Imprint Academic
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Unknowable Minds
Philosophical Insights on AI and Autonomous Weapons
Unknowable Minds delves into the unsettling reality of entrusting our safety to an intelligence that lacks human essence. The book explores how AI differs from any technology we've ever developed, its inherent complexities, and the profound risks it poses to our future.
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Politics of Random Selection
Making Good Use of Sortition
Gil Delannoi begins with a general theory of political procedures and its relations with the typology of political regimes. Sortitive democracy is also studied as a third type distinct from the representative and direct types. Sortition is analysed through its main uses, effects, and objectives.
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Ancient Evenings
Nine Pyrrhonian Dialogues
Ancient Evenings is a study of consciousness presented as a series of fictional philosophical dialogues - on good and evil, truth and falsehood, life and death - set at the height of the Roman Empire.
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Against Sortition?
The Problem with Citizens' Assemblies
This book presents the institutionalization of sortition while questioning its political consequences in terms of representation and deliberation. Several examples are used, such as the Citizens' Climate Convention in France and the Conference on the Future of Europe.
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Consciousness and Its Place in Nature
Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism (2nd Ed.)
Galen Strawson has been on the front line of the battlefield on the topic of panpsychism since the 1990s. This new edition of this seminal book (originally published in 2006) contains several new postscripts on the topic of panpsychism, and Strawson's 'realistic monism' in particular.
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Mary Catherine Bateson
Compositions in Living Cybernetics
This collection of essays from authors representing a range of disciplines from anthropology to design to creativity and spirituality, as well as transdisciplinary perspectives that are at the heart of cybernetics, honours Mary Catherine Bateson's life and work.
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Humberto Maturana
Reflections on Bringing Forth Worlds
This volume is grounded in a deep appreciation of the rich and cohesive constellation of ideas developed by Humberto Maturana which, taken as a whole, can be understood as a biocultural matrix of human understanding.
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The Prophets of Doom
The Prophets of Doom explores eleven thinkers who not only dared to contradict the dominant linear and progressive view of history, but also predicted many of the political and social maladies through which we are living.
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Charles, The Alternative King
An Unauthorised Biography
King Charles has entertained a long-standing love affair with alternative medicine. This book describes his passion as it developed during the last 40 years. The King's beliefs, opinions, and ambitions are critically assessed against the background of the scientific evidence. In most instances, the contrast could not be starker.
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The Hope of the Poor
Philosophy, Religion and Economic Development
Is economic development the best hope for the world's poor? This book aims to add a philosophical dimension to the debate about this question. The author argues in favour of replacing quantitative assessments of wealth and poverty with a qualitative account of the ways in which human lives can be enriched or impoverished.
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The Keys to Democracy
Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power
In this distillation of a lifetime's thinking about democracy, Maurice Pope presents a new model of governance that replaces elected politicians with assemblies selected by lot. The re-introduction of sortition, he believes, offers a way out of gridlock, apathy, alienation and polarisation by giving citizens back their voice.
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The Tango of Ethics
Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering
A key paradigm in The Tango of Ethics is the conflict and interplay between two fundamentally different ways of seeing and being in the world — that of the intuitive human being who wants to lead a meaningful life and thrive, and that of the detached, rational agent who wants to prevent unbearable suffering from occurring.
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Is Consciousness Everywhere?
Essays on Panpsychism
This volume, originally a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, uses the recent writings of Philip Goff as a jumping-off point for discussions of panpsychism — the idea that consciousness is a fundamental and pervasive aspect of our universe that cannot be understood in other, more basic, terms.
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The Sentient Robot
The Last Two Hurdles in the Race to Build Artificial Superintelligence
Rupert Robson argues that we are now just two conceptual hurdles away from developing artificial superintelligence. The first of the two hurdles is to embed consciousness in AI, thereby giving us the sentient robot. The second is about the developmental step needed in AI design so as to achieve human-level flexibility in thought.
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Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and the Threat to Academic Freedom
Policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) have increasingly led to the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. Here we put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book.
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Artivism
The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism
Using artist statements, theoretical writings, statistical data, historical analysis and insider testimony, British art critic Alexander Adams examines the origins, aims and spread of artivism (activism through art). His findings suggest the perception of artivism as a grassroots humanitarian movement could not be more misleading.
