What made the Renaissance tickWhy had it such a force that its thinking spread from a small group of scholars in Florence, working in their own brilliant ways but coming together in a small villa on the Florentine hillside where Marsilio Ficino (143399) lived, to affect the thinking of the whole of Europe, and eventually of America, for five hundred years and is continuing to do soCosimo de?Medici, the virtual ruler of Florence, had been attracted to the philosophy of Plato by Gemistos Plethon during the Council Florence in 1439 and had instructed his agents to gather together Plato?s works before Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. In 1462 he commissioned Marsilio Ficino to translate them from Greek into Latin for the benefit of the Latin speaking world, a task he completed in under five years according to his biographer Giovanni Corsi. This, the first volume in a four volume series, provides the first English translation of the 25 short commentaries on the dialogues and the 12 letters traditionally ascribed to Plato. Later volumes will provide translations of his longer commentaries on the Parmenides (2008), the Republic and Laws (2009) and Timaeus (2010). Though this book will be an essential buy for Renaissance scholars and historians, its freshness of thought and wisdom are as relevant today as they ever were to inspire a new generation seeking spiritual and philosophical direction in their lives.

Make the most of R’s dynamic capabilities and implement web applications with ShinyAbout This BookPresent interactive data visualizations in R within the Shiny frameworkConstruct web dashboards in a simple, intuitive, but fully flexible environmentApply your skills to create a real-world web application with this step-by-step guide Who This Book Is For If you are a data scientist who needs a platform to show your results to a broader audience in an attractive and visual way, or a web developer with no prior experience in R or Shiny, this is the book for you.What You Will LearnComprehend many useful functions, such as lapply and apply, to process data in RWrite and structure different files to create a basic dashboardDevelop graphics in R using popular graphical libraries such as ggplot2 and GoogleVisMount a dashboard on a Linux ServerIntegrate Shiny with non-R-native visualization, such as D3.jsDesign and build a web application In Detail R is nowadays one of the most used tools in data science. However, along with Shiny, it is also gaining territory in the web application world, due to its simplicity and flexibility. Shiny is a framework that enables the creation of interactive visualizations written entirely in R and can be displayed in almost any ordinary web browser. It is a package from RStudio, which is an IDE for R. From the fundamentals of R to the administration of multi-concurrent, fully customized web applications, this book explains how to achieve your desired web application in an easy and gradual way. You will start by learning about the fundamentals of R, and will move on to looking at simple and practical examples. These examples will enable you to grasp many useful tools that will assist you in solving the usual problems that can be faced when developing data visualizations. You will then walk through the integration of Shiny with R in general and view the different visualization possibilities out there. Finally, you will put your skills to the test and create your first web application!Style and approach This is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide that will allow you to learn and make full use of R and Shiny’s capabilities in a gradual way, together with clear, applied examples.

Integrate Elasticsearch into Hadoop to effectively visualize and analyze your dataAbout This BookBuild production-ready analytics applications by integrating the Hadoop ecosystem with ElasticsearchLearn complex Elasticsearch queries and develop real-time monitoring Kibana dashboards to visualize your dataUse Elasticsearch and Kibana to search data in Hadoop easily with this comprehensive, step-by-step guide Who This Book Is For This book is targeted at Java developers with basic knowledge on Hadoop. No prior Elasticsearch experience is expected.What You Will LearnSet up the Elasticsearch-Hadoop environmentImport HDFS data into Elasticsearch with MapReduce jobsPerform full-text search and aggregations efficiently using ElasticsearchVisualize data and create interactive dashboards using KibanaCheck and detect anomalies in streaming data using Storm and ElasticsearchInject and classify real-time streaming data into ElasticsearchGet production-ready for Elasticsearch-Hadoop based projectsIntegrate with Hadoop eco-system such as Pig, Storm, Hive, and Spark In Detail The Hadoop ecosystem is a de-facto standard for processing terra-bytes and peta-bytes of data. Lucene-enabled Elasticsearch is becoming an industry standard for its full-text search and aggregation capabilities. Elasticsearch-Hadoop serves as a perfect tool to bridge the worlds of Elasticsearch and Hadoop ecosystem to get best out of both the worlds. Powered with Kibana, this stack makes it a cakewalk to get surprising insights out of your massive amount of Hadoop ecosystem in a flash. In this book, you'll learn to use Elasticsearch, Kibana and Elasticsearch-Hadoop effectively to analyze and understand your HDFS and streaming data. You begin with an in-depth understanding of the Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Marvel, and Kibana setup. Right after this, you will learn to successfully import Hadoop data into Elasticsearch by writing MapReduce job in a real-world example. This is then followed by a comprehensive look at Elasticsearch essentials, such as full-text search analysis, queries, filters and aggregations; after which you gain an understanding of creating various visualizations and interactive dashboard using Kibana. Classifying your real-world streaming data and identifying trends in it using Storm and Elasticsearch are some of the other topics that we'll cover. You will also gain an insight about key concepts of Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch-hadoop in distributed mode, advanced configurations along with some common configuration presets you may need for your production deployments. You will have “Go production checklist” and high-level view for cluster administration for post-production. Towards the end, you will learn to integrate Elasticsearch with other Hadoop eco-system tools, such as Pig, Hive and Spark.Style and approach A concise yet comprehensive approach has been adopted with real-time examples to help you grasp the concepts easily.

