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In Deciphering Reality: Simulations, Tests, and Designs, Benjamin B. Olshin offers a series of essays that examine the detection of computer simulations, challenge visual models of reality, explore Daoist conceptions of reality, and present possible future directions for deciphering reality.
Lost Knowledge: The Concept of Vanished Technologies and Other Human Histories examines the idea of lost knowledge, reaching back to a period between myth and history. It investigates a peculiar idea found in a number of early texts: that there were civilizations with knowledge of sophisticated technologies, and that this knowledge was obscured or destroyed over time along with the civilization that had created it. This book presents critical studies of a series of early Chinese, South Asian, and other texts that look at the idea of specific “lost” technologies, such as mechanical flight and the transmission of images. There is also an examination of why concepts of a vanished “golden age” were prevalent in so many cultures. Offering an engaging and investigative look at the propagation of history and myth in technology and culture, this book is sure to interest historians and readers from many backgrounds.
This book follows ideas and knowledge that migrated in the cultural baggage of Austrian refugees, who fled to Australia in 1938 and 1939 because of National Socialism. By telling and comparing the stories of twenty-six different lives, it highlights the processes of acquisition, transportation, translation, and adaption of ideas, knowledge, and cultural capital. This provides a unique and colourful insight into the impact of a group of refugees on their host society over several decades. As the book shows, there were many different ways in which displaced people relied upon their social and cultural capital to first escape their oppressive homeland and then build new lives. Once they had arrived in Australia, they used very different approaches to negotiate and promote their knowledge and to exercise agency.
Explores the coevolution of Absolute idealist philosophy and British fiction from the Romantic period forward. Absolute Fiction examines the principal form of idealism in the modern period, Absolute idealism, which posits that mind and matter must be understood in relation to all of reality-the universe, the Absolute. This premise was variously articulated by philosophers and writers from Germany, Britain, India, and beyond. Absolute Fiction traces a genealogy from the creative adoption of Hinduism and German Idealism by Coleridge and Carlyle to Aldous Huxley's novelization of Advaita Vedānta. Justin Prystash argues that canonical figures, such as Hegel and George Eliot, as well as overlook...
This revealing analysis of Medieval cartography and native American travel upends conventional narratives about discovering the New World. For generations, American schools have taught children that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. But evidence shows that Leif Erikson set foot on the continent centuries earlier. As debate continues over which explorer deserves the credit, early maps of North America suggest that we may be asking the wrong questions. How did medieval Europeans have such specific geographic knowledge of North America, a land even their most daring adventurers had not yet discovered? In Erikson, Eskimos, and Columbus, James Robert Enterline presents new evidence that traces this knowledge to the cartographic skills of indigenous people of the high Arctic, who, he contends, provided the basis for medieval maps of large parts of North America. Drawing on an exhaustive chronological survey of pre-Columbian maps, including the controversial Yale Vinland Map, this book boldly challenges conventional accounts of Europe's discovery of the New World.
Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art defines a new cartographic aesthetic, or what Simonetta Moro calls carto-aesthetics, as a key to interpreting specific phenomena in modern and contemporary art, through the concept of poetic cartography. The problem of mapping, although indebted to the "spatial turn" of poststructuralist philosophy, is reconstructed as hermeneutics, while exposing the nexus between topology, space-time, and memory. The book posits that the emergence of "mapping" as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art can be attributed to the power of the cartographic model to constitute multiple worldviews that can be seen as paradigmatic of the post-modern and contemporary condition. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art theory, aesthetics, and cartography.
This encyclopedia offers an interdisciplinary approach to studying science and technology within the context of world history. With balanced coverage, a logical organization, and in-depth entries, readers of all inclinations will find useful and interesting information in its contents. Science and Technology in World History takes a truly global approach to the subjects of science and technology and spans the entirety of recorded human history. Topical articles and entries on the subjects are arranged under thematic categories, which are divided further into chronological periods. This format, along with the encyclopedia's integrative approach, offers an array of perspectives that collective...
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Covering all aspects of global exploration, from Antarctica to the North Pole, The Oxford Companion to World Exploration examines the lives and expeditions of heroic and influential explorers. This coverage includes biographies, including Lewis and Clark, Ferdinand Magellan, Cheng Ho, Hernán Cortés, Ibn Battuta, Vitus Bering, and Christopher Columbus; national expeditions, including Portuguese, British, French, Chinese, Dutch, and Spanish; and navigational and marine sciences, such as navigational techniques, ancient and medieval navigation, ocean currents and winds, longitude, cartography, and aerial surveys. The Companion's temporal scope ranges from the ancient cultures of Egypt, Persia...