology in addressing issues in philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind from a phenomenological standpoint. Eventually he transformed this account in light of his investigations in linguistics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history and institutions. Far less work has been done in addressing his evolving conception of philosophy and how this account influenced more general philosophical issues in epistemology, accounts of rationality, or its status as theoretical discourse. Merleau-Ponty's own contributions to these issues and, in particular, the theoretical status of the phenomenological account that resulted, have provoked varying responses. On the one hand, some commentators have understood his work to be a regional application of Husserl's foundational account of phenomenology. On the other hand, some commentators have questioned whether, in the final analysis, Merleau-Ponty was a phenomenologist at all. In In the Shadow of Phenomenology, Stephen H. Watson offers an in depth analysis of these responses and the complications and development of Merleau-Ponty's position.
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