Nicholas Books

...one of the greatest parlor tricks Mother Earth has played on that dominion seeking species, Man, is that once given something perceived as 'precious' Man refuses (or does not know how) to acknowledge how he is a small part of something mammoth....Mother Earth makes us see the glitter but not what it takes to get there. Man is seeing the current incarnation of something open to many, many changes. Earth is a big isolated system--contents of which has so much variety and diversity of all things that it is mind staggering.

So, it is rather intuitive that we have a 'ecological economics' first famously posited by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and currently championed by one of his proteges, Kozo Mayumi. Part of this theory involves a closed systems' tendency towards randomness, entropy. This is mostly manifested in unused energy and irreversible effects. Pollution. That defines this work in its most basic level.

But simple it is not. Most students of thermodynamics know that to be able to solve certain problems of thermodynamics one must know what are the conditions acquired. Are we talking temperature changes, no pressure, time is not a factor, and has the fat lady sang? And so from the theoretical isolated or closed system we have allowed and accounted for the changes. It's quite the same for economic theory (although I am not an economist) it seems. Here is Mayumi's work of the Georgescu-Roegen market models and theoretical approaches on the environment to consumer and vice-versa. Homo oeconomicus is an exosomatic entity which desires more than his grasp--that ain't new. What 'is' new is that this exosomatic ability is available to more folks which may be stretching the limits.

This is not for everybody. It's extensive mathematical modeling and technical language will be better suited reading if you are an economic theorist. But remember if the power brokers start talking about ecological economics, (in the same phrase with, say, global warming) this is the outline for it and Mayumi is it's current day flame bearer.

A war poem in the great tradition of 'Three German Officers Crossed the Rhine'...

If you are a history buff then this is the book for you. It gives you a lot of detail. I plan on getting the other books in this series. It is top notch and a must have for anyone that seriously wants to study history.

I have to admit that this trilogy surprise me a lot, because I'm a fan of Knigths of the Temple, but this book is different, is beyond a simple knigth's tale and make you travel in time around the globe with new characters, with their own personality every one of them, and the thrill has a very good mix with the historical details. This book is for readers that feels the joy of reading, it's not a Nobel Prize, it's fun and entertainment.

Having read Jung's glowing praises of Paracelsus, as well as various accounts of his amazing life, I was very excited to read this book to get a better idea what his actual writings are like. This selection of excerpts is alternately enjoyable and baffling, since Paracelsus was a very complicated thinker with enormous ambitions, and it appears from these excerpts that his reach often exceeds his grasp. He takes an encyclopedic approach to explaining everything about the science of his day as he understood it, completely mingled with his personal theology. The Paracelsian universe is saturated with living and breathing forces, stars influencing everything but in very strange ways that seem to contradict each other, and the inner light of nature leaving signs strewn about everywhere for the enlightened person to interpret. It's rather daunting to read that you really can't just use a particular herb to cure something, because you have to choose the right herb at the right time to fit the current astrological environment as it relates to the person requiring healing. All very heady stuff, and it might be easy to dismiss Paracelsus as a wooly-headed dreamer except for the known historical facts about his rather heroic life, and his reputation for expending great amounts of energy helping the poor.

In summary, the book doesn't (and really couldn't) cover any of the many subjects that concerned Paracelsus in great depth, but it provides a wonderful survey and starting point for additional investigation into this great man's writings.

The title of this review is false.

I love paradoxes. A good paradox is something like an incongruity in the structure of the Matrix, an indication that there's something not quite right about our take on reality. Jorge Luis Borges even took paradoxes as evidence of monistic absolute idealism -- proof that the "undivided divinity operating within us" had "dreamt the world" but left in a few "crevices of unreason" so that we could tell we were dreaming. ("Avatars of the Tortoise," in _Labyrinths_.)

I also love Nicholas Rescher's books, of which he's written many. This one is very, very good.

Every time Rescher writes a book, it seems, he founds (or at least names) a new discipline. This time it's "aporetics," the study of paradoxes and their resolution. (An "apory," Rescher says, is a "group of acceptable-seeming propositions that are collectively inconsistent" [p. 7].)

Rescher studies a _lot_ of paradoxes in this volume. Even if you're interested in it only as a sort of bestiary of paradoxes, you'll be impressed by the sheer number of the things he's managed to include. He's combed the philosophical literature from the present day on back through the European Middle Ages clear to ancient Greece. And I'm willing to bet that he didn't miss any of importance.

But what's actually supposed to be new here is Rescher's method for dealing with paradoxes. So let's chat about that.

First of all, Rescher spends some time discussing the difference between truth and plausibility. His point here is that paradoxes become resoluble if we break them out into propositions, each of which is under consideration as a _candidate_ for truth, but which we can decide to reject if we like. In an aporetic analysis, the propositions in an "aporetic cluster" may have a _presumption_ of acceptability (if they're plausible, which they probably are or we wouldn't have a paradox) but we don't just assume indefeasibly that they're all true.

