My Mercedes Is Not for Sale is a rollicking, witty and insightful tale of an innocent abroad which captures the high-spirited adventure of a young journalist and paints a vivid portrait of West Africa through a surprise-filled journey into its thriving car cult. It has all the wit and charm of John Mole s bestselling Its All Greek to Me! and Peter Allison s Don t Run, Whatever You Do and the philosophical underpinnings of Robert Pirsig s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Dutch journalist Jeroen van Bergeijk came up with what seemed like a great scheme for making a quick profit: buy an old banger in Amsterdam and resell it in the Third World, where a market for clapped-out cars still thrives. His chariot of choice is a rusty 1988 Mercedes 190D with 140,000 miles on the clock; his route takes him from Holland through Morocco, across the Sahara, and into some of the least trodden parts of Africa. Van Bergeijk finds himself facing a driving challenge akin to a Dakar Road Rally but encounters obstacles never dreamed of by race-car drivers: active minefields, occasional banditry mostly by the border guards and a teenaged, chain-smoking desert guide with a fondness for Tupac lyrics. Food and water are scarce, sandstorms are frequent, and all he has to patch up his many car breakdowns thousands of miles from civilization is a bar of soap, some duct tape, and a pair of women's tights. Then there's the coup he lived through. My Mercedes Is Not for Sale captures more than the adventure it vividly portrays the impact of globalization on Africa through an adventurous and sometimes dangerous journey into its thriving car culture.

The author’s most famous and well-loved work, the Starbridge series, six self-contained yet interconnected novels that explore the history of the Church of England through the 20th century.

This book offers an original philosophical perspective on exemplarity. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s later work and Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, it argues that examples are not static entities but rather oscillate between singular and universal moments. There is a broad consensus that exemplary cases mediate between singular instances and universal concepts or norms. In the first part of the book, Mácha contends that there is a kind of différance between singular examples and general exemplars or paradigms. Every example is, in part, also an exemplar, and vice versa. Furthermore, he develops a paracomplete approach to the logic of exemplarity, which allows us to say of an exemplar of X neither that it is an X nor that it is not an X. This paradox is structurally isomorphic to Russell’s paradox and can be addressed in similar ways. In the second part of the book, Mácha presents four historical studies that exemplify the ideas developed in the first part. This part begins with Plato’s Forms, understood as standards/paradigms, before considering Kant’s theory of reflective judgment as a general epistemological account of exemplarity. This is then followed by analyses of Hegel’s conceptual moment of particularity and Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. The book concludes by discussing the speculative hypothesis that all our knowledge is based on paradigms, which, following the logic of exemplarity, are neither true nor false. The Philosophy of Exemplarity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, logic, history of philosophy, and literary theory.

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