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Ecologists traditionally regard time as part of the background against which ecological interactions play out. In this book, Eric Post argues that time should be treated as a resource used by organisms for growth, maintenance, and offspring production. Post uses insights from phenology--the study of the timing of life-cycle events--to present a theoretical framework of time in ecology that casts long-standing observations in the field in an entirely new light. Combining conceptual models with field data, he demonstrates how phenological advances, delays, and stasis, documented in an array of taxa, can all be viewed as adaptive components of an organism's strategic use of time. Post shows how the allocation of time by individual organisms to critical life history stages is not only a response to environmental cues but also an important driver of interactions at the population, species, and community levels. To demonstrate the applications of this exciting new conceptual framework, Time in Ecology uses meta-analyses of previous studies as well as Post's original data on the phenological dynamics of plants, caribou, and muskoxen in Greenland.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. The reason we exist: The meaning of meaning
• Solving the riddle of the human species
• Evolution and our inner conflict
• 2. The unity of knowledge: The new enlightenment
• The all-importance of the humanities
• The driving force of social evolution
• 3. Other worlds: Humanity lost in a pheromone world
• The superorganisms
• Why microbes rule the galaxy
• A portrait of E.T.
• The collapse of biodiversity
• 4. Idols of the mind: Instinct
• Religion
• Free will
• 5. A human future: Alone and free in the universe.

In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence-from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch, " which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere, " here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species, " "Free Will, " or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T., " Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Much ado about nothing / Anthony Everett, Thomas Hofweber
• Pleonastic Fregianism and empty names / Stephen Schiffer
• Emptiness without compromise / Kenneth A. Taylor
• Referentialism and empty names / Anthony Everett
• On myth / Avrom Faderman
• Existence as metaphor? / Kendall Walton
• Negative Existentials / Fred Kroon
• Pretense theory and abstract object theory / Edward N. Zalta
• Making up stories / Harry Deutsch
• Real people in unreal contexts / Stacie Friend
• Semantic pretense / Mark Richard
• Quantification and fictional discourse / Peter van Inwagen
• Quantification and non-existent objects / Thomas Hofweber
• A paradox of existence / Stephen Yablo.

Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzle of Non-Existence contains 13 important new papers concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors, some of the most important researchers working in these fields, develop and defend new positions on these matters and offer important new criticisms of the existing approaches. The book contains a comprehensive introductory essay by the editors which provides a survey of the philosophical issues concerning empty names, the various responses to these issues, and the literature to date. The book will be of special interest to philosophers of language and to those interested in metaphysics and the nature of fiction.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction Jean-Pierre Dupuy--
• 1. Who is fooled? Donald Davidson--
• 2. Two paradoxes of self-deception Alfred Mele--
• 3. Rationality and self-deception Jean-Pierre Dupuy--
• 4. Comments John Ferejohn--
• 5. (Apparent) paradoxes of self-deception Kent Bach--
• 6. Madness and the divided self Mark Anspach, Larry Beyer, and Amela Lazar.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Self-deception is one of the topics that lends itself best to the task of exploring the possibilities of cross-fertilization between 'continental philosophy' and 'analytic philosophy'. Fifty years ago, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre defined the core notion of 'Bad Faith' as lying to oneself. On the other side of the Atlantic, self-deception has become one of the most exciting puzzles in the philosophy of mind, and a number of paradoxes encountered by the theory of rational choice involve that very same notion. One of the objectives is to show that bridges can be thrown over the gap between the two traditions, but also that both of them make self-deception too intrapsychic and suffer from a serious individualistic bias. The conference was intended to explore the intersubjective and social dimensions of self-deception.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This collection of essays brings together a whole range of Wilson's thinking, as he turns his attention to snakes and sharks, ants and hyenas. Previous works by the author include "On Human Nature".
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• A model for knowledge and its properties-- completeness and complexity - results and techniques-- knowledge in distributed systems-- actions and protocols-- common knowledge, co-ordination and agreement-- evolving knowledge-- dealing with logical omniscience-- knowledge and computation-- common knowledge revisited.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Reasoning about knowledge - particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge - was once the exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers. More recently, this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the analysis of distributed computer algorithms. "Reasoning About Knowledge" provides a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. It brings eight years of work by the authors into a cohesive framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable. The book is almost completely self-contained and should be accessible to readers in a variety of disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and game theory. Each chapter includes exercises and bibliographic notes.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Free lunch - introductory remarks on the concept of artificial and virtual reality-- flying high - the origins of computer simulation-- virtually there - the concept of "virtual" in computing, the mysterious ability of computers to be able to be bigger and more powerful than they really are-- computer universe - a look at the limits of what can be simulated using a computer, and at the claim that the universe itself might be in a computer-- made up minds - the greatest challenge of simulation - reproducing human thought - the evidence so far seems to show that this is in practice, perhaps in principle, impossible-- euphoria - the origins of the idea of virtual reality are traced back to 1960s drug culture, some of its claims are revealed to be more matters of marketing than technology-- cyberspace - the concept of cyberspace, central to virtual reality, is a way of making sense of the information era and media age, what sort of space is it?-- stories - the emergence of critical theory and its influence over our concept of reality-- hyperreality - the Gulf War as a case study for the postmodern-- reality - the scientific conception of reality is itself being forced to change in response to strange phenomena discovered in the subatomic realm-- virtual reality - how the changing perspective of reality in science and cultural theory is reflected in the concept of cirtual reality, a sceptical examination of the claim that fiction is a virutal reality, that even reality is a virtual reality.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Virtual reality was originally used to describe a specific technology, comprising of a pair of goggles, with TV screens for eyepieces and a sensor for monitoring orientation and position. With the goggles on, the wearer sees a computer-generated image on the screens. When the head moves, the image on the screen moves correspondingly, thus giving the sense of being in a "real" space. From a refinement of arcade game and flight simulator technology, virtual reality is travelling towards complete immersion in "artificial" space, to the point where the subject is not just sensing an artificial world but is part of it. In "Virtual Worlds", Benjamin Woolley examines the reality of virtual reality. He looks at the dramatic intellectual and cultural upheavals that gave birth to it, at the hype that surrounds it, at the people who have promoted it, and at the dramatic implications of its development. Vitural reality is not simply a technology, it is a way of thinking created and promoted by a group of technologists and thinkers that sees itself as creating our future. "Virtual Worlds" reveals the politics and culture of these virtual realists, and examines whether they are creating reality, or losing their grasp of it.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)