Sefer Yetzirah, or the Book of Formation, is among the earliest and most important treatises on Jewish mysticism. Traditionally ascribed to the patriarch Abaraham or the first century CE Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, Sefer Yetzirah explores how the universe was created through "32 wondrous ways of wisdom", including the ten numbers or aspects of God in Kabbalistic thought, and twenty-two letters, corresponding to early philosophic and proto-scientific ideas about the planets, elements and conste...

This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice -- and ideas for how each of us can contributeMany of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matte...

Rorty and the Prophetic interrogates and provides a constructive assessment to the American neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty’s critiques of Jewish ethics. Rorty dismisses the public applicability of Jewish moral reasoning, because it is based on “the will of God” through divine revelation. As a self-described secular philosopher, it comes as no surprise that Rorty does not find public applicability within a divinely-ordered Jewish ethic. Rorty also rejects the French Jewish philoso...

Many philosophy majors are shocked by the gap between the relative ease of lower-level philosophy courses and the difficulty of upper-division courses. This book serves as a necessary bridge to upper-level study in philosophy by offering rigorous but concise and accessible accounts of basic concepts and distinctions that are used throughout the discipline. It serves as a valuable advanced introduction to any undergraduate who is moving into upper-level courses in philosophy.While l...

Theories of Hope: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Human Experience is a collection of essays dedicated to inquiring into the nature of hope in its multiple and varied guises. Looking specifically at the ways in which some experiences of hope emerge within contexts of marginalization, transgression, and inquiry, this volume seeks to explore the experiences of hope through a lens of its more challenging aspects.

The essence of natural computing is aesthetics; for example, in cooking, one of the most common forms of natural computation, the decision to add salt, and how much, is based on the aesthetics of taste. Because touch perception is instinctively related to a sense of beauty, the aesthetics of tactile sense are considered as algorithms by using the Tactile Score, which encodes tactile sensation. This book will appeal not only to researchers of natural computing or aesthetics, but also those ...

This book shows that the assumption that classical logic is essentially a bivalent (i.e., 2-valued) logic, a logic of truth and falsity, is an incorrect and harmful conception. Classical logic is certainly a Boolean logic, and the smallest (non-degenerate) Boolean algebra is the 2-element Boolean algebra; however, there are numerous Boolean algebras that have more than 2 elements, such as the 4-, 8-, 16-, ..., infinite-element Boolean algebra, and they all work equally well for the semanti...

The "Simple" stories, Langston Hughes's satirical pieces featuring Harlem's Jesse B. Semple, have been lauded as Hughes's greatest contribution to American fiction. In Not So Simple, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper provides the first full historical analysis of the Simple stories.Harper traces the evolution and development of Simple from his 1943 appearance in Hughes's weekly Chicago Defender column through his 1965 farewell in the New York Post. Drawing on correspondence and ...

With Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), smart devices are about to become even smarter. This practical guide demonstrates how this exciting wireless technology helps developers build mobile apps that share data with external hardware, and how hardware engineers can gain easy and reliable access to mobile operating systems.This book provides a solid, high-level overview of how devices use BLE to communicate with each other. You’ll learn useful low-cost tools for developing and testing BLE-...

This book discusses the latest investigations into the electronic structure of narrow-gap semiconductors in extreme conditions, and describes in detail magnetic field and pressure measurements using two high-quality single crystals: black phosphorus (BP) and lead telluride (PbTe).The book presents two significant findings for BP and PbTe. The first is the successful demonstration of the pressure-induced transition from semiconductor to semimetal in the electronic structure of BP us...

Thinking Jewish Culture in America argues that Jewish thought extends our awareness and deepens the complexity of American Jewish culture. This volume stretches the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish thought so that it can productively engage expanding arenas of culture by drawing Jewish thought into the orbit of cultural studies. The eleven contributors to Thinking Jewish Cultures, together with Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s postscript, position Jewish thought within the dynamics and possibili...

This is a book about the need for redemptive narratives to ward off despair and the dangers these same narratives create by raising expectations that are seldom fulfilled. The quasi-messianic expectations produced by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, and their diminution, were stark reminders of an ongoing struggle between ideals and political realities.Redemptive Hope begins by tracing the tension between theistic thinkers, for whom hope is transcendental, and intell...