Bring real business insights to your company through effective and engaging dashboards in QlikViewAbout This BookBuild outstanding dashboards that respond to your company’s information needsPresent the data in efficient and innovative ways to promote insightsUnleash the true power of QlikView by creating engaging visualizations Who This Book Is For This book is focused on QlikView developers with basic knowledge of *ing and layouts who want to improve their designing skills and build effective, eye-catching dashboards that deliver tangible value to their business.What You Will LearnBuild a comprehensive library of QlikView components to speed up your developmentsDefine a practical roadmap that will help you build business-driven dashboardsExplore the most effective and engaging ways to present dataApply the best practices in the field of data visualizationAvoid common pitfalls when creating bar, line and pie chartsCreate robust visualizations such as heat maps, histograms and scatter plots In Detail QlikView is one of the most powerful analytical tools in the market. Based on an in-memory associative model, it lets users freely navigate through the data, spot trends and make better decisions. This platform is capable of integrating a wide range of data sources like ERP systems, data warehouses or spreadsheets into a single application in order display dashboards with state-of-the-art visualizations. Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView is an easy to follow handbook that guides you through the process of creating an effective and engaging dashboard that delivers tangible value to the business. It starts with the identification of the business needs and the definition of the main KPIs, and takes you all the way to the application rollout. Throughout the book, you will learn how to apply some of the best practices in the field of data visualization, create a robust navigation schema, chose the best chart types for each scenario and many other things that will help you create effective dashboards that uncover all the stories behind the data.Style and approach This easy-to-follow compilation of best practices, tips, and tricks will help you leverage your QlikView developments. Each section presents practical guidelines to help you create dashboards that are not only functional, but also engaging and compelling.

Create a high-quality first person shooter game using the Unity game engine and the popular UFPS and Probuilder frameworksAbout This BookLearn how to use Unity in conjunction with UFPS and ProBuilder to create a high-quality game quicklyCreate both interior and exterior environmentsA step-by step guide to building a project with clear examples and instructions to create a number of interesting scenarios Who This Book Is For This book is for those who want to create an FPS game in Unity and gain knowledge on how to customize it to be their very own. If you are familiar with the basics of Unity, you will have an easier time, but it should make it possible for someone with no prior experience to learn Unity at an accelerated pace.What You Will LearnUse UFPS to build custom weapons with custom meshes and behaviorsExplore level design as you prototype levels, making use of Prototype to build levels out quicklyBuild environments that are realistic as possible while keeping peak performance and repetitiveness downReview tips and tricks on how to create environments using both terrain for outdoor areas and a modular workflow for interiorsDevelop a number of different encounters that your players can fight against, from a simple turret enemy to complex AI characters from Shooter AIDiscover how to create unique objects such as exploding barrels and objects you can interact withCreate a custom GUI to help your game stand out from the crowdPackage your game for release, create an installer, and get your game out into the world In Detail Unity, available in free and pro versions, is one of the most popular third-party game engines available. It is a cross-platform game engine, making it easy to write your game once and then port it to PC, consoles, and even the web, making it a great choice for both indie and AAA developers. Building an FPS Game in Unity takes readers on an exploration of how to use Unity to create a 3D first person shooter (FPS) title, leveraging the powerful UFPS framework by VisionPunk and Prototype/ProBuilder 2.0 by ProCore3D. After some setting up, you will start by learning how to create custom weapons, prototype levels, create exterior and interior environments, and breathe life into our levels. We will then add polish to the levels. Finally, we will create a custom GUI and menus for our title to create a complete package.Style and approach An easy-to-follow guide with each project containing step-by-step explanations, diagrams, screenshots, and downloadable material. Concepts in Unity and C# are explained as they are used and for the more inquisitive, there are more details on the concepts used with additional external resources to learn from.

