Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? This question has preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the a...(展开全部)

Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what "is" the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content? Questions such as these have preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there...(展开全部)

In the spring of 1672, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz arrived in Paris, home of France's two greatest philosopher-theologians of the period, Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas de Malebranche. The meeting of these three men represents a profoundly important moment in the history of philosophical and religious thought. In "The Best of All Possible Worlds"...(展开全部)

Updated and revised to include theoretical and other developments, bibliographical additions, new photographs and illustrations, and expanded name and subject indexes, the fourth edition of All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas is the most complete and comprehensive book of its kind. The text also features a layout and readability that make the material easy to n...(展开全部)

This is the only reference to explore the history of geographic thought, from the ancient Greeks to the present day. It focuses on the differences between pre-Darwin and post-Darwin thinking and the changes that have taken place. Features extensive references, an index of names with brief biographic comments and four new chapters on the new geography of Canada, Sweden, Japan an...(展开全部)

The Logic of Metaphor uses techniques from possible worlds semantics to provide formal truth-conditions for many grammatical classes of metaphors. It gives logically precise and practically useful syntactic and semantic rules for generating and interpreting metaphors. These rules are implemented in a working computer program. This book treats the lexicon as a conceptual network...(展开全部)

Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, when the tremendous pressures exerted by capital on contemporary life produce an aggressively normative ‘official reality’, the question of the construction of other possible worlds is crucial and perhaps more urgent than ever. This collection brings together different perspectives from the fields ...(展开全部)

Even the most enthusiastic of maths students probably at one time wondered when exactly it would all prove useful in ‘real life’. Well, maths reaches so far and wide through our world that, love it or hate it, we’re all doing maths almost every minute of every day. David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee go in search of the perfect labyrinth, journey back to the second century in pur...(展开全部)

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. At first, naive locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat-ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge. Soon the whole of human civilisation is under threat, as powerful Martians bu...(展开全部)