Man-Eaters of Kumaon is a book written by hunter-naturalist Jim Corbett. It details the experiences Corbett had in the Kumaon region of India in the 1920s and 1930s, while hunting man-eating tigers and leopards. One tiger, for example, was responsible for over 400 human deaths. Man-Eaters of Kumaon is the best known of Corbett's books and contains 10 stories of tracking and shooting man-eaters in the Indian Himalayas during the early years of the twentieth century. The text also contains incidental information on flora, fauna and village life. The book was later turned into a film, Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948). (Ref. Wikipedia)
TTC - Philosophy as a Guide to Living (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture) Course No. 4244
Taught by Stephen A. Erickson Pomona College Ph.D., Yale University
Is there meaning in human life?
All of us have asked ourselves this question. But for philosophers through the ages, it was the first question of many, for they needed to know whether such a question was even answerable by philosophy. And if it was, they needed to ask whether any positive answer could be pursued through the practice of philosophy itself.
Today, these questions remain as timely and controversial as ever.
In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over mental representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding.
The Semantics of Science proposes a radical new rethinking of science and scientific discourse. Roy Harris argues that supercategories such as science, art, religion and history are themselves verbal constructs, and thus language-dependent. Because each supercategory is constructed differently, it is necessary to pay attention to the linguistic process by which a discourse such as 'science' has developed. Through this view it is possible to observe that the function of the supercategory is to integrate what would otherwise be separate activities and enquiries, and the result of this integration is therefore a re-drawing of the intellectual world that society as a whole adopts.
The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles, but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy, as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words.