Hailed by The Comics Journal as one of Europe’s most important and innovative comics artists, David B. has created a masterpiece in Epileptic, his... stunning and emotionally resonant autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother. Epileptic gathers together and makes available in English for the first time all six volumes of the internationally acclaimed graphic work.David B. was born Pierre-François Beauchard in a small town near Orléans, France. He spent an idyllic early childhood playing with the neighborhood kids and, along with his older brother, Jean-Christophe, ganging up on his little sister, Florence. But their lives changed abruptly when Jean-Christophe was struck with epilepsy at age eleven. In search of a cure, their parents dragged the family to acupuncturists and magnetic therapists, to mediums and macrobiotic communes. But every new cure ended in disappointment as Jean-Christophe, after brief periods of remission, would only get worse.Angry at his brother for abandoning him and at all the quacks who offered them false hope, Pierre-François learned to cope by drawing fantastically elaborate battle scenes, creating images that provide a fascinating window into his interior life. An honest and horrifying portrait of the disease and of the pain and fear it sowed in the family, Epileptic is also a moving depiction of one family’s intricate history. Through flashbacks, we are introduced to the stories of Pierre-François’s grandparents and we relive his grandfathers’ experiences in both World Wars. We follow Pierre-François through his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, all the while charting his complicated relationship with his brother and Jean-Christophe”s losing battle with epilepsy. Illustrated with beautiful and striking black-and-white images, Epileptic is as astonishing, intimate, and heartbreaking as the best literary memoir.From the Hardcover edition.

A funny and searching trio of stories from the bestselling author of Run with the Horsemen. Each of these novella-length tales focuses on an epiphany,... and in each, Sams displays the warmth, humor, and wisdom that have delighted readers for years.

An astounding novel from Argentina that is a meditation on the beautiful and the grotesque in nature, the art of landscape painting, and one experience... in a man's life that became a lightning rod for inspiration.An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.

Professor Honsberger has succeeded in 'finding' and 'extricating' unexpected and little known properties of such fundamental figures as triangles,... results that deserve to be better known. He has laid the foundations for his proofs with almost entirely synthetic methods easily accessible to students of Euclidean geometry early on. While in most of his other books Honsberger presents each of his gems, morsels, and plums, as self contained tidbits, in this volume he connects chapters with some deductive treads. He includes exercises and gives their solutions at the end of the book. In addition to appealing to lovers of synthetic geometry, this book will stimulate also those who, in this era of revitalizing geometry, will want to try their hands at deriving the results by analytic methods. Many of the incidence properties call to mind the duality principle; other results tempt the reader to prove them by vector methods, or by projective transformations, or complex numbers.

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know.... In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. Her work highlights the diversity of these cultures of knowing and, in its depiction of their differences--in the meaning of the empirical, the enactment of object relations, and the fashioning of social relations--challenges the accepted view of a unified science. By many accounts, contemporary Western societies are becoming "knowledge societies"--which run on expert processes and expert systems epitomized by science and structured into all areas of social life. By looking at epistemic cultures in two sample cases, this book addresses pressing questions about how such expert systems and processes work, what principles inform their cognitive and procedural orientations, and whether their organization, structures, and operations can be extended to other forms of social order. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice,... in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice. The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

Sophisticated yet accessible and easy to read, this introduction to contemporary philosophical questions about knowledge and rationality goes beyond... the usual bland survey of the major current views to show that there is argument involved. Throughout, the author provides a fair and balanced blending of the standard positions on epistemology with his own carefully reasoned positions or stances into the analysis of each concept. Epistemological Questions. The Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Modifying the Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Evidentialist Theories of Justification. Non-evidentialist Theories of Knowledge and Justification. Skepticism. Epistemology and Science. Relativism. For anyone interested in the philosophy of knowledge and rationality.

Epistemology, or “the theory of knowledge,” is concerned with how we know what we know, what justifies us in believing what we believe, and what... standards of evidence we should use in seeking truths about the world and human experience.  This comprehensive introduction to the field of epistemology explains the concepts and theories central to understanding knowledge. Along with covering the traditional topics of the discipline in detail, Epistemology explores emerging areas of research.  The third edition features new sections on such topics as the nature of intuition, the skeptical challenge of rational disagreement, and “the value problem” – the range of questions concerning why knowledge and justified true belief have value beyond that of merely true belief.  Updated and expanded, Epistemology remains a superb introduction to one of the most fundamental fields of philosophy.    Special features of the third edition of Epistemology include: a comprehensive survey of basic concepts, major theories, and emerging research in the field enhanced treatment of key topics such as contextualism, perception (including perceptual content), scientific hypotheses, self-evidence and the a priori, testimony, understanding, and virtue epistemology expanded discussion of the relation between epistemology and related fields, especially philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics increased clarity and ease of understanding for an undergraduate audience an updated list of key literature and annotated bibliography.  

New and thoroughly updated, Epistemology: An Anthology continues to represent the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of canonical readings... in the theory of knowledge. Concentrates on the central topics of the field, such as skepticism and the Pyrrhonian problematic, the definition of knowledge, and the structure of epistemic justification Offers coverage of more specific topics, such as foundationalism vs coherentism, and virtue epistemology Presents wholly new sections on 'Testimony, Memory, and Perception' and 'The Value of Knowledge' Features modified sections on 'The Structure of Knowledge and Justification', 'The Non-Epistemic in Epistemology', and 'The Nature of the Epistemic' Includes many of the most important contributions made in recent decades by several outstanding authors

Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology (the theory of human knowledge and reasoning). Their approach aims... to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical data, Bishop and Trout show how people can improve their reasoning by relying on Statistical Prediction Rules (SPRs). They then develop and articulate the positive core of the book. Their view, Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning.This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy.

How do we know what we know? What have wisdom, prudence and studiousness to do with justifying our beliefs? Jay Wood begins this introduction to... epistemology by taking an extended look at the idea of knowing within the context of the intellectual virtues. He then surveys current views of foundationalism, epistemic justification and reliabilism. Finally he examines the relationship of epistemology to religious belief, and the role of emotions and virtues in proper cognitive functioning Professors will find this text, with its many examples drawn from everyday student experience, especially useful in introducing students to the formal study of epistemology.

In Epistemology, Laurence Bonjour introduces the serious philosophy student to the history and concepts of epistemology, while simultaneously... challenging them to take an active part in its ongoing debates. The text reflects BonJour's conviction that the place to start any discussion of the theories of knowledge is with the classical problems, beginning with and centered around Descartes. Only after the groundwork for understanding epistemology is laid does BonJour move on to the more contemporary revolutions against the classical approach. A versatile text that can be used in introductory-level epistemology courses, it can also be used by an upper-level epistemology class when supplemented by appropriate readings. This book is not, however, a simple reader of the different theories of knowledge. Epistemology prods students to think independently about the various epistemological approaches presented in the text, and form their own conclusions, thus becoming active participants in the ongoing debate.