The popular stereotype of the scientist as mad boffin or weedy nerd has been peddled widely in film and fiction, with the implication that the world of science is far removed from the intellectual and emotional messiness of other human activities. In Passionate Minds, distinguished scientist Lewis Wolpert investigates the style and motivation of some of the most eminent scientists in the world. In this stimulating collection of conversations, scientists in fields as diverse as particle physics and evolutionary biology explore how their backgrounds have shaped their careers and discoveries - how being an outsider or an "innocent" can play an invaluable role in overcoming conventional barriers to new understanding. Being a little crazy does seem to help. As Nobel laureate for physics Sheldon Glashow says, "If you would simply take all the kookiest ideas of the early 1970s and put them together you would have made for yourself the theory which is, in fact, the correct theory of nature, so it was like madness..." These personal explorations with individual scientists are not only accessible and truly fascinating in their insights into the minds of some of the greatest men and women of science, but they also provide a strong case that the life and works of our leading scientists are at least as illuminating and interesting as the personalities of the latest literary prizewinners. A sequel to A Passion for Science, this book will delight and intrigue scientists and non-scientists alike.

It was 1733 when the poet and philosopher Voltaire met Emilie du Châtelet, a beguiling—and married—aristocrat who would one day popularize Newton’s arcane ideas and pave the way for Einstein’s theories. In an era when women were rarely permitted any serious schooling, this twenty-seven-year-old’s nimble conversation and unusual brilliance led Voltaire, then in his late thirties, to wonder, “Why did you only reach me so late?” They fell immediately and passionately in love.Through the prism of their tumultuous fifteen-year relationship we see the crumbling of an ancient social order and the birth of the Enlightenment. Together the two lovers rebuilt a dilapidated and isolated rural chateau at Cirey where they conducted scientific experiments, entertained many of the leading thinkers of the burgeoning scientific revolution, and developed radical ideas about the monarchy, the nature of free will, the subordination of women, and the separation of church and state. But their time together was filled with far more than reading and intellectual conversation. There were frantic gallopings across France, sword fights in front of besieged German fortresses, and a deadly burning of Voltaire’s books by the public executioner at the base of the grand stairwell of the Palais de Justice in Paris. The pair survived court intrigues at Versailles, narrow escapes from agents of the king, a covert mission to the idyllic lakeside retreat of Frederick the Great of Prussia, forays to the royal gambling tables (where Emilie put her mathematical acumen to lucrative use), and intense affairs that bent but did not break their bond.Along with its riveting portrait of Voltaire as a vulnerable romantic, Passionate Minds at last does justice to the supremely unconventional life and remarkable achievements of Emilie du Châtelet—including her work on the science of fire and the nature of light. Long overlooked, her story tells us much about women’s lives at the time of the Enlightenment. Equally important, it demonstrates how this graceful, quick-witted, and attractive woman worked out the concepts that would lead directly to the “squared” part of Einstein’s revolutionary equation: E=mc2.Based on a rich array of personal letters, as well as writings from houseguests, neighbors, scientists, and even police reports, Passionate Minds is both panoramic and intimate in feeling. It is an unforgettable love story and a vivid rendering of the birth of modern ideas.

Consciousness, declares Robin Fox, is "out of context." Useful as an adaptation in the Stone Age, it brought humanity to the top of the food chain but has now created a world it cannot control. The Passionate Mind explores this paradox not through academic demonstration but through satiric dialogues, blank-verse ruminations, lyric, narrative and comic verse, and Aesopian fables. This mix of genres and styles forces us out of our usual linear modes of thinking to confront a harsh thesis. Because of consciousness we cannot operate without ideas, but once in thrall to ideas--whether of love, power, religion, or ideology--we cannot operate without destructiveness lest we become imprisoned by them. The range of subjects and genres Fox covers includes a verse summary of the key points of human evolution, a conference of farm animals ruminating on their social problems, visions of a desperate future from a neolithic hunter and a shaman at Lascaux, Kafkaesque trial scenes, and a new version of "God is dead." George Washington, having lost at Yorktown is put on trial with Adams, Jefferson, and Benedict Arnold giving evidence. Through the persona of Humbert Humbert as decadent Europe, the new world of Lolita/America is faced with the consequences of its pursuit of happiness. Scandinavian utopianism and salvation through romantic eros get their turn, and the basic "design failure" of humanity is examined in a Platonic dialogue. A bullfight and the struggle for existence in New Jersey farming lead up to a monologue from a decidedly unlikely Jesus who turns out to be part of an alien plan to control an otherwise out of control human race. Through this kaleidoscopic mix, Fox mounts a case for a thorough revision of consciousness that breaks "realistic" boundaries between science, the humanities, religion, and myth. "If ever there was a book to show that there is more than one way to say' anthropology, this is it."--Ivan Brady, American Anthropologist "A beautiful, strange worka wild, free book."--Dame Iris Murdoch Robin Fox is University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University and the author of Conjectures and Confrontations, Reproduction and Succession, and The Challenge of Anthropology, all available from Transaction.

