Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction -- PART I SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES: ADDRESSING THE QUESTION -- 1 The Notion of Social Pathology: A Case Study of Narcissus in American Society -- 2 The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization: Meaning-giving Experiences and Pathological Expectations Concerning Health and Suffering -- 3 Modernity as Spiritual Disorder: Searching for a Vocabulary of Social Pathologies in the Work of Eric Voegelin -- PART II SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES: CONTEMPORARY (...) MALAISES -- 4 The Value of Houses in the Libidinal Economy: Financialization as Social Pathogenesis -- 5 Depression: Resisting Ultra-liberalism? -- 6 The Pathologization of Morality -- 7 The Multiple Self: A Social Pathology? -- 8 Possible Explanations for Increasing Antidepressant Treatment in Modern Society -- PART III SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES: BIOPOWER, SUBJECTIFICATION AND CIVILIZATION -- 9 Does Society Still Matter? Mental Health and Illness and the Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century -- 10 Evaluations as a Process of Disenfranchisement -- 11 Schismogenesis, Liminality and Public Health. (shrink)

One of our great contemporary scientists presents ten insights that illuminate what every thinking person needs to know about what the world is and how it works. Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek's Fundamentals is built around a simple but profound idea: the models of the world we construct as children are practical and adequate for everyday life, but they do not bring in the surprising and mind-expanding revelations of modern science. To do that, we must look at the world anew, (...) combining clear thinking with an openness to wonder. This "born again" world is in many ways larger, fuller, and much stranger than it appears. Through an exploration of space, time, matter, and ideas--and equipped with facts, questions, and brilliant speculations--Wilczek guides us through the past, present, and future of fundamental science. Readers will emerge with an expanded vision of our universe. Author Bio: Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. He was among the earliest MacArthur fellows, and has won many awards both for his scientific work and his writing. He is the author of A Beautiful Question, The Lightness of Being, Fantastic Realities, Longing for the Harmonies, and hundreds of articles in leading scientific journals. His "Wilczek's Universe" column appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute and chief scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai, China, and a distinguished professor at Arizona State University and Stockholm University. (shrink)

A history of the world from the big bang to the present. "Big history" is a new approach to world history that joins the history of the world as a physical entity to human history. David Christian is the leading proponent of this approach to world history.

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein's general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all of physics, be united in a single quantum theory of gravity? Two of the world's most famous physicists - Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose - disagree. Here they explain their positions in a work based on six lectures with a final (...) debate, all originally presented at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. (shrink)

[opening paragraph] -- Clark: The `astonishing hypothesis' which you put forward in your book, and which you obviously feel is very controversial, is that `You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: `You're nothing but a pack of neurons'.' But it seems to me that this is not so (...) astonishing a statement for a scientist to make. Isn't this what reductionist science has always believed? (shrink)

[opening paragraph] -- Clark: The `astonishing hypothesis' which you put forward in your book, and which you obviously feel is very controversial, is that `You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: `You're nothing but a pack of neurons'.' But it seems to me that this is not so (...) astonishing a statement for a scientist to make. Isn't this what reductionist science has always believed? (shrink)