Master PowerCLI to automate all aspects of VMware environmentsAbout This BookLeverage PowerCLI to perform administration tasks in a more effective and efficient wayEscape from daily tedious and repetitive tasks by unleashing the full potential of your creative side through *ingMaster the intricate workings of PowerShell and PowerCLI through easy and real-life examples Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator with working knowledge of PowerShell and PowerCLI who wants to perform quick and easy *ing but at the same time achieve complex results and write production grade *s, then this book is for you.What You Will LearnUse GitHub for collaboration and Pester to automate unit testsWrite advanced reusable functions and dynamic variables and learn about error handling in PowerShellAutomate ESXi host installation using Auto-Deploy, host profile, and host imageImplement security best practices in a vSphere data centerManage SRM, vCloud Air, and vRealize Operations environmentsAccess and utilize vSphere APIs to manage advanced aspects of vSphere and work with .NET view objectsUtilize REST APIs to manage vRealize Automation environmentsCreate a Windows GUI through the use of PowerShell and Sapien PrimalForms CE In Detail Have you ever wished that every morning you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your datacenter in exactly the same format you wantOr whether you could automate that boring, exhausting taskWhat if some crucial task needs to be performed on a regular basis without any errorPowerCLI *s do all that and much more for VMware environments. It is built on top of the popular Windows PowerShell, with which you can automate server tasks and reduce manual input, allowing you to focus on more important tasks. This book will help you to achieve your goals by starting with a short refresher on PowerShell and PowerCLI and then covering the nuances of advanced functions and reusable *s. Next you will learn how to build a vSphere-powered virtualized datacenter using PowerCLI while managing different aspects of the environment including automated installation, network, and storage. You will then manage different logical constructs of vSphere environment and different aspects of a virtual machine. Later, you will implement the best practices for a security implementation in vSphere Environment through PowerCLI before discovering how to manage other VMware environments such as SRM, vCloud Director and vCloud Air through PowerCLI. You will also learn to manage vSphere environments using advanced properties by accessing vSphere API and REST APIs through PowerCLI. Finally, you will build a Windows GUI application using PowerShell followed by a couple of sample *s for reporting and managing vSphere environments with detailed explanations of the *s. By the end of the book, you will have the required in-depth knowledge to master the art of PowerCLI *ing.Style and approach In this book, every topic is explained in a very easy-to-follow fashion with real-life, simple examples so that you get an idea of not only the topic but also the context in which it should be used or where it can be best utilized.

When Stanley Lambchop wakes up one morning, his brother, Arthur, is yelling. A bulletin board fell on Stanley during the night, and now he is only half an inch thick! Amazing things begin happening to him. Stanley gets rolled up, mailed, and flown like a kite. He even gets to help catch two dangerous art thieves. He may be flat, but he's a hero. This is the very first Flat Stanley adventure, updated with crisp new art. Supports the Common Core State Standards

