Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics

By Roger Penrose, Martin Gardner, Martin Gardner (Foreword by)

For decades, proponents of artificial intelligence have argued that computers will soon be doing everything that a human mind can do. Admittedly, computers now play chess at the grandmaster level, but do they understand the game as we do? Can a computer eventually do everything a human mind can do?
In this absorbing and frequently contentious book, Roger Penrose–eminent physicist and winner, with Stephen Hawking, of the prestigious Wolf prize–puts forward his view that there are some facets of human thinking that can never be emulated by a machine. Penrose examines what physics and mathematics can tell us about how the mind works, what they can’t, and what we need to know to understand the physical processes of consciousness.
He is among a growing number of physicists who think Einstein wasn’t being stubborn when he said his “little finger” told him that quantum mechanics is incomplete, and he concludes that laws even deeper than quantum mechanics are essential for the operation of a mind. To support this contention, Penrose takes the reader on a dazzling tour that covers such topics as complex numbers, Turing machines, complexity theory, quantum mechanics, formal systems, Godel undecidability, phase spaces, Hilbert spaces, black holes, white holes, Hawking radiation, entropy, quasicrystals, the structure of the brain, and scores of other subjects. Call Number Q325 .P415 1989

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Love’s Executioner

by Irvin D. Yalom, Randall Weingarten

Call # RC489 . E93 Y345 1990

Synopsis

The collection of ten absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients’ dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist. Not since Freud has an author done so much to clarify what goes on between a psychotherapist and a patient.

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Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture

By Linnell Secomb

Call Number: BD496 .S43 2007

Philosophy and Love introduces readers to philosophical reflections on love from Plato to the present. Bringing philosophy together with popular cultural analysis, Linnell Secomb provides an interesting and engaging account of theories of love throughout history. Along the way, reflections on same-sex desire, cross-cultural love, and internet romance are considered against the ideas of Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Derrida, and Fanon, and other contemporary cultural commentators on the human condition. The work also looks at cultural productions of love ranging from Sappho to Frankenstein by focusing on archetypal stories of love and love gone wrong. Philosophy and Love reveals an ethics and politics of love that discloses the paradoxes, conflicts, and intensity of human love relations.

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Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies

by Constantin V. Boundas

Call Number: B804 .C726 2007

Description not available

Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire

by Rajmohan Gandhi

Call Number: DS481 .G3 G2165 2008

This monumental biography of one of the most intriguing figures of the twentieth century, written by his grandson, is the first to give a complete and balanced account of Mahatma Gandhi’s remarkable life, the development of his beliefs and his political campaigns, and his complex relations with his family. Written with unprecedented insight and access to family archives, it reveals a life of contrasts and contradictions: the westernized Inner Temple lawyer who wore the clothes of India’s poorest and who spun cotton by hand, the apostle of nonviolence who urged Indians to enlist in the First World War, the champion of Indian independence who never hated the British. It tells of Gandhi’s campaigns against racial discrimination in South Africa and untouchability in India, tracks the momentous battle for India’s freedom, explores the evolution of Gandhi’s strategies of non-violent resistance, and examines relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, a question that attracted Gandhi’s passionate attention and one that persists around the world today. Published to rave reviews in India in 2007, this riveting book gives North American readers the true Gandhi, the man as well as the legend, for the first time. (Description by BarnesandNobles.com)

Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism

by Peter C. Myers

Call Number: E449 .D75 M94 2008

For Frederick Douglass, the iconic nineteenth-century slave and abolitionist, the foundations for his arguments in support of racial equality rested on natural rights and natural law—and the bold proclamation of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. But because many Americans never observed this principle—and in Douglass’s day even renounced it—he made it his life’s work to move the nation toward this vision of a more noble liberalism. Peter Myers now considers that effort and the natural rights arguments by which Douglass confronted race in America.

Myers examines the philosophic core of Douglass’s political thought, offering a greater understanding of its depth and coherence. He depicts Douglass as the leading thinker to apply the Founders’ doctrine of natural rights to the plight of African Americans—an activist who grounded his arguments on the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the inherent injustice not only of slavery but of any form of racial superiority.

Myers first reconsiders Douglass’s descriptive analysis of slavery, developing his arguments for its natural wrongness and for its natural weakness in conjunction with the right of resistance. He then examines Douglass’s understandings of civil government in general and of the U.S. constitutional order in particular, exploring his argument on the Constitution’s relation to slavery and his thoughts on the powers and duties of the federal and state governments in the matter of postslavery race relations—including new insight into Douglass’s controversial “do nothing” doctrine.

Myers argues that Douglass’s political thought at its core is both more coherent andmore defensible in substance than his critics acknowledge. He maintains that Douglass was right in finding the natural rights principles of the Declaration a sufficient theoretical basis for addressing the nation’s racial problems and contends that his hopefulness for the demise of slavery and white supremacy was marked by moderation and realism.

Myers finds in Douglass’s political thought the foundations of a revitalized argument for the mainstream civil rights, integrationist tradition of African American political thought. His analysis offers a new way of looking at an important thinker, as well as a compelling case for hoping that race relations in America will improve over time. (Description by BarnesandNobles.com)

Critical Perspectives on Al Qaeda

by April Isaacs

Call Number: HV6432.5 Q2 C75 2006

Description not available

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Call Number: G154.5 .G55 A3 2007

The celebrated author of The Last American Man creates an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion.

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Abortion: An Eternal Social and Moral Issue

by Sandra M. Alters

Call Number: HQ767.15 .A26 2008

No description available

Is There a Right to Remain Silent?: Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11

by Alan M. Dershowitz

Call Number KF9668 ,D47 2008

The prolific and opinionated Dershowitz (Rights from Wrongs), public personality and Harvard law professor, is provocative and erudite in this treatise on the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, which in his view may become a victim of the war on terror as America slides toward preventing violent acts rather than deterring them with threat of punishment. Replete with trademark Dershowitz flourishes, quotes from a wide range of sources including Jewish law, Emily Dickinson and his own college term paper, this is a serious examination of the constitutional ramifications of an unheralded 2003 Supreme Court decision, Chavez v. Martinez,that could allow the coercion of testimony from interrogation subjects as long as the information isn’t used against them in criminal prosecutions. Dershowitz is best at exploring the implications of this decision. His analysis is sometimes technical on the origin of the right to remain silent as well as its application to suspects, defendants and witnesses. Dershowitz believes current law is dangerously unsettled and, as such, an “anathema to democracy”; his conclusion is a measured but urgent call to fill the legal “black hole” that the narrow Chavez decision creates regarding a right we all take for granted. (Description by Publishers Weekly)