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The Past is a Future Country
The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution
The Past is a Future Country shows how a resistant class of intelligent, religious conservatives will band together to preserve enclaves of our currently failing civilization — a failing civilization caused by a rejection of traditional values and an epidemic of narcissists who compete to signal their individuality and moral superiority.
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The Architecture of Ideas
The Life and Work of Ranulph Glanville, Cybernetician
This book contains a collection of writings related to the work of Ranulph Glanville. The editor, Bill Seaman, includes a piece titled 'Composing Composing' which explores a number of Glanville's texts. Also included is an interview with Glanville titled 'A Long Conversation', and a text by Aartle Hulstein, Ranulph's wife.
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Character and Virtues
10 Years of the Jubilee Centre
This book captures the key areas of focus of the Jubilee Centre's work over the past ten years. It would be of interest to those who have followed any part of the Jubilee Centre’s journey since 2012, as well as researchers into character and virtues and character educators in schools and universities.
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Rethinking Thinking
Problem Solving from Sun Tzu to Google
Everyone, as the French philosopher René Descartes pointed out long ago, thinks. That's the easy bit. The harder part, and what this book is really about, is how to make your thinking original and effective. The focus here is on practical suggestions about ways to think better.
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Democracy in Crisis
Lessons from Ancient Athens
From the storming of the Capitol and the rise of authoritarian rhetoric and politicians to the challenge of global warming, liberal democracy faces a twin crisis of legitimacy and efficacy. Democracy in Crisis points to long neglected resources from the world's first democracy - Ancient Athens - prompting us to think beyond our current practices.
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Idealism & Experience
The Philosophy of Guido de Ruggiero
Idealism & Experience: The Philosophy of Guido de Ruggiero comprises eight new critical essays, as well as English translations of five of de Ruggiero's most important shorter writings, which chart the development of his thought between 1914 and 1946.
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Dylan at 80
It used to go like that, and now it goes like this
2021 marks Bob Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate's masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age.
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Shadow, Self, Spirit
Essays in Transpersonal Psychology
Transpersonal Psychology concerns the study of those states and processes in which people experience a deeper sense of who they are, or a greater sense of connectedness with others, with nature, or the spiritual dimension. This book brings together the author's writings on the topic over recent years in a new and enlarged edition.
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Identity Politics and Tribalism
The New Culture Wars
This book guides the reader through a journey that connects the dots on the various fronts of the culture wars. There is a thread that links together the expressions of group and identity conflicts in today's West: from Left to Right, from SJWs to Trumpites, from feminism to the manosphere, and from critical race theorists to white nationalists.
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Quality of Life
A Post-Pandemic Philosophy of Medicine
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the need for a fresh look at health and health care. This book offers a philosophical critique of medicine as applied science, but more positively it stresses the social causes of disease and argues for greater equity in the distribution of resources and the benefits of a wider evidence-base for medical treatments.
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Hidden Agender
Transgenderism's Struggle Against Reality
In Hidden Agender, Casey develops a timely and provocative defence of free speech and toleration against the transgenderist ideology that has infiltrated so much of the media, the political establishment and the law. Opposing ideas, not individuals, Hidden Agender provides a compelling critique of the transgender ideologists and trans activists.
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Selfhood, Autism and Thought Insertion
This book, a reprint of a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, highlights some excellent examples of the complex nature of first-person thoughts as they figure in linguistics, autism, thought insertion in schizophrenia, and the phenomenon of mental autonomy.
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Radical Transformation
The Unexpected Interplay of Consciousness and Reality
In Radical Transformation, Imants Barušs leads the reader out of the receding materialist paradigm into an emerging post-materialist landscape in which new questions present themselves. The book contains discussions of meaning, radical transformation, and subtle activism, revealing the unexpected interplay of consciousness and reality.
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The Blind Guardians of Ignorance
Covid-19, Sustainability, and Our Vulnerable Future
Politicians, business leaders, and sustainability experts have assumed that market forces will drive the transformation to sustainability. This book explains in clear language why this view is wrong and what we need to do to prepare for the future of humanity. Governments will have a key role to play in this process, and they need a wake-up call.
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Becoming Artificial
A Philosophical Exploration into Artificial Intelligence and What it Means to be Human
Becoming Artificial is a collection of essays about the nature of humanity, technology, artifice, and the irreducible connections between them. Is there something fundamental to being human or are humans simply biological computers?
