Thinking The Impossible

Gary Gutting tells the story of the remarkable flourishing of philosophy in France in the last four decades of the 20th century. He examines what it was to 'do philosophy', what this achieved, and how it differs from the Anglophone tradition. His key theme is that French philosophy in this period was mostly concerned with thinking the impossible.

This volume, first published in 2000, is about the development of human thinking that stretches beyond the ordinary boundaries of reality. Various research initiatives emerged in the decade prior to publication exploring such matters as children's thinking about imaginary beings, magic and the supernatural. The purpose of this book is to capture something of the larger spirit of these efforts. In many ways, this new work offers a counterpoint to research on the development of children's domain-specific knowledge about the ordinary nature of things that has suggested that children become increasingly scientific and rational over the course of development. In acquiring an intuitive understanding of the physical, biological or psychological domains, even young children recognize that there are constraints on what can happen. However, once such constraints are acknowledged, children are in a position to think about the violation of those very same constraints - to contemplate the impossible.

50,000 copies sold, now in paperback... If you can think impossible thoughts, then you can do impossible things!! The power of change: create new thinking for new solutions! Includes a new introduction demonstrating the "power of impossible thinking," plus access to exclusive book summary and authors' interview at the book's companion Web site. The Power of Impossible Thinking is about getting better at making sense of what's going on around you so you can make decisions that respond to reality, not inaccurate or obsolete models of the world. This bestseller reveals how mental models stand between you and the truth and how to transform them into your biggest advantage! Learn how to develop new ways of seeing, when to change to a new model, how to swap amongst a portfolio of models, how to understand complex environments and how to do "mind R and D," improving models through constant experimentation. Jerry Wind and Colin Crook review why it's so hard to change mental models and offer practical strategies for dismantling "hardened missile silos". Finally they show how to access models quickly through intuition, and assess the effectiveness of any mental model. Purchasers of this book gain access to audio summaries on a companion web site, along with a new half-hour interview with the authors.

How the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind. What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides.Magic, Kuhn explains, creates a cognitive conflict between what we believe to be true (for example, a rabbit could not be in that hat) and what we experience (a rabbit has just come out of that hat!). Drawing on the latest psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, he suggests that misdirection is at the heart of all magic tricks, and he offers a scientific theory of misdirection. He explores, among other topics, our propensity for magical thinking, the malleability of our perceptual experiences, forgetting and misremembering, free will and mind control, and how magic is applied outside entertaiment—the use of illusion in human-computer interaction, politics, warfare, and elsewhere. We may be surprised to learn how little of the world we actually perceive, how little we can trust what we see and remember, and how little we are in charge of our thoughts and actions. Exploring magic, Kuhn illuminates the complex—and almost magical—mechanisms underlying our daily activities.

Presents a systematic rethinking of the power and limits of comparison in anthropology.

In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities (possible, actual, necessary) and their impact on the philosophy and culture of modernity and postmodernity, focusing on the creative potentials of possibilistic thinking for the humanities.

A beautifully wrought modern fairy tale from master storyteller and award-winning author Nancy Werlin Inspired by the classic folk ballad “Scarborough Fair,” this is a wonderfully riveting novel of suspense, romance, and fantasy. Lucy is seventeen when she discovers that she is the latest recipient of a generations-old family curse that requires her to complete three seemingly impossible tasks or risk falling into madness and passing the curse on to the next generation. Unlike her ancestors, though, Lucy has family, friends, and other modern resources to help her out. But will it be enough to conquer this age-old evil?