Ruse and Wit


Book Description

These essays examine a millennium of humorous and satirical writing in the Islamic world. Humor in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish narrative emerges here as a culturally modulated phenomenon that demands examination with reference to its historical framework and that, in turn, communicates as much about its producers as it does about its audience.




Ruse


Book Description

Winner of a 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir “Kerbeck’s juicy memoir tells riveting tales [with] the thrill of a spy novel. . . Kerbeck bares all of his wild business secrets within the world of corporate espionage” — Foreword Reviews "Robert Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level." — Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can B-list actor, A-list corporate spy. . . In the world of high finance, multibillion-dollar Wall Street banks greedily guard their secrets. Enter Robert Kerbeck, a working actor who made his real money lying on the phone, charming people into revealing their employers’ most valuable information. In this exhilarating memoir that will appeal to fans of The Wolf of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can, unsuspecting receptionists, assistants, and bigshot executives all fall victim to “the Ruse.” After college, Kerbeck rushed to New York to try to make it as an actor. But to support himself, he’d need a survival job, and before he knew it, while his pals were waiting tables, he began his apprenticeship as a corporate spy. As his acting career started to take off, he found himself hobnobbing with Hollywood luminaries: drinking with Paul Newman, taking J.Lo to a Dodgers game, touring E.R. sets with George Clooney. He even worked with O.J. Simpson the week before he became America’s most notorious double murderer. Before long, however, his once promising acting career slowed while the corporate espionage business took off. The ruse job was supposed to have been temporary, but Kerbeck became one of the world’s best practitioners of this deceptive—and illegal—trade. His income jumped from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year. Until the inevitable crash… Kerbeck shares the lies he told, the celebrities he screwed (and those who screwed him), the cons he ran, and the money he made—and lost—along the way.




Darwin and Design


Book Description

In clear, non-technical language, Ruse offers a full and fair assessment of the status of the argument from design in light of both the advances of modern evolutionary biology and the thinking of today’s philosophers—with special attention given to the supporters and critics of “intelligent design.”




Mystery of Mysteries


Book Description

With the recent Sokal hoax--the publication of a prominent physicist's pseudo-article in a leading journal of cultural studies--the status of science moved sharply from debate to dispute. Is science objective, a disinterested reflection of reality, as Karl Popper and his followers believed? Or is it subjective, a social construction, as Thomas Kuhn and his students maintained? Into the fray comes "Mystery of Mysteries," an enlightening inquiry into the nature of science, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Michael Ruse begins with such colorful luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and Julian Huxley (brother of novelist Aldous and grandson of T. H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog" ) and ends with the work of the English game theorist Geoffrey Parker--a microevolutionist who made his mark studying the mating strategies of dung flies--and the American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, whose computer-generated models reconstruct mass extinctions and other macro events in life's history. Along the way Ruse considers two great popularizers of evolution, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as two leaders in the field of evolutionary studies, Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Wilson, paying close attention to these figures' cultural commitments: Gould's transplanted Germanic idealism, Dawkins's male-dominated Oxbridge circle, Lewontin's Jewish background, and Wilson's southern childhood. Ruse explicates the role of metaphor and metavalues in evolutionary thought and draws significant conclusions about the cultural impregnation of science. Identifying strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the "science wars," he demonstrates that a resolution of the objective and subjective debate is nonetheless possible.




Atheism


Book Description

Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know provides a balanced look at the topic, considering atheism historically, philosophically, theologically, sociologically and psychologically.




The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn


Book Description

"Mission Impossible, but with magic, dragons, and a series of heists that go from stealing a crown to saving the world" (David Dalglish). Master con artist Ardor Benn and his crew of intrepid thieves are hired to pull off a series of wildly complex heists, from stealing a crown to saving the world, in this daring fantasy adventure. Liar. Thief. Legend. Ardor Benn is no ordinary thief. Rakish, ambitious, and master of wildly complex heists, he styles himself a Ruse Artist Extraordinaire. When a priest hires him for the most daring ruse yet, Ardor knows he'll need more than quick wit and sleight of hand. Assembling a dream team of forgers, disguisers, schemers, and thieves, he sets out to steal from the most powerful king the realm has ever known. But it soon becomes clear there's more at stake than fame and glory -- Ard and his team might just be the last hope for human civilization. Discover the start of an epic fantasy trilogy that begins with a heist and quickly explodes into a full-tilt, last ditch plan to save humanity.




Darwinism and Its Discontents


Book Description

Publisher description




The Gaia Hypothesis


Book Description

“The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia.” —Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. He mulled this revolutionary idea over for several years, first with his close friend the novelist William Golding, and then in an extensive collaboration with the American scientist Lynn Margulis. In the early 1970s, he finally went public with the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that everything happens for an end: the good of planet Earth. Lovelock and Margulis were scorned by professional scientists, but the general public enthusiastically embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis. In The Gaia Hypothesis, philosopher Michael Ruse, with his characteristic clarity and wit, uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself. Gaia emerged in the 1960s, a decade when authority was questioned and status and dignity stood for nothing, but its story is much older. Ruse traces Gaia’s connection to Plato and a long history of goal-directed and holistic—or organicist—thinking and explains why Lovelock and Margulis’s peers rejected it as pseudoscience. But Ruse also shows why the project was a success. He argues that Lovelock and Margulis should be commended for giving philosophy firm scientific basis and for provoking important scientific discussion about the world as a whole, its homeostasis or—in this age of global environmental uncertainty—its lack thereof. “[Ruse’s] treatment is thought-provoking and original, as you would expect from this perceptive, irrepressible philosopher of biology.” —New Scientist




The World of Persian Literary Humanism


Book Description

Humanism has mostly considered the question “What does it mean to be human?” from a Western perspective. Dabashi asks it anew from a non-European perspective, in a groundbreaking study of 1,400 years of Persian literary humanism. He presents the unfolding of this vast tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.




Witnessness


Book Description

Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination. Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett's “untranslatable” text, Worstward Ho, alongside Dante's Purgatorio and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved and If This Be a Man. Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose Witnessness are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett's unique and precise vocabulary. Harvey explores the particular experience of the witness as recounted in Dante and Levi-for signs of a general, common, and innate witness-like attitude that protects the other and that we see expressed in Beckett's penultimate prose piece.