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Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History
This book surveys the origins, uses and manifestations of iconoclasm in history, art and public culture. It is one of the first books to examine the outbreak of iconoclasm in Europe and North America in the summer of 2020 in the context of previous outbreaks.
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The Rupture
On Knowledge and the Sublime
This book views the sublime as the radically other, revealing to us our own finitude, and compares it with ideas of negative theology and post-modernism. Fane argues that art and religion attempt to break through the 'hermeneutic circle of knowledge', turning sleepwalkers into people who are alive to an (unknowable) truth.
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The Psychology of the Bible
Explaining Divine Voices and Visions
The Psychology of the Bible explores how the Old Testament provides perspective into the tumultuous transition from an earlier mentality to a new paradigm of interiorized psychology and introspective religiosity that came to characterize the first millennium BCE.
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British Idealism and International Thought
The Development of Human Rights
This book gives a comprehensive account of the British Idealist approach to international relations from the 1880s to 1930s. In an attempt to historically contextualise the shifts in several British Idealists' approaches to the nature of international relations and human rights, it focuses on on the 2nd Boer War, WWI and the League of Nations.
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Don't Believe What You Think
Arguments for and against SCAM
This book discloses the errors and lies that misled you into believing things about so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) that are untrue. It analyses the many falsehoods used in the promotion of SCAM, explains the erroneous thinking behind them, and presents the scientific evidence in easily understandable terms.
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After #MeToo
Feminism, Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity and Sundry Cultural Delights
In After #MeToo, Gerard Casey provides a critical assessment of the #MeToo movement, situating it in the context of the radical feminism of which it is just the latest manifestation. He argues that if there is such a thing as the patriarchy, it is singularly and spectacularly ineffectual.
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Laws of Form: Spencer-Brown at Esalen, 1973
This Special Issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing contains rare material related to G. Spencer-Brown's book Laws of Form and its contents. In 1973 there was a conference at Big Sur at which Spencer-Brown discussed his calculus with a group of scientists. In this issue we print Walter Barney’s transcripts of the conference.
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Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson has attracted a high level of attention. Focusing on Peterson's ideas rather than controversies, this book explores his answers to perennial questions. Champagne unites the different strands of Peterson's thinking in a handy summary and then articulates his main critical concerns.
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Sortition and Democracy
History, Tools, Theories
This book offers a historical analysis of sortition. It brings together a number of the best specialists on political sortition from antiquity to contemporary experiments, in Europe but also in the Ancient Middle East and in imperial China. It demonstrates that sortition has been a crucial device in political history.
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Seeing
Beyond Dreaming to Religious Experiences of Light
After years of lucid dreaming, the author spontaneously experiences a series of religious encounters with intense light which bring an awareness of the presence of God. He describes a number of these encounters in detail. The greater part of the book then presents an analysis of these experiences.
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ZAP
Free Speech and Tolerance in the Light of the Zero Aggression Principle
In ZAP, Gerard Casey presents a critical and unified approach to both free speech and tolerance based on the Zero Aggression Principle, keeping the critical discussion topical and grounded by reference to current events.
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Democracy — A Work in Progress
An Irreverent Exercise in Political Thought
In this personal, and sometimes challenging, work the author argues that an idealised form of political government has been the goal of mankind since Plato himself. But political thinking has always been a theoretical exercise detached from reality. Little consideration was given to the fact that it is flawed humans who must implement these ideas.
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The Life and Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe
This volume in the St Andrews series contains a collection of essays from leading authors regarding the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, in particular issues in mind and metaphysics, and can be considered a partner work to 2016's The Moral Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (also published by Imprint Academic).
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Michael Oakeshott as a Philosopher of the "Creative"
And Other Essays
This book is a collection of eight essays on the work of the twentieth-century English philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott. Six of them advance the view in different ways that Oakeshott's multifarious lifework may be understood as variations on a singular insight — that the structure of experiential reality is 'creative' or 'poetic'.
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Culture War
Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism
In Culture War Alexander Adams examines a series of pressing issues in today's culture: censorship, Islamism, Feminism, identity politics, historical reparations and public arts policy.
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The Nature of Goods and the Goods of Nature
Why anti-globalisation is not the answer
The Nature of Goods and the Goods of Nature unfolds a voyage of awareness that links our everyday experiences with the economic theory of the nature of goods to the goods of nature — human nature, social nature, and the environment — that are essential for all of us in our quest for happiness and prosperity.
