Discover how the profound metaphysics of twelfth-century mystic Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi directly engages with modern philosophy, psychology, and contemporary epistemology.Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought: The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously presents an open dialogue between classical Sufi wisdom and Western theoretical culture. Peter Coates examines how Ibn 'Arabi's central doctrine of wahdat al-wujud (the Oneness of Being) reframes foundational...

Authored by two highly respected experts in this specialist area, The Fundamentals of Radiation Thermometers is an essential resource for anyone intending to measure the temperature of an object using the radiated energy from that object. This readable, user-friendly book gives important background knowledge for anyone working in the field of non-contact thermometry.The book begins with an accessible account of how temperature scales are set up and defined, and ex...

'Nature' is a deceptively simple and ahistorical term, suggesting intrinsic, unchanging reality. Yet nature has a history too, both in terms of human attitudes and human impacts. Coates outlines the major understandings of 'nature' in the western world since classical times, from nature as higher authority to its more recent meaning of threatened physical space and life forms.Unlike many others, this book places the history of attitudes to nature within the story of human-induced c...

Every year, wild salmon travel hundreds of miles upstream. They fight fierce river currents, leap over rocks and small waterfalls, and die by the thousands of starvation, disease and exposure to cold. Even if they surmount these obstacles the fish risk becoming dinner for hungry predators like bears, birds and humans. Guided by a keen sense of smell, the survivors travel to their original hatching grounds, where they breed, spawn and die ina short space of time.Inspired by the rema...

Squirrel Nation is a history of Britain’s two species of squirrel over the past two hundred years. The red squirrel, although rare, is among the most cherished of native species. Grey squirrels, by contrast, are one of the most frequently seen wild creatures in our gardens, parks, towns and countryside, and many Britons consider it to be a foreign interloper, introduced from North America in the late nineteenth century. By examining this animal’s colonization of Britain, Peter Coa...

Many of the world’s major cities sprang up on the banks of rivers. Used for water, food, irrigation, transportation and power, rivers sustain life and connect places and countries, but most of us think of them simply as waterways that must be crossed on the way to somewhere else. Relating the biographies of four European and two North American rivers, A Story of Six Rivers considers the place of rivers in our world and emphasizes the inextricable links between their history, cultu...

The most precise and authoritative translation of one of the founding works of Western culture, in an edition supported by helpful, effective notes.The Nicomachean Ethics is one of Aristotle’s most widely read and influential works. Ideas central to ethics—that happiness is the end of human endeavor, that moral virtue is formed through action and habituation, and that good action requires prudence—found their most powerful proponent in the person medieval ...

The Sayings of Mencius has been revered for well over 2,000 years, and is arguably the most influential of the Si Shu (Four Books) which form the foundation of traditional Chinese education, 'Master Meng' was born during the turbulent Warring States period, and was a tireless advocate of Confucian thought, defending and expanding its tenets as a means of achieving peaceful relations between individuals and competing kingdoms. The sage spent most of his life journeying from court to court, ...

The Shield of Heracles is an archaic Greek epic poem that was attributed to Hesiod during antiquity. The subject of the poem is the expedition of Heracles and Iolaus against Cycnus, the son of Ares, who challenged Heracles to combat as Heracles was passing through Thessaly. It has been suggested that this epic may reflect anti-Thessalian feeling after the First Sacred War (595–585 BCE): in the epic, a Thessalian hero interfering with the Phocian sanctuary is killed by a Boeotian hero (Hera...

The Works and Days is a didactic poem written by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod around 700 BC. It is in dactylic hexameter and contains 828 lines. At its center, the Works and Days is a farmer's almanac in which Hesiod instructs his brother Perses in the agricultural arts.Scholars have seen this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of colonial expeditions in search of new land. In the poem Hesiod also offers his brother extensive mor...

Step into the shadowy world of Dracula, where the timeless clash between light and darkness unfolds. When Jonathan Harker, an unsuspecting solicitor, journeys to the eerie castle of Count Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains, he unwittingly unleashes a centuries-old terror upon Victorian England. As the enigmatic Count weaves his web of seduction and horror, a small band of brave souls must rise to face an evil that defies comprehension. With its chilling atmosphere, hypnotic villain, and r...

"The Problem of Cell 13" is a short story by Jacques Futrelle. It was first published in 1905 and later collected in The Thinking Machine (1907), which was featured in crime writer H. R. F. Keating's list of the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. Like Futrelle's other short stories, "The Problem of Cell 13" features Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen as the main character, although most of the story is seen through the perspective of a prison warden. While in a scientific debate wit...