a "delightful reader's companion that lights up the literary dark" (The New York Times)
Annotation
Filled with lively essays and a glossary of obscure terms, this unique reference--organized by subject--is a practical and entertaining compendium of information and insight on this time of debtor prisons, bedlam, and that wonderful disease of sense and sensibility, "putrid fever." Illustrations.
Academics who publish regularly must therefore have somehow moved beyond ‘reason’, not in the sense that they have lost their minds, but in the sense that they do not, they say, find their deepest motivation to publish in organizational or political directives; ironically, the scoring systems used to value – and devalue – publications is, for some, the last thing they would think of if you asked them what motivates them to write.
For Harry Fletcher, life on St Mary's Island is good. He has a fine boat and a long list of rich clients eager to charter it for the big game fishing of the Mozambique Channel. He has a home amongst the palms above a white coral beach, and he has friends and pretty girls to share his paradise.
Harry has earned all this the hard way, but now he is at peace. Until suddenly men from the world of violence which he has forsaken so long before arrive on the island to plunge him once more into a deadly game – for an unknown prize against undeclared odds. Of one thing Harry is certain: to fall is to die.
This volume contains seventeen papers on coordinating constructions in languages from different families and different continents (see p.vii for a world map showing the most important languages treated in this book). The definition of the term coordination will be discussed in some detail in §11 below. For the moment we take it for granted that coordinating constructions can be identified on the basis of their symmetry: A construction [A B] is considered coordinate if the two parts A and B have the same status (in some sense that needs to be specified further), whereas it is not coordinate if it is asymmetrical and one of the parts is clearly more salient or important, while the other part is in some sense subordinate.
Minds, Brains and Science takes up just the problems that perplex people, and it does what good philosophy always does: it dispels the illusion caused by the specious collision of truths. How do we reconcile common sense and science? Searle argues vigorously that the truths of common sense and the truths of science are both right and that the only question is how to fit them together.
Searle explains how we can reconcile an intuitive view of ourselves as conscious, free, rational agents with a universe that science tells us consists of mindless physical particles. He briskly and lucidly sets out his arguments against the familiar positions in the philosophy of mind, and details the consequences of his ideas for the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, questions of action and free will, and the philosophy of the social sciences.