Learn how to do more with the Android SDK with this advanced Android Application guide which shows you how to make even better Android apps that users will loveAbout This BookLearn how to design and build better Android apps to reach new usersExplore the latest features and tools in the Android SDK that will help you become a better developerFrom concurrency to testing – through to adding adverts and billing, this book ties together every element to help you deliver a high-quality Android application on Google Play Who This Book Is For Mastering Android Application Development is intended for Android developers that want insight on and guidance through the steps they need to take to give their creations the edge in a competitive market.What You Will LearnCreate an Android project with Android M featuresDesign the basic navigation for our app using the UI componentsSet up a cloud-based platform and store data on itImplement programming patterns such as Singleton and Observer to maintain your project code for future useDisplay lists and grids using Android RecyclerViewImplement user interface components and make your app look professionalHandle, download, and store images along with memory managementCreate the database and content providers to perform read-write operationsAdd notifications to the app and analytics to track the user’s usageShow a Google map view on your appConfigure minify to obfuscate the codeAdd adverts and create products for purchase in your app In Detail There are millions of Android apps out there for people to download – how do you make sure yours has the edgeIt’s not always about innovation and ideas – the most successful apps are those that are able to satisfy customer demands – they’re the ones that look the best, the fastest, and the easiest and most intuitive to use. This book shows you how to create Android applications that do precisely that – it has been designed help you consider and answer those questions throughout the development process, so you can create applications that stand out against the crowd. Learn how to create exemplary UIs that contribute to a satisfying user experience through the lens of Material Design, and explore how to harness the range of features within the Android SDK to help you. Dive deeper into complex programming concepts and discover how to leverage concurrency and navigate memory management and image handling. You’ll also find further guidance on testing and debugging so you can guarantee that your application is reliable and robust for users. Beyond this you’ll find out how to extend your app and add greater functionality, including notifications, location services, adverts and app billing (essential if you want to properly monetize your creation!). To make sure you have confidence at every stage in the process, the book also shows you how to release your app to the Play store – to make sure your maximising your efforts to create a popular Android application!Style and approach This is a step-by-step guide where theory and practice are merged in a way that helps you to put a new concept into practice with ease. By helping to focus on the end result, and showing all the technical steps you need to get there, you will be poised for development success!

Design, test, and debug your apps using Android StudioAbout This BookSee what Material design is about and how to apply it your appsExplore the possibilities to develop apps that works on any type of deviceA step-by-step practical guide that will help you build improved applications, change their look, and debug them Who This Book Is For This book is for developers that are already familiar with programming concepts and have already started creating apps for the Android platform, for example, by using the Eclipse IDE. It is for developers who intend to use Android Studio as their primary IDE or want to use Android Studio more efficiently.What You Will LearnDevelop Android Studio applications using GenymotionApply the concepts of Material design to your applicationsUse memory monitoring tools to tweak performanceBuild applications for Android WearableCapture images, video, or audio within your Android appUse content providers to display dataBuild apps with a cloud-based backendCreate media-related apps that will run on phones, phablets, tablets, and TVs In Detail This book starts with an introduction of Android Studio and why you should use this IDE rather than Eclipse. Moving ahead, it teaches you to build a simple app that requires no backend setup but uses Google Cloud or Parse instead. After that, you will learn how to create an Android app that can send and receive text and images using Google Cloud or Parse as a backend. It explains the concepts of Material design and how to apply them to an Android app. Also, it shows you how to build an app that runs on an Android wear device. Later, it explains how to build an app that takes advantage of the latest Android SDK while still supporting older Android versions. It also demonstrates how the performance of an app can be improved and how memory management tools that come with the Android Studio IDE can help you achieve this. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop high quality apps with a minimum amount of effort using the Android Studio IDE.Style and approach This is a practical guide full of challenges and many real-world examples that demonstrate interesting development concepts. Besides smartphones and tablets, it also covers Android wearable devices and Android TV. Although strongly recommended, it is not necessary to own any Android device yourself.

After decades of service and years of watching her family's troubles splashed across the tabloids, Britain's Queen is beginning to feel her age. She needs some proper cheering up. An unexpected opportunity offers her relief: an impromptu visit to a place that holds happy memories—the former royal yacht, Britannia, now moored near Edinburgh. Hidden beneath a skull-emblazoned hoodie, the limber Elizabeth (thank goodness for yoga) walks out of Buckingham Palace into the freedom of a rainy London day and heads for King's Cross to catch a train to Scotland. But a characterful cast of royal attendants has discovered her missing. In uneasy alliance a lady-in-waiting, a butler, an equerry, a girl from the stables, a dresser, and a clerk from the shop that supplies Her Majesty's cheese set out to find her and bring her back before her absence becomes a national scandal.Mrs Queen Takes the Train is a clever novel, offering a fresh look at a woman who wonders if she, like Britannia herself, has, too, become a relic of the past. William Kuhn paints a charming yet biting portrait of British social, political, and generational rivalries—between upstairs and downstairs, the monarchy and the government, the old and the young. Comic and poignant, fast paced and clever, this delightful debut tweaks the pomp of the monarchy, going beneath its rigid formality to reveal the human heart of the woman at its center.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and adviser to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca-whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson-to his rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities.Written near the end of Seneca's life, Natural Questions is a work in which Seneca expounds and comments on the natural sciences of his day-rivers and earthquakes, wind and snow, meteors and comets-offering us a valuable look at the ancient scientific mind at work. The modern reader will find fascinating insights into ancient philosophical and scientific approaches to the physical world and also vivid evocations of the grandeur, beauty, and terror of nature.

