9780199243280 (019924328X), Oxford University Press, 2010

Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on August 13 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall.

This new history rejects traditional, top-down approaches to Cold War politics, exploring instead how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, "caught out" by Sunday the Thirteenth. Party, police and Stasi reports reveal why one in six East Germans fled the country during the 1950s, undermining communist rule and forcing the eleventh-hour decision by Khrushchev and Ulbricht to build a wall along the Cold War's frontline.

Did East Germans resist or come to terms with immurement? Did the communist regime become more or less dictatorial within the confines of the so-called "Antifascist Defense Rampart?" Using film and literature, but also the GDR's losing battle against Beatlemania, Patrick Major's cross-disciplinary study suggests that popular culture both reinforced and undermined the closed society. Linking external and internal developments, Major argues that the GDR's official quest for international recognition, culminating in Ostpolitik and United Nations membership in the early 1970s, became its undoing, unleashing a human rights movement which fed into, but then broke with, the protests of 1989. After exploring the reasons for the fall of the Wall and reconstructing the heady days of the autumn revolution, the author reflects on the fate of the Wall after 1989, as it moved from demolition into the realm of memory.

9780195385021 (0195385020), Oxford University Press, 2010

John Cort explores the narratives by which the Jains have explained the presence of icons of Jinas (their enlightened and liberated teachers) that are worshiped and venerated in the hundreds of thousands of Jain temples throughout India. Most of these narratives portray icons favorably, and so justify their existence; but there are also narratives originating among iconoclastic Jain communities that see the existence of temple icons as a sign of decay and corruption. The veneration of Jina icons is one of the most widespread of all Jain ritual practices. Nearly every Jain community in India has one or more elaborate temples, and as the Jains become a global community there are now dozens of temples in North America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia. The cult of temples and icons goes back at least two thousand years, and indeed the largest of the four main subdivisions of the Jains are called Murtipujakas, or "Icon Worshipers." A careful reading of narratives ranging over the past 15 centuries, says Cort, reveals a level of anxiety and defensiveness concerning icons, although overt criticism of the icons only became explicit in the last 500 years. He provides detailed studies of the most important pro- and anti-icon narratives. Some are in the form of histories of the origins and spread of icons. Others take the form of cosmological descriptions, depicting a vast universe filled with eternal Jain icons. Finally, Cort looks at more psychological explanations of the presence of icons, in which icons are defended as necessary spiritual corollaries to the very fact of human embodiedness.

9780199570300 (0199570302), Oxford University Press, 2009

Animal life, now and over the past half billion years, is incredibly diverse. Describing and understanding the evolution of this diversity of body plans - from vertebrates such as humans and fish to the numerous invertebrate groups including sponges, insects, molluscs, and the many groups of worms - is a major goal of evolutionary biology. In this book, a group of leading researchers adopt a modern, integrated approach to describe how current molecular genetic techniques and disciplines as diverse as palaeontology, embryology, and genomics have been combined, resulting in a dramatic renaissance in the study of animal evolution.

The last decade has seen growing interest in evolutionary biology fuelled by a wealth of data from molecular biology. Modern phylogenies integrating evidence from molecules, embryological data, and morphology of living and fossil taxa provide a wide consensus of the major branching patterns of the tree of life; moreover, the links between phenotype and genotype are increasingly well understood. This has resulted in a reliable tree of relationships that has been widely accepted and has spawned numerous new and exciting questions that require a reassessment of the origins and radiation of animal life. The focus of this volume is at the level of major animal groups, the morphological innovations that define them, and the mechanisms of change to their embryology that have resulted in their evolution. Current research themes and future prospects are highlighted including phylogeny reconstruction, comparative developmental biology, the value of different sources of data and the importance of fossils, homology assessment, character evolution, phylogeny of major groups of animals, and genome evolution. These topics are integrated in the light of a 'new animal phylogeny', to provide fresh insights into the patterns and processes of animal evolution.

Animal Evolution provides a timely and comprehensive statement of progress in the field for academic researchers requiring an authoritative, balanced and up-to-date overview of the topic. It is also intended for both upper level undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in animal evolution, molecular phylogenetics, evo-devo, comparative genomics and associated disciplines.

9780486450384 (0486450384), Dover Publications, 2006

Advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the natural sciences receive a solid foundation in several fields of mathematics with this text. Topics include vector spaces and matrices; orthogonal functions; polynomial equations; asymptotic expansions; ordinary differential equations; conformal mapping; and extremum problems. Includes exercises and solutions. 1962 edition.   This book is based on a two-semester course in "The Mathematical Methods of Physics" which I have given in the mathematics department of the University of Illinois in recent years. The audience has consisted primarily of physicists, engineers, and other natural scientists in their first or second year of graduate study. Knowledge of the theory of functions of real and complex variables is assumed.

9780199543274 (0199543275), Oxford University Press, 2008

Discussion of natural law reaches a new level of sophistication in Suarez’s elaborate and careful treatment. He takes account of Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and their successors, and claims to defend Aquinas’ views on the main issues. Since his discussion is usually fuller than Aquinas’ discussion, and explores questions that Aquinas does not discuss at length, Suarez deserves careful study.

