Westerns Books

Without previewing this book, I ordered it as the primary textbook for a graduate level course I was teaching in International HR Management. The table of contents looked comprehensive and since it was written by a couple of Australians, I thought it had to be good. Not so. Although the field of international human resource management is interesting and exciting, this book was not. Excessively wordy and academic, it was excruciatingly boring to read. My students unanimously gave it a thumbs-down.

I have had several copies of this book (I keep buying them because I keep giving my copies away). My criticism is simply aesthetic - this particular issue of The Kybalion is poorly formatted and contains numerous errors. The best copy I had has a picture of two hands on the cover...

Besides all that, this book is amazing. Hands down the most powerful thing I have ever read.

This book is a must for any serious student of spirituality, I read this book as a teen and did not appreciate it, recently I decided to purchase a copy and reread it, I found myself having many Neo moments, I would read a little paragraph and go whoaaaaaaaa like when Morpheous showed Neo how to jump across the building with out hitting the pavement lol. I find myself savoring the words and nodding my head in agreement. the Kybalion is something that is inherent in man/woman his/her spirituality and their connection with the mental universe. it put into words what I had always felt deep in my soul and at this stage in my spiritual evolution I can appreciate it and be filled with hope for humans and this planet once again.

A thought provoking, crystal-clear, concise and simple yet extremely effective explanation of the "holy grail" of ancient wisdom, the much elusive "philosopher's stone" sought after through millennia of intelligent human questioning and versed in countless forms of myth, philosophy, religion, esoterism and science throughout the whole planet.
A must for the honest, open minded and unbiased truth seeker of our times, regardless of ideological background or creed.
In our view, a priceless contribution to a much needed new era not only of knowledge but of wisdom and awareness.
"When the ears of the student are ready to hear, then cometh the lips to fill them with wisdom".
Brilliant and unmissable!
A great thank you to "The Three Initiates".

This book covers a lot of territory and other reviewers have spoken their minds. Some comments here on one aspect of the teaching: In all our minds, there is a masculine principle and a feminine principle, also called the "I" and the "Me". Vibrations from the "I" stimulate the "Me" and creativity results. Writers, composers, visual artists and inventors create in this way. The "I" consists mostly of will and the "Me" consists mostly of imagination. If these two principles work harmonously in a person, the result is creative originality. Interesting theory as to how we create.

This is a wonderful book. I would recommend it to anyone on the Path.

Some readers might find some parts slow going, but this classic work remains an excellent introduction into how and why our understanding of the heavens (and ourselves) changed so radically following the work of Copernicus. Those interested in reading Kuhn's seminal and more famous "The Stucture of Scientific Revolutions" will enjoy reading "Copernicus" to see how his thinking grew from this earlier work.

I asked my son when he was 4 years old why the Sun moved across the sky over the day. He answered me "because the earth turns". This seems like an obvious answer even for a 4 year old, but 400 years ago his response would be meet with ridicule and even worse would be considered heresy. Thomas S. Kuhn is able to beautifully and logically describe from a scientific perspective the ideas and discoveries through the ages that lead to the enormous conceptual leap from a geocentric to heliocentric world. This alone makes this book a great read. But what I valued more from the book is Kuhn's revealing of the impact of the "Copernican Revolution" outside the scientific world. It's influence on religion, society and the entire scientific process is still felt today. The idea of a heliocentric universe was not only a great scientific theory, it was really a turning point in the human race and how we see ourselves in the universe. I would also recommend "The book nobody read" and "Galileo's Daughter" as more modern follow ups to "The Copernican Revolution".

Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution was written as a text for an undergraduate course in the intellectual history of science. As such, its approach is focused and temporally expansive. The drawback of such an approach is the deficit of analysis in key areas. The analysis of the Church's role in science during the late middle ages and Renaissance was rather one-dimensional, but this obviously is not Kuhn's focus. Instead, he would like the reader to realize that any set of data can be modeled to an infinite number of paradigms (in anticipation of Structure of Scientific Revolutions). The heliocentric argument solved some qualitative problems but was largely Ptolemaic in articulation. Its aesthetic and geometric harmonies were extracted by astronomers who could could apply a mathematical rigor to it, in a post-Ptolemaic tradition (Kepler and Newton).

