Secret Stirling explores the lesser-known history of the central Scottish city of Stirling through a fascinating selection of stories, unusual facts and attractive photographs.

W. J. Mander presents a history of metaphysics in nineteenth-century Britain. The story focuses on the elaboration of, and differing reactions to, the concept of the unknowable or unconditioned, first developed by Sir William Hamilton in the 1829. The idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves may be seen as supplying a narrative arc that runs right through the metaphysical systems of the period in question. These thought schemes may be divided into three broad groups which were roughly consecutive in their emergence but also overlapping as they continued to develop. In the first instance there were the doctrines of the agnostics who developed further Hamilton's basic idea that fundamental reality lies for the great part beyond our cognitive reach. These philosophies were followed immediately by those of the empiricists and, in the last third of the century, the idealists: both of these schools of thought--albeit in profoundly different ways--reacted against the epistemic pessimism of the agnostics. Mander offers close textual readings of the main contributions to First Philosophy made by the key philosophers of the period (such as Hamilton, Mansel, Spencer, Mill, and Bradley) as well as some less well known figures (such as Bain, Clifford, Shadworth Hodgson, Ferrier, and John Grote). By presenting, interpreting, criticising, and connecting together their various contrasting ideas, this book explains how the three traditions developed and interacted with one another to comprise the history of metaphysics in Victorian Britain.

Secret Perth explores the lesser-known history of the city of Perth through a fascinating selection of stories, unusual facts and attractive photographs.

Highly illustrated look at the military heritage of Stirling from medieval times to the present day.

Originally published in 1931, Muirhead’s study aims to challenge the view that Locke’s empiricism is the main philosophical thought to come out of England, suggesting that the Platonic tradition is much more prominent. These views are explored in detail in this text as well as touching on its development in the nineteenth century from Coleridge to Bradley and discussions on Transcendentalism in the United States. This title will be of interest to students of Philosophy.

A boy arrives at a remote village in the dead of night. His name is Ludlow Fitch—and he is running from a most terrible past. What he is about to learn is that in this village is the life he has dreamed of—a safe place to live, and a job, as the assistant to a mysterious pawnbroker who trades people's deepest, darkest secrets for cash. Ludlow's job is to neatly transcribe the confessions in an ancient leather-bound tome: The Black Book of Secrets. Ludlow yearns to trust his mentor, who refuses to disclose any information on his past experiences or future intentions. What the pawnbroker does not know is, in a town brimming with secrets, the most troubling may be held by his new apprentice.

This book is a unique ethnographic study of a racially exclusive Malay Muslim gang, Omega, which has its roots in Singapore’s prisons and controls much of the illicit drug trade in the state. Similar to indigenous peoples elsewhere, Singapore Malays are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system and can respond to structural marginalization and colonization through gang involvement. In demonstrating that gang membership can be an adaptive strategy for minority groups, this book promotes a more inclusive and restorative justice model for people with repeat convictions.

This path-breaking book considers the recent trend for governments to look increasingly to private sector finance, provided by private enterprises constructing and managing public infrastructure facilities in partnership with government bodies. 'The boundaries between the public and private sector are the most important political issue of our time.'

Alan Woods outlines the development of philosophy from the ancient Greeks, all the way through to Marx and Engels who brought together the best of previous thinking to produce the Marxist philosophical outlook, which looks at the real material world, not as a static immovable reality, but one that is constantly changing and moving according to laws that can be discovered. It is this method which allows Marxists to look at how things were, how they have become and how they are most likely going to be in the future, in a long process which started with the early primitive humans in their struggles for survival, through to the emergence of class societies, all as part of a process towards greater and greater knowledge of the world we live in. This long historical process eventually created the material conditions which allow for an end to class divisions and the flowering of a new society where humans will achieve true freedom, where no human will exploit another, no human will oppress another. Here we see how philosophy becomes an indispensable tool in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society.

The Measure of God, now in paperback, is a lively historical narrative offering the reader a sense for what has taken place in the God and science debate over the past century. Modern science came of age at the cusp of the twentieth century. It was a period marked by discovery of radio waves and x rays, use of the first skyscraper, automobile, cinema, and vaccine, and rise of the quantum theory of the atom. This was the close of the Victorian age, and the beginning of the first great wave of scientific challenges to the religious beliefs of the Christian world. Religious thinkers were having to brace themselves. Some raced to show that science did not undermine religious belief. Others tried to reconcile science and faith, and even to show that the tools of science, facts and reason, could support knowledge of God. In the English speaking world, many had espoused such a project, but one figure stands out. Before his death in 1887, the Scottish judge Adam Gifford endowed the Gifford Lectures to keep this debate going, a science haunted debate on "all questions about man's conception of God or the Infinite." The list of Gifford lecturers is a veritable Who's Who of modern scientists, philosophers and theologians: from William James to Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer to Reinhold Niebuhr, Niels Bohr to Iris Murdoch, from John Dewey to Mary Douglas.