We may not always agree with his claim to defend Aquinas’ position. Indeed, some readers, especially among those sympathetic to Aquinas, have argued that Suarez does not simply disagree with Aquinas on some details, but radically alters Aquinas’ views on natural law and the foundations of ethics, and alters them for the worse. This departure from Aquinas is historically significant because—it is suggested—Suarez strongly influences the theory of natural law that has been prominent in post-Reformation Roman Catholic moral theology. Historians of ethics and political theory have concentrated on Suarez’s treatment of law, and especially of natural law. His treatise ‘On Laws and God the Legislator’ clarifies many issues that his predecessors pass over. Aquinas has relatively little to say on the relation of the principles of natural law to the will of God. Some of his successors, particularly Scotus and Ockham, have more to say. Suarez sets out and discusses in full the major issues that arise in his predecessors; he considers how many separable claims can be made, and what follows from each of them. Since Grotius and Cudworth are probably familiar with Suarez’s discussion, it provides a useful basis for comparing modern with mediaeval views.

9780199571789 (0199571783), Oxford University Press, 2009

This book is a selective historical and critical study of moral philosophy in the Socratic tradition, with special attention to Aristotelian naturalism. It discusses the main topics of moral philosophy as they have developed historically, including: the human good, human nature, justice, friendship, and morality; the methods of moral inquiry; the virtues and their connexions; will, freedom, and responsibility; reason and emotion; relativism, subjectivism, and realism; the theological aspect of morality. The first volume discusses ancient and mediaeval moral philosophy. The second volume examines early modern moral philosophy from the 16th to the 18th century. This third volume continues the story up to Rawls's Theory of Justice.

A comparison between the Kantian and the Aristotelian outlook is one central theme of the third volume. The chapters on Kant compare Kant both with his rationalist and empiricist predecessors and with the Aristotelian naturalist tradition. Reactions to Kant are traced through Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. Utilitarian and idealist approaches to Kantian and Aristotelian views are traced through Sidgwick, Bradley, and Green. Mill and Sidgwick provide a link between 18th-century rationalism and sentimentalism and the 20th-century debates in the metaphysics and epistemology of morality. These debates are explored in Moore, Ross, Stevenson, Hare, C.I. Lewis, Heidegger, and in some more recent meta-ethical discussion. This volume concludes with a discussion of Rawls, with special emphasis on a comparison of his position with utilitarianism, intuitionism, Kantianism, naturalism, and idealism.

Since this book seeks to be not only descriptive and exegetical, but also philosophical, it discusses the comparative merits of different views, the difficulties that they raise, and how some of the difficulties might be resolved. It presents the leading moral philosophers of the past as participants in a rational discussion in which the contemporary reader can participate.

9780816071999 (0816071993), Facts on File, 2009

Conservation refers to the careful and controlled use of natural resources for the purpose of extending the time they are available as well as retaining biodiversity. Conservation does not prevent the loss of plants, trees, land, water, or habitat; it simply slows the rate of degradation of these things. This new book explores aspects of conservation, particularly the conservation of plant life upon which ecosystems are built. Though students with an interest in ecology assume conservation is a worthwhile endeavor in sustaining the environment, conservation has had a rocky history. Conservation provides an overview of the successes and failures in striving to protect living natural resources that predate humans on their home continents. Chapters include: Forests and the Water Cycle; Analyzing Threats to Forests; Tropical Forest Preservation; Temperate and Boreal Forest Preservation; Desertification; Saving Riparian Habitats; and, Reducing Wood Waste.

9780816066827 (0816066825), Facts on File, 2010

In labs, clinics, and companies around the world, an amazing revolution in our understanding of life has taken place. This revolution makes the news nearly every day and has dramatically changed the way medicine is practiced, but the headlines often seem mysterious and scary. Today, discoveries are made at such a dizzying pace that even scientists - let alone the public - can barely keep up. The six-volume "Genetics and Evolution" set aims to explain what is happening in biological research and put things into perspective for high school students and the general public. Providing up-to-date research as well as a basis for understanding all aspects of life, this new full-color set highlights key issues in the field of biology and how genetics and evolution are drawn together in a powerful way. Providing a detailed look at how these sciences are likely to shape science and society in the future, the books in this accessible set aim to fill an important niche by connecting the history of scientific ideas and methods to their impact on today's research. This set is ideal for high school and college students interested in these exciting areas of scientific research.

9780816071975 (0816071977), Facts on File, 2009

Students with a basic understanding of the environment and concern for its future know the importance of preserving biological diversity. Biodiversity is the variety of living things on Earth or in a specific area. This definition seems simple enough to understand, yet the concept of biodiversity has deeper meanings that challenge even trained environmental scientists. A region that has a wide variety of species in robust populations is said to possess biodiversity. But not every place on Earth bursts with diverse life. Biodiversity concentrates in certain areas, while other parts of the globe possess a somewhat lesser variety and number of species. "Biodiversity" takes a look at how habitats are destroyed, the devastating effect this has on biodiversity, and the ways in which scientists restore ecosystems and habits. This new, full-color book also examines the ethical questions that arise when trying to rescue threatened species in the face of dire human conditions. Chapters include: Endangered Species; Measuring Species and Extinction; Protecting Native from Invasive Species; Urban Development; Nature Reserves; Species Protection; and, Methods for Measuring Diversity.