Kuhn challenges the reader's imagination to decipher the heavenly phenomena in the same way Ptolemy might have, without being hampered by the technical minutia of astronomy. He writes so lucidly as to pick the reader up and drop him or her under the ancient sky, and to follow a long, through time. Paramount to Kuhn is the practical importance of astronomical data and the logic of its categorization.

Perhaps the most persuasive analysis that Kuhn endeavors is that of the progression of the Renaissance neo-Platonics: Brahe, Galilei, Kepler, Descartes, and the mutation of the Copernican system into Newtonian synthesis. In one sense, his analysis is very non-Kuhnian as it can't point to a singular moment, and involves more of a patchwork of adopting new features (that is until Newton).

A concise introduction to the evolution of astronomical thought from antiquity to newton and a compelling classic.

This is a great overview of the development of the Copernican system. The main text is very clear and readable and the "technical appendix" has good expositions of key mathematical arguments. Nevertheless, I think Kuhn's interpretation of "the Copernican revolution" has some shortcomings. Kuhn wishes the Copernican revolution to conform to his idea (as presented in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) of a revolution brought on by a crisis: "[Copernicus'] famous preface still provides one of the classic descriptions of a crisis state" and "Ptolemaic astronomy had failed to solve its problems; the time had come to give a competitor a chance." But Kuhn does not support this position very well. For instance he writes: "When Copernicus listed the aspects of contemporary astronomy that had led him to consider his radical theory, he began, 'For, first, the mathematicians are so unsure of the movements of the Sun and the Moon that they cannot even explain or observe the constant length of the seasonal year.'" Here Kuhn is using a rather underhand trick. He is implying, of course, that this calendar issue was Copernicus' primary motivation, but fails to address two crucial counterarguments. First, Copernicus' preface is addressed to the Pope and he is clearly interested in emphasising that "my labors contribute somewhat even to the Commonwealth of the Church, of which your Holiness is now Prince," mentioning specifically how the calendar issue was a concern for Leo X, etc. Second, when Copernicus says "first...", he does not mean "first" as in "most important," for he continues with a "second" and then reaches "the chief point of all." This chief point of all is the fact that the Copernican model has a beautiful implication: the planetary distances. A geocentric model cannot give such information because we could scale the orbit of Saturn, say, to make it twice as big and it would still look exactly the same seen from earth. But in a heliocentric model the distances are determined because if we scaled the orbit of Saturn then it would look the same seen from the sun but different seen from earth. So with the earth in the center we cannot determine planetary distances because we are the center of scaling, but with the sun in the center we would notice scaling and thus the planetary distances are locked, or, as Copernicus puts it, "this correlation binds together so closely the order and the magnitudes of all the planets and of their spheres or orbital circles and the heavens themselves that nothing can be shifted around in any part of them without disrupting the remaining parts and the universe as a whole." Thus he can claim triumphantly that earlier astronomers "have not been able to discover or to infer the chief point of all, i.e., the form of the world and the certain commensurability of its parts. But they are in exactly the same fix as someone taking from different places hands, feet, head, and the other limbs---shaped very beautifully but not with reference to one body and without correspondence to one another---so that such parts made up a monster rather than a man." (I'm using the translation from Goldoni's excellent article in the Mathematical Intelligencer.) Kuhn admits that the Copernicus' determination of the planetary distances is "crucially important" but dismisses it as the main reason for the acceptance of the theory: "'Harmony' seems a strange basis on which to argue for the earth's motion... Copernicus' arguments are not pragmatic. They appeal, if at all, not to the utilitarian sense of the practising astronomer but to his aesthetic sense and to that alone. ... New harmonies did not increase accuracy or simplicity. Therefore they could and did appeal primarily to that limited and perhaps irrational subgroup of mathematical astronomers whose Neoplatonic ear for mathematical harmonies could not be obstructed by page after page of complex mathematics leading finally to numerical predictions scarcely better than those they had before." The correct reading---beauty before truth---is staring Kuhn in the face but he refuses to recognise it, opting instead to dismiss Copernicus as "strange" and Kepler as "irrational."