A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then-diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions-continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its original publication, contains an improved and expanded index and a new introduction by noted Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan which incisively analyzes the book's argument and examines its present relevance. A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely.Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the leading social theorists in the United States. Her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy and Love and Saint Augustine are also published by the University of Chicago Press.

"e;I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! But on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet. . . . What an age since 1914!"e;In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as "e;murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes."e;All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer-of being simultaneously soldier and poet-pervade Blunden's memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross.Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden's war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders's fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on anyone's bookshelf between Siegfried Sassoon's poetry and Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That.

"e;Family history begins with missing persons,"e; Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring.?Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a ne'er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than we'd hoped. That didn't stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her father's life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is a clear-eyed, fascinating, frequently moving account of the lives of everyday people, of the tough decisions and hard work, the good luck and bad breaks, that chart the course of a life. Light's forebears-servants, sailors, farm workers-were among the poorest, traveling the country looking for work; they left few lasting marks on the world. But through her painstaking work in archives, and her ability to make the people and struggles of the past come alive, Light reminds us that "e;every life, even glimpsed through the chinks of the census, has its surprises and secrets."e;?What she did for the servants of Bloomsbury in her celebrated Mrs. Woolf and the Servants Light does here for her own ancestors, and, by extension, everyone's: draws their experiences from the shadows of the past and helps us understand their lives, estranged from us by time yet inextricably interwoven with our own. Family history, in her hands, becomes a new kind of public history.

Who among us hasn't marveled at the diversity and beauty of shellsOr picked one up, held it to our ear, and then gazed in wonder at its shape and hueMany a lifelong shell collector has cut teeth (and toes) on the beaches of the Jersey Shore, the Outer Banks, or the coasts of Sanibel Island. Some have even dived to the depths of the ocean. But most of us are not familiar with the biological origin of shells, their role in explaining evolutionary history, and the incredible variety of forms in which they come.Shells are the external skeletons of mollusks, an ancient and diverse phylum of invertebrates that are in the earliest fossil record of multicellular life over 500 million years ago. There are over 100,000 kinds of recorded mollusks, and some estimate that there are over amillion more that have yet to be discovered. Some breathe air, others live in fresh water, but most live in the ocean. They range in size from a grain of sand to a beach ball and in weight from a few grams to several hundred pounds. And in this lavishly illustrated volume, they finally get their full due.The Book of Shells offers a visually stunning and scientifically engaging guide to six hundred of the most intriguing mollusk shells, each chosen to convey the range of shapes and sizes that occur across a range of species. Each shell is reproduced here at its actual size, in full color, and is accompanied by an explanation of the shell's range, distribution, abundance, habitat, and operculum-the piece that protects the mollusk when it's in the shell. Brief scientific and historical accounts of each shell and related species include fun-filled facts and anecdotes that broaden its portrait.The Matchless Cone, for instance, or Conus cedonulli, was one of the rarest shells collected during the eighteenth century. So much so, in fact, that a specimen in 1796 was sold for more than six times as much as a painting by Vermeer at the same auction. But since the advent of scuba diving, this shell has become far more accessible to collectors-though not without certain risks. Some species of Conus produce venom that has caused more than thirty known human deaths.The Zebra Nerite, the Heart Cockle, the Indian Babylon, the Junonia, the Atlantic Thorny Oyster-shells from habitats spanning the poles and the tropics, from the highest mountains to the ocean's deepest recesses, are all on display in this definitive work.

