Thomas Edison spent the second half of his life in West Orange, about 10 miles from New York City. There he built his last and largest laboratory, where he developed motion pictures, improved the phonograph, and built an international business empire, earning over half of his 1,093 patents. The five laboratory buildings housed over 100 experimenters busily engaged in invention and innovation. As they turned ideas into commercial products, Edison surrounded the laboratory with factories tha...

For more than a century readers have found Herman Melville’s writing rich with philosophical ideas, yet there has been relatively little written about what, exactly, is philosophically significant about his work and why philosophers are so attracted to Melville in particular. This volume addresses this silence through a series of essays that: (1) examine various philosophical contexts for Melville’s work, (2) take seriously Melville’s writings as philosophy, and (3) consider how modern phi...

This anthology of hard-to-find primary documents provides a solid overview of the foundations of American media studies. Focusing on mass communication and society and how this research fits into larger patterns of social thought, this valuable collection features key texts covering the media studies traditions of the Chicago school, the effects tradition, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, and mass society theory. Where possible, articles are reproduced in their entirety to pres...

This book is concerned with the problem of how men actually think. The aim of these studies is to investigate not how thinking appears in textbooks on logic, but how it really functions in public life and in politics as an instrument of collective action.Philosophers have too long concerned themselves with their own thinking. When they wrote of thought, they had in mind primarily their own history, the history of philosophy, or quite special fields of knowledge such as mathematics o...

Beyond the Numbers presents a thought-provoking series of essays by leading authorities on issues of population and consumption. The essays both define the poles of debate and explore common ground beyond the polarized rhetoric.Specific chapters consider each of the broad topics addressed at the International Conference on Population and Development held in September 1994 in Cairo, Egypt. The essays are supplemented by sidebars and short articles featuring more-impassioned...

Repositions Bachelard as a critical and integral part of contemporary continental philosophy.Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and i...