"The Copernican Revolution" tells the epochal story of how the earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy was replaced by the sun-centered cosmology of Copernicus and Kepler. The book is a classic. Kuhn understood how ideas influence each other and hang together in a system. He could write with equal erudition about observational astronomy, medieval theology, astrology, and Aristotelian physics.

"The Copernican Revolution" is a trove of historical and intellectual insights. Perhaps the main lesson is that scientific progress is not a simple matter of theory being adapted to observation. Multiple theories can account for the same observations, theories have complex non-observational bases of support, and extra-theoretical assumptions provided by "common sense" (such as the immobility of the earth) can be highly contingent products of a culture. Scientific progress is never guaranteed. Erroneous theories -- such as the theory placing the earth at the center of the universe -- can hold sway for centuries and generate a vast body of supporting evidence, only to fall out of sync with new observations and a new climate of opinion -- at which point they can hang on tenaciously, or collapse "suddenly" over the course of a generation or two. It all comes down to history.

Kuhn's great contribution to thought was to situate the history of science within the history of ideas -- he treated scientific theories as the products of cultures, institutions, and sheer accidents, not as deliverances of pure logic. "The Copernican Revolution" is fantastic and should be ready by anyone who enjoyed and learned from "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It's become fashionable to bash Kuhn lately but his books have a secure place in the canon of history and philosophy of science. Six stars!

Kant is one of those modern philosophers whose presence looms large over much of what has been achieved over the past couple of centuries in modern philosophy, and yet he is not very likely to be read in most introductory philosophy classes. Part of the difficulty lies with Kant's highly technical and oftentimes convoluted use of language, which gave even his contemporaries who were native German speakers some difficulties. The philosophers and scholars have since had a chance to debate, oftentimes vehemently, the "true" meaning of Kant's works and it is unlikely that those debates will end any time soon. With such formidable baggage, it would be very difficult for an absolute novice in philosophy to just plunge into Kant's work and start reading it on its own. A good first exposition by an expert is invaluable and this thin volume serves exactly such purpose. It does a remarkable job of delineating the scope of Kant's thought and bringing this philosopher to life for the new generation of readers.

It's a pretty good introduction, I'd recommend reading several introductions to Kant before diving in (he's pretty dense). I think Goethe said that reading Kant was like walking into a well-lit room, I hardly think he was talking about Kant's dry, scholastic writing style. The clarity of his thought, however, is pretty intense. I do recommend this book, merely because jumping straight into Kant probably isn't going to fare well. When, and if, you do choose to read Kant, take a look at Jonathan Bennett's website (a philosopher and Kant scholar), I think he translates Kant into more readable English. Early Modern Texts or something. I agree with some of the other commentators, that this introduction is kinda hard for a first time look into Kant. A history of philosophy book might be your best bet to read first. It is pretty good for such a short introduction though. Take your time and don't do it in a day. Digest it. Good luck all.

Immanuel Kant's life work focused on solving the mistakes of the rationalist philosophy that he had learned from men, like Gottfried Leibnitz, and the mistakes of the empiricist philosophy that he was so intrigued with through the writings of David Hume. Kant wants to move beyond the mistakes both schools of philosophy made and synthesize their truths into a new philosophical understanding of knowledge. Rationalist philosophers held the view that all knowledge came from the exercise of reason alone, unpolluted by the view of any experience held by the observer. "Reality itself is accessible to reason alone, since only reason can rise above the individual point of view and participate in the vision of ultimate necessities, which is also God's." Thus, Leibnitz argues that human understanding contained certain innate principles known to be true, which when used with our ability to reason, could explain all questions in and of the world. Rationalists were convinced that experience was not a reliable tool to gain knowledge of the world. The rationalist method was very convincing and was the dominant school of philosophy in Kant's day. The criticism of rationalist philosophy was that you had to "trust" in reason to be able to deduce answers.

