Provides students and general readers with a basic understanding of the central concepts, issues, and thinkers of the early modern era of philosophyIs there a world that exists apart from ourselves? If an external world exists, what is its nature?Can an external world based on evidence from our sense perception be known? How do such questions arise? Is it even possible for them to be answered? This is Modern Philosophy: An Introduction surveys how ...

Voting Your Center is a short book geared for the everyday citizen who has decided to take their voting to the next level. Based on an Aristotelian notion of character, philosopher Kurt Smith shows how to apply the concept of logical consistency when in the throes of deciding how to vote. The aim of the book is to help voters toward realizing and preserving their central values.

A Myth For Dragonflies is a heartwarming philosophical comedy set in the late 1790s, in the newly formed United States of America, a product of the Enlightenment, where ancient myths and sacred rites of passage have been abandoned for materialistic science and an unimaginative obsession with the mundane. We follow a father and son who have embarked on a dangerous quest. Although we, inheritors of the Enlightenment, claim to be finished with the sacred systems known to have...

René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, France, on March 31, 1596. He attended a Jesuit college and studied law for two years, but he soon gave up formal academics to immerse himself in “the great book of the world.” In 1618, he joined the army, where he became interested in military engineering and expanded his knowledge of physics and mathematics. Then, one night in 1619, he experienced what he described as divine visions, which inspired him to create a new mathe...

The Descartes Dictionary is an accessible guide to the world of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences, and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Descartes' thought.The introduction provides a biographical sketch, a brief account of Descartes' philosophical works, and a summary of the current state of Cartesian studies, discu...

“Simply Descartes is the perfect one-stop-shop for all matters Cartesian. Smith presents Descartes’s entire system from the ground up, building from metaphysics and epistemology to physics and morality. In some ways, he even goes one step further than the master himself for, with the benefit of hindsight and of the work of leading scholars, Smith reconstructs the system in a neat, orderly, clean and concise way, extracting the disparate pieces from Descartes’s many works scattered...

Over a period of thirteen hundred years, more than two million people have ventured down the sacred path of the Camino de Santiago. The northern route of this pilgrimage trek starts in the Pyrenees in France and takes pilgrims 500 miles to the west of Spain. Two intrepid pilgrims describe their journey.

n, A Pastor in Revival, Kurt Smith navigates the reader through one of the most prodigious periods in American Church History we know as “The Great Awakening.” But this book doesn’t canvass the entire Awakening with a broad brush; rather, it turns our attention to the leading voice in this season who was none other Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758).It is to this subject therefore that Kurt Smith concentrates our focus with rich historical research forged in an accessible style ...

"Basically, this is the real thing. No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination. You're talking about four guys from rural Washington who wanna rock..."--Everett True, Melody Maker, March 18th, 1989In 1992, Nirvana's breakthrough anthem, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," introduced a new underground sound to the mainstream music world. The record-breaking sales and global recognition that followed should have been a welcomed payoff for the har...

Fourteen stories. Fourteen terrifying journeys.† A suicidal man waits on a high building for the perfect moment †† A young woman discovers that the past is a different place †† A victim searches for her killer in the most unexpected location †† A serial killer seeks retribution for his press nickname †† A young man explores noir and sex in Paris †† A woman scorned tries to rebuild her life with deadly results †† An abused wife is faced with...

Build software that combines Python’s expressivity with the performance and control of C (and C++). It’s possible with Cython, the compiler and hybrid programming language used by foundational packages such as NumPy, and prominent in projects including Pandas, h5py, and scikits-learn. In this practical guide, you’ll learn how to use Cython to improve Python’s performance—up to 3000x— and to wrap C and C++ libraries in Python with ease.Author Kurt Smith takes you through Cython’s ca...

More spine-tingling tales of Lovecraftian horror inspired by the classic novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth**—with stories from Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and more**Respected horror anthologist Stephen Jones edits this collection of 17 stories inspired by the 20th century’s master of horror, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, in which a young man goes to an isolated, desolate fishing village in Mass...