In The Passionate Mind, Joel Kramer asserts that "what we believe determines much of what we think and do: the way we move, the way we respond to people, how we think of ourselves, how we see the world in general." His basic message, stated in short, clear prose, is that passion is to be found only in the present moment, and mainly through becoming aware of the thoughts flowing through our minds, and through the primal process of observing our thoughts, they begin to self-correct. From the author of The Guru Papers, The Passionate Mind is a wonderful journey for anyone seeking to discover how to look at oneself.

An important and original reading of Descartes' account of mind-body unity and his theory of mind.

This collection of work is an analysis and investigation into Maxine Greene, the most important philosopher of education in the United States today. The book opens and concludes with Greene's own autobiographical statements.

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey toward a freer and more just nation. Any serious effort to understand how the Black civil rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn how to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age twenty-nine, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida, school she had founded and which would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency, and she enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause. Rooks grew up in Florida, in Bethune’s shadow: her grandmother trained to be a teacher at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many community empowerment projects. The story of how Bethune succeeded in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country is, in Rooks’s hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a mind and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the stakes of the long struggle for full Black equality in this country are particularly evident—and centered on the state of Florida—it is a gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune’s journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle.

The Passionate Mind Revisited takes readers on a liberating inner journey into the workings of their mind that can transform the way people look at themselves and the world. This expanded inquiry reflects the authors’ own and the world’s evolution since The Passionate Mind came out in 1974. The original book focusing on the individual is now extended to social and philosophical spheres and global challenges, exploring how the world’s life-threatening dramas are largely a function of people’s genetic and cultural conditioning, worldviews, beliefs, and values. Kramer and Alstad assert that humanity is on an evolutionary cusp requiring further awareness and conscious social evolution. Worldviews can create rigid beliefs and narrow identities that are destructive in a world of global impact. While acknowledging the fallibility of any mental construction, the book offers an evolutionary worldview deemed more likely than traditional worldviews or scientific materialism. In exploring what it is to be a human social animal, The Passionate Mind Revisited offers fresh vantage points on life’s core issues: the nature of thought, authority and belief, pleasure and pain, desire and fear, identity, love and care, freedom, power, gender, time, meditation, violence, and evolution. By demonstrating how to inwardly see and break through one’s conditioning, the authors delve deeply into the nature and processes of the mind, including how subjectivity filters perception. This approach to self-inquiry can help free people from mechanical responses that develop from unexamined beliefs and habits. Dysfunctional worldviews and their values inhibit the creative solutions much needed in a perilous world of runaway change. This book, through its discussion and methodology, fosters curiosity and truth-seeking. Kramer and Alstad offer new insights on personal and global issues that can facilitate a necessary shift to conscious social evolution.

In this volume, Krishnamurti takes great care to elucidate this necessity of a revolution within our consciousness where the problem lies before we expect any kind of revolutionary change outside of ourselves. Krishnamurti posits that if the politicians and scientists wanted to end starvation in the world it could be done." It could be done, but they are not going to do it as long as their thinking is based on nationalism, on motives of their own personal profit. And even if this far-reaching outward change were brought about, it seems to me that the problem is much deeper." "The problem is not merely starvation, war, the brutality of man to man; it is the crisis in our own consciousness. Fundamentally the problem lies within." (p. 295)

Tourism Microentrepreneurship shares scholarship and best practices to educate practitioners and to encourage more research on the development of microentrepreneurship and its impact on destination communities.