On the other hand, empiricist philosophers believed that knowledge of the world was only possible through learning by experience. Hume "denies the possibility of knowledge through reason, since reason cannot operate without ideas, and ideas are acquired only through the senses." Hume and other empiricist philosophers argued that without observing proof of something, the observer could not have knowledge of it. Knowledge of the world, for Hume, is knowledge of the world through the eyes of the observer. Hume argues that reason can only provide relationships between ideas; reason cannot produce ideas on its own or provide facts. Hume was even distrustful of the writings and teachings of others being capable of providing answers. "The only experience that can confirm anything for me is my experience." Hume's skepticism even rises to the level of doubting the existence of self. Thus, Hume earns the moniker of "the Great Skeptic." Hume's skepticism is in direct contradiction to the rationalist philosopher, Rene Descartes, whose rationalist investigations led him to utter the famous words, "Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am." The criticism of empiricist philosophy is that we can be sure of so little, since one can actually prove through direct observation so little in the world. For Kant, Hume puts so much of scientific thought into question since Hume doubts the concept of causality occurring in nature. Thus, Kant says it was Hume who "awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers." Kant so desperately wants to solve the philosophical dichotomy between these two schools.

Kant believes that both schools make the same fundamental mistake in their approach to the question of epistemology. He argued that philosophers were essentially asking the wrong question, which was, how we can bring ourselves to understand the world. Kant said the real question to ask was how the world comes to be understood by us. Kant will solve this dichotomy between the two schools in his first book Critique of Pure Reason.

This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, and literature.

Kant is clearly one of the 4 or 5 most influential thinkers of the last half-century, however, the complexity of his ideas combined with an often difficult writing style (for modern readers) makes for a difficult study. In order to get the most out of Kant (or to get through him at all, for that matter), it is essential to read and study modern introductions and commentaries first. This "very short introduction" is an excellent example. It is concise, highly readable, and a good beginning for more detailed study. However, it is still not enough to allow one to tackle Kant immediately and I suggest further introductory study.

This is an heroic attempt by Scruton to summarize the entire philosophy of one the most important thinkers of all time. Unfortunately, Kant was also not the greatest writer of all time and often made his own great insights almost incomprehensible to the casual reader. Scruton does a wonderful job of making Kant clear.

not only for photographers.
But if you do like making more interesting pictures there is plenty of precise and useful information about where and when and how make a nice picture of animals or geisers!

I bought three books to prepare for two days photographing Yellowstone National Park and this was the best. It was very helpful for planning times of day to be in various locations and prioritizing stops. My favorite photo was the rainbow on Lower Falls that occured exactly when the author said it would. If you love photography and don't have a lot of time in the park, this book is a must have!

Gustav Verderber was right on the money about everything in this book. If you only have a week to explore, save yourself some time and follow his instructions. He has mapped out when the rainbows appear on the falls, gives advice on where to photograph wildlife. Some of the trails he mentions in his book have since been closed due to erosion or wildlife management but if you talk with the Park Ranger Service (not Xanterra!) you should be able to find a comparable walk to capture the images.

The book may be beneath the experienced photographer but for an amateur who just wants better vacation photos and does not have the luxury to spend a year in the park getting them, this is the perfect guide!

I didnt even know I liked Economics until I read this book. It is very helpful and really shows you how economics effects your life everyday!

i think the econ book is great except that it is for econ and I'm not very good at econ.

The book arrived quickly. There are two books with the same title by this author. One is a study guide and the other is the text. I initally bought the paperback not knowing the difference until I had a reading assignment beyond chapter 18. The quick response allowed me to stay current with my assignments. Thanks.

A must buy for the personal library of any future economics major. While most economics textbooks are dubbed as "dry" and "incomprehensible," this text fully acquaints the reader with fundamental economic principles in English that is clear and simple to understand, all the while maintaining the importance of the concepts. Despite the fact that McEachern does not explore (in any depth) the complex mathematical facet of economics, he covers well the basic theories of supply and demand, the market system, and the fundamental principles of both micro and macro economics. The graphs and other visual displays are clear and can be followed by anyone with a firm background in basic algebra.

Even though some very important concepts are simply "grazed" at the mere tip of the iceberg, this nonetheless functions relatively well with the book's overall intent to provide the reader with a firm knowledge of basic concepts. While this particular text wouldn't be used in the curriculum for an advanced seminar in economics, it would perform well as the "lay terms" manual for students that can't make heads or tails of the algorithms and complex functions and language of their college text.

All in all, McEachern's ECONOMICS: A CONTEMPORARY INTRODUCTION is a must-have for any and all future business, political science, and certainly economics majors.