This volume features a collection of essays on consciousness, which has become one of the hot topics at the crossroads between neuroscience, philosophy, and religious studies. Is consciousness something the brain produces? How can we study it? Is there just one type of consciousness or are there different states that can be discriminated? Are...

Jan Narveson is one of the most significant contemporary defenders of the libertarian political position. Unlike other libertarians who typically defend their view with reference to natural rights or an appeal to utilitarianism, Narveson's main contribution has been to offer a philosophical defence of libertarianism based on a Hobbesian...

Since the origin of the modern sciences, our views on discovery and creativity had a remarkable history. Originally, discovery was seen as an integral part of methodology and the logic of discovery as algorithmic or nearly algorithmic. During the nineteenth century, conceptions in line with romanticism led to the famous opposition between the...

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...

This new edition of the widely read Evolution in Four Dimensions has been revised to reflect the spate of new discoveries in biology since the book was first published in 2005, offering corrections, an updated bibliography, and a substantial new chapter. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb's pioneering argument proposes that there is more...