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Lady Mary Shepherd
Selected Writings
A collection of works published by Lady Mary Shepherd, brought together in one volume with an introduction by the editor and published as part of the Library of Scottish Philosophy series.
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At Our Wits' End
Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future
We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago, why that may be, and what its consequences might be for the future.
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The Icelandic Adventures of Pike Ward
The Icelandic Adventures of Pike Ward is the entertaining and intrepid diary of a Devon fish merchant who became an Icelandic knight. It is a frank and funny account of one year in his life, from mixing in Reykjavík society to bargaining for fish on the remote coasts of the north and east.
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Immigration Control in a Warming World
Realizing the Moral Challenges of Climate Migration
In the 21st century, climate change is projected to increase the already significant immigration pressures that rich countries in Europe and North America face. However, the willingness of citizens in destination countries to let further foreigners immigrate is unlikely to keep pace with that increase. These issues are discussed in this book.
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The Tribe
The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity
In The Tribe, Ben Cobley guides us around the 'system of diversity' that has resulted from identity politics, exploring the consequences of offering favour and protection to some people but not others based on things like skin colour and gender.
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SCAM
So-Called Alternative Medicine
So-called alternative medicine (SCAM) is popular and therefore important. This book was written by someone who received SCAM as a patient, practised SCAM as a doctor, and researched SCAM as a scientist. It provides an insider's perspective by covering aspects of SCAM which most other books avoid.
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Faking the News
What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump
In Faking the News, eleven prominent rhetoric experts explain how Trump's persuasive language works. The authors explain Trump’s persuasive uses of demagoguery, anti-Semitism, alternative facts, populism, charismatic leadership, social media, television, political slogans, visual identity/image, comedy and humour, and shame and humiliation.
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Laws of Form
Commentary and Remembrance for George Spencer-Brown
This volume is a collection of articles on themes related to the book Laws of Form by George Spencer-Brown.
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A Hospitable Universe
Addressing Ethical and Spiritual Concerns in Light of Recent Scientific Discoveries
This book argues that new developments in the sciences, in particular twentieth-century physics and twenty-first-century biology, suggest revising several pessimistic outlooks for the development of a scientific understanding of the relationship of humans with the universe.
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The Jaynes Legacy
Shining New Light Through the Cracks of the Bicameral Mind
Following on from Jaynes, this book suggests that the evolution of the relationship between consciousnesses, mass, energy, and spacetime radically changed nearly 6,000 years ago during the epigenetic, evolutionary degeneration of a little-known, threadlike structure originating from the center of the central nervous system called Reissner's fiber.
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The 'Other' Psychology of Julian Jaynes
Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities
Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Jaynes, points out the blind spots of mainstream, establishment psychology by providing empirical support for Jaynes's ideas on sociohistorical shifts in cognition. He argues that from around 3500 to 1000 BCE the archaeological and historical record reveals features of hallucinatory super-religiosity.
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Arthur Balfour's Ghosts
An Edwardian Elite and the Riddle of the Cross-Correspondence Automatic Writings
This book tells the incredible story of the cross-correspondence automatic writings, described by one leading scholar of the field, Alan Gauld, 'as undoubtedly the most extensive, the most complex and the most puzzling of all ostensible attempts by deceased persons to manifest purpose...'
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Illusionism
as a theory of consciousness
Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. This book is a reprint of a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted to this topic. It takes the form of a target paper by the editor, followed by commentaries from various thinkers representing various academic disciplines.
Featured Titles
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The Life and Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe
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Idealism & Experience
The Philosophy of Guido de Ruggiero
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Against Sortition?
The Problem with Citizens' Assemblies
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Quality of Life
A Post-Pandemic Philosophy of Medicine
Robin Downie -
Culture War
Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism
Alexander Adams -
Becoming Artificial
A Philosophical Exploration into Artificial Intelligence and What it Means to be Human
Danial Sonik -
The Keys to Democracy
Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power
Maurice Pope -
Lady Mary Shepherd
Selected Writings
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Identity Politics and Tribalism
The New Culture Wars
Nikos Sotirakopoulos -
Michael Oakeshott as a Philosopher of the "Creative"
And Other Essays
Wendell John Coats, Jr.