A critical and provocative exploration of the political, conceptual and cultural points of resonance between Deleuze's minor politics and Marx's critique of capitalist dynamics, Deleuze, Marx and Politics is the first book to engage with Deleuze's missing work, The Grandeur of Marx.
I consider Robert Heinlein's most fascinating novel to be his prescriptive utopia Beyond This Horizon. (A prescriptive utopia is where an author "prescribes" what he or she believes a better civilization would look like.) While Heinlein did opine, extensively, about society in many books, from Starship Troopers to Glory Road, it is in Beyond This Horizon (BTH) that you'll find him clearly stating This Is The Way Things Ought To Be. And it turns out to be a fascinating, surprisingly nuanced view of our potential future.
"After so many years, and so many lists, you might think the task of choosing the 10 Best Books would get easier. If only. The sublime story collections alone created agonies of indecision. So did the superb literary biographies we read - and deeply admired. But in the end the decisions had to be made."
The founder of Palm, Jeff Hawkins, solves the mystery of Artificial Intelligence and presents his theory at the RSA Conference 2008. He gives a brief tutorial on the neocortex and then explains how the brain stores memory and then describes how to use that knowledge to create artificial intelligence. This lecture is insightful and his theory will revolutionize computer science.
WASHINGTON -- These days, when we think of George W. Bush, we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy is the loss of our moral authority, and the transformation of the United States of America from global champion of human rights into an outlaw nation.
Glenn Greenwald studied law and spent ten years as a litigator in federal and state courts across the country. Now he's a big two-fisted progressive blogger and columnist for Salon.com. And he's out with a blistering critique of what has happened to American law. We've stopped applying it to everyone, says Greenwald.
We've carved out an exemption for Americans in the halls of power. We've created what Greenwald calls a "lawless elite" that is running roughshod over our economy and national policy. Over American law.
This hour On Point: Glenn Greenwald, and liberty and justice for some.
Following are the scheduled events for the book tour for my forthcoming new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, to be released on Tuesday, October 25. More events are likely to be added, and media appearances will be posted on my blog as they approach. Unless otherwise indicated, these events are free, open to the public, and include a Q-and-A session and book signing.
According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.