Now, when we get down to cases, what we do is this: when we encounter a paradox/apory, we break it down into a set of propositions that give rise to the paradox. Then we sort the propositions according to their degrees of plausibility. Then, based on the resulting "retention prioritization," we decide which one(s) to reject. There are some complications here but that's the skinny of it.

How far does this take us? Well, frankly, what it's doing is giving us a useful and organized way to _think_ about paradoxes (which of course is no small thing), but not necessarily a method for actually resolving them.

First, as Rescher himself acknowledges, different people may have different "retention prioritizations" (as in the "Paradox of Evil," p. 31, about which, Rescher says, religious believers and committed atheists would presumably disagree). This fact alone means that in lots of controversial cases, Rescher's method will generate different results for different people.

Second, and arguably more seriously, it's not altogether clear that different people will break a paradox out into exactly the _same_ set of propositions. On the contrary, I would have thought that actually _finding_ this set of propositions would have been a major subdiscipline of aporetics. But Rescher essentially hands us these on a silver platter and tends to presume that there's no question about how to arrive at them.

Third, and probably _most_ seriously, even when we're through with our aporetic analysis, we still may not have satisfactorily resolved our paradox! I'll illustrate with the "Liar Paradox," which Rescher discusses in his tenth chapter.

The "Liar Paradox" arises, of course, from the statement "This statement is false" -- which seems to be true if it's false and false if it's true. Rescher resolves it by breaking it out into a set of propositions that includes this one: "S [the Liar statement] is a semantically meaningful statement -- that is, it is either true or false and not both." His "retention prioritization" concludes that this is the one to reject; the Liar statement must be dismissed as "semantically meaningless" [p. 202].

This is all well and good; at the very least, that proposition is almost undoubtedly the place at which to concentrate one's philosophical fire in an analysis of the Liar Paradox. But does Rescher's analysis really _resolve_ the paradox?

I think it does not. Not all readers would agree (I don't) that "semantically meaningful" is identical in meaning to "either true or false and not both"; indeed, if Rescher had broken _this_ proposition out separately, I might have regarded _it_ as the one to reject.

Which means that the paradox hasn't really gone away. Indeed, the engine that drives it seems to be our very sense that a statement _can_ be semantically meaningful and yet fail to be decisively true or false. For surely the heart of the paradox is precisely that we _can_ tell what the Liar statement means well enough to recognize that it is self-referring and self-undermining (or, in Rescher's marvellous coinage, "self-counterexemplifying" [p. 194]). We may very well have to dismiss it as semantically meaningless after all -- but the paradox hasn't been resolved until we know _why_. Rescher's method, even if fully sound, would tell us only _that_ we should do so.

This isn't a fatal flaw, so long as we don't expect to use Rescher's aporetic analysis for more than it can do. As a method of organizing our thoughts when we sit down to think through a paradox, it's very, very good. It's just not complete (and probably isn't supposed to be) as a method for actually figuring out what makes a paradox tick and what we should do about it.

If you enjoy paradoxes even a tenth as much as I do, you'll like this book.

If you're just starting to investigate the subject, I recommend William Poundstone's _Labyrinths of Reason_ and Mark Sainsbury's _Paradoxes_ as introductory volumes. Eventually you'll also want to get around to Barwise and Etchemendy's book on the Liar Paradox, Raymond Smullyan's books, Douglas Hofstadter's _Goedel, Escher, Bach_, and Rudy Rucker's _Infinity and the Mind_, and a host of others.

If you love playing with gumpaste and pastillage, you will find this book a wonderful resource.

I love this book because of the section on bas relief (projects include a clown, a prairie girl and several others). But he also offers how to do butterflies, hedgehogs, and many other cute ideas in modeling.

Alexander Fullerton is not just a superb writer of tension-packed action stories; he actually served as gunnery and torpedo officer in a Royal Navy submarine during World War II. "Patrol to the Golden Horn" has everything a lover of naval novels could wish for - an exciting plot, lots of action, character development, and so much closely-observed detail that you really feel you are breathing the choking, stinking air of that apparently doomed sub. The Great War has not received as much attention as WWII, especially the war at sea, and Fullerton's "Nicholas Everard" series does much to redress the balance. For my money he is up there with Douglas Reeman and John Winton. His writing is as good as C.S. Forester's; the difference is that Forester, much as he would have liked to, never became a naval officer himself. Having finished this book, you might be disappointed that the experience is over. Good thing, then, that it is part of a series! I plan to read them all.

This new edition of Whitehead's book, which has already become a classic in esoteric/mystical Christianity, will be a delight to students. The formatting and binding are much improved, and lovely CD recordings of the meditations are in a handy pocket in the back. There is also some new material. All who are interested in the living symbolism of the Christian tradition will find this book a valuable and much-consulted resource.

I read this book for a research paper on the Russian Revolution and I must say that it was excellent. The information was self explanatory and concise. It was all around a generally fun book to read. I recomend it to those who are interested in Russian history but who do not like to have to read a book with a dictioary by their side.