A Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a leading brain researcher show how the brain creates conscious experience.

Since 9/11 politicians, preachers, conservatives and the media are all speaking about evil. In the past the dicourse about evil in our religious, philosophic and literary traditions has provoked thinking, questioning and inquiry. But today the appeal to evil is being used as a political tool to obscure compex issues, block serious thinking and stifle public discussion and debate. We are now confronting a clash of mentalities, not a clash of civilisations. One mentality is drawn to absolutes, moral certainties, and (...) simplistic dichotomies of good and evil. The other seriously questions an appeal to absolutes in politics and criticizes the simplistic division of the world into the forces of evil and the forces of good. In The Abuse of Evil Bernstein challenges the claim that without an appeal to absolutes, we lack the grounds for acting decisively in fighting our enemies. The post 9/11 abuse of evil corrupts both democratic politics and religion. The stakes are high in this clash of mentalities in shaping how we think and act in the world today - and in the future. (shrink)

The book is a collection of fourteen chapters, each one of which takes as its starting point a myth, a legend, a story, or a fable, and explores its contemporary relevance for a world of globalisation, organizations, and consumerism. Chapters deal with, for example, the nature of leadership in the face of terrorism and the struggle for identity.

This book is part of the core materials project of the 'European Ethics Network'.

"We are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated world view--the mechanistic world view of Cartesian-Newtonian science--to a reality that can no longer be understood in terms of these concepts.

One subject which captured the imagination of sociologists, philosophers, political scientists and writers on culture in the 1980s was postmodernism. This text considers the meaning and importance of postmodernity.

Thesis )--University of Stellenbosch, 2008.

Typically, we think of both artificial and natural computing devices as following rules that allow them to alter their behaviour (output) according to their environment (input). This approach works well when the environment and goals are well defined and regular. However, 1) the search time for appropriate solutions quickly becomes intractable when the input is not fairly regular, and 2) responses may be required that are not computable, either in principle, or given the computational resources available to the system. It (...) may seem that there is no way to deal with these conditions, but if we think of systems as dynamical non-equilibrium autonomous entities, there are ways to deal with the unexpected and irregular by taking advantage of self-organising and self-preserving capacities of such systems. A generalised force acting on a system far from equilibrium will cause the system to reorganise itself in the direction of the generalised force in such a way as to minimise its effects (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977), but there can be unpredictable effects in different generalised directions in the system’s phase space. In order to preserve system integrity, these effects must be damped or used for further self-reorganisation, possibly starting a cascade effect that leaves the system in a substantially different state in which it can handle further instances of this sort of information. This model is similar to and extends the theoretical model of accommodation and assimilation of Piaget, derived from his observations of the development of intelligence in children. (shrink)