The eighty-nine cetacean species that swim our seas and rivers are as diverse as they are intelligent and elusive, from the hundred-foot-long, two-hundred-ton blue whale to the lesser-known tucuxi, ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, and diminutive, critically endangered vaquita. The huge distances these highly migratory creatures cover and the depths they dive mean we catch only the merest glimpses of their lives as they break the surface of the water. But thanks to the marriage of science and technology, we are now beginning to understand their anatomy, complex social structures, extraordinary communication abilities, and behavioral patterns. In this beautifully illustrated guide, renowned marine mammalogist Annalisa Berta draws on the contributions of a pod of fellow whale biologists to present the most comprehensive, authoritative overview ever published of these remarkable aquatic mammals.Opening with an accessible rundown of cetacean biology-including the most recent science on feeding, mating, and communication-Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises then presents species-specific natural history on a range of topics, from anatomy and diet to distribution and conservation status. Each entry also includes original drawings of the species and its key identifiers, such as fin shape and color, tooth shape, and characteristic markings as they would appear both above and below water-a feature unique to this book.Figures of myth and-as the debate over hunting rages on-figures of conflict since long before the days of Moby-Dick, whales, dolphins, and porpoises are also ecologically important and, in many cases, threatened. Written for general enthusiasts, emergent cetacean fans, and biologists alike, this stunning, urgently needed book will serve as the definitive guide for years to come.

In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading studies and weaving together the history of science with intellectual history, she explores Darwin's global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arabic readers and shows how Darwin's writings helped alter the social and epistemological landscape of the Arab learned classes.?Providing a close textual, political, and institutional analysis of the tremendous interest in Darwin's ideas and other works on evolution, Elshakry shows how, in an age of massive regional and international political upheaval, these readings were suffused with the anxieties of empire and civilizational decline. The politics of evolution infiltrated Arabic discussions of pedagogy, progress, and the very sense of history. They also led to a literary and conceptual transformation of notions of science and religion themselves. Darwin thus became a vehicle for discussing *ural exegesis, the conditions of belief, and cosmological views more broadly. The book also acquaints readers with Muslim and Christian intellectuals, bureaucrats, and theologians, and concludes by exploring Darwin's waning influence on public and intellectual life in the Arab world after World War I.?Reading Darwin in Arabic is an engaging and powerfully argued reconceptualization of the intellectual and political history of the Middle East.

In Michael Polanyi and His Generation, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare.?At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi's scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation-including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton-and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science.

Imprisoned in the Tower of London after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Sir Walter Ralegh spent seven years producing his massive History of the World.?Created with the aid of a library of more than five hundred books that he was allowed to keep in his quarters, this incredible work of English vernacular would become a best seller, with nearly twenty editions, abridgments, and continuations issued in the years that followed.Nicholas Popper uses Ralegh's?History?as a touchstone in this lively exploration of the culture of history writing and historical thinking in the late Renaissance. From Popper we learn why early modern Europeans ascribed heightened value to the study of the past and how scholars and statesmen began to see historical expertise as not just a foundation for political practice and theory, but as a means of advancing their power in the courts and councils of contemporary Europe. The rise of historical scholarship during this period encouraged the circulation of its methods to other disciplines, transforming Europe's intellectual-and political-regimes. More than a mere study of Ralegh's History of the World, Popper's book reveals how the methods that historians devised to illuminate the past structured the dynamics of early modernity in Europe and England.

In this groundbreaking work, Richard L. Velkley examines the complex philosophical relationship between Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss. Velkley argues that both thinkers provide searching analyses of the philosophical tradition's origins in radical questioning. For Heidegger and Strauss, the recovery of the original premises of philosophy cannot be separated from rethinking the very possibility of genuine philosophizing.?Common views of the influence of Heidegger's thought on Strauss suggest that, after being inspired early on by Heidegger's dismantling of the philosophical tradition, Strauss took a wholly separate path, spurning modernity and pursuing instead a renewal of Socratic political philosophy. Velkley rejects this reading and maintains that Strauss's engagement with the challenges posed by Heidegger-as well as by modern philosophy in general-formed a crucial and enduring framework for his lifelong philosophical project. More than an intellectual biography or a mere charting of influence, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy is a profound consideration of these two philosophers' reflections on the roots, meaning, and fate of Western rationalism.

There have been many Spinozas over the centuries: atheist, romantic pantheist, great thinker of the multitude, advocate of the liberated individual, and rigorous rationalist. The common thread connecting all of these clashing perspectives is Spinoza's naturalism, the idea that humanity is part of nature, not above it.?In this sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza's iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of "e;renaturalization,"e; showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts.?Sharp's groundbreaking argument critically engages with important contemporary thinkers-including deep ecologists, feminists, and race and critical theorists-making Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization vital for a wide range of scholars.