First, note that I have used Zen in the title of this book. I have been asked many times why I used such an esoteric term. After all, what is the meaning of Zen? To clarify the meaning of Zen, we must examine the philosophical environment that gave rise to Zen: Indian and Chinese philosophies. In India, Buddhism arose out of a Hindu...

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent...

Some TIME ago a group of mathematicians and computer scientists (including the editors of this volume) thought of making a scientific pilgrimage to the birthplace of al-Khw&rizmf, the outstanding ninth-century mathematician who gave his name to the word "algorithm". As his name indicates, al-Khwarizmi came from the Khorezm...

Word sense disambiguation is a core research problem in computational linguistics, which was recognized at the beginning of the scientific interest in machine translation and artificial intelligence. And yet no book has been fully devoted to review the wide variety of approaches to solving the problem. The time is right for such a...

Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies―struck by a laundry van―after lunch with the presidential...