Ignorance And Bliss On Wanting Not To Know 2024
Download Ignorance And Bliss On Wanting Not To Know 2024 PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Ignorance And Bliss On Wanting Not To Know 2024 book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Ignorance and Bliss
Author: Mark Lilla
language: en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: 2024-12-03
"A wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit . . . Invigorating." —John Banville, The Guardian A dazzling exploration of our wish to remain innocent and ignorant—and its consequences. Aristotle claimed that “all human beings want to know.” Our own experience proves that all human beings also want not to know. Today, centuries after the Enlightenment, mesmerized crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Why is this? Where does this will to ignorance come from, and how does it continue to shape our lives? In Ignorance and Bliss, the acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. With erudition and brio, Lilla ranges from the Book of Genesis and Plato’s dialogues to Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud, revealing the paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves. He also exposes the fantasies this impulse lead us to entertain—the illusion that the ecstasies of prophets, mystics, and holy fools offer access to esoteric truths; the illusion of children’s lamb-like innocence; and the nostalgic illusion of recapturing the glories of vanished and allegedly purer civilizations. The result is a highly original meditation that invites readers to consider their own deep-seated impulses and taboos. We want to know, we want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.
Bite
From the guilt-ridden mortician to the drunk vampire on the front lawn, from decaying castles to Chernobyl, this collection of stories bring you twenty-three tales that will leave a mark. Featuring stories involving vampires and other beings with teeth by Alice Austin, Raluca Balasa, Paul L. Bates, Evan Michael Baughfman, Ryan W. Benson, S.R. Bevilacqua, Hannah Birss, Jonah Buck, Kelli Etheridge, Lawrence Harding, R.J. Howell, MA Hoyler, Marshall J Moore, B.K. Loomis, AJ Martin, P. R. O’Leary, Rosalie A. Peng, Christopher Alex Ray, Michael Reed, Deborah Sheldon, J. Tonzelli, Valerie B. Williams, and John Wolf.
Science Societies
What role do science and technology play in society? What is the nature of expert knowledge? What is science’s relation to democracy? This introduction to science, technology, and society answers these questions, and more, by exploring contemporary research on topics such as expertise, activism, science policy, and innovation. It offers a comprehensive resource for considering the place that science and technology have in contemporary societies, and the roles that they can and should play. Accessible to a non-specialist audience, it draws on a rich range of cases and examples, from nuclear activism in India to content moderation in Kenya. Framing science as always social, and society as always shaped by science and technology, it asks: what worlds do we want science and technology to bring into being?