This English edition of The Catechism of Positive Religion was published in 1891, thirty-four years after the death of Comte, the French philosopher of science and politics and founder of positivism, whose work was widely read in the later nineteenth century. Comte's self-published French original of 1852, translated here, outlines his progressive ideal of 'sociocracy', which would provide a systematic basis, free of metaphysics, for intellectual and moral transactions among humans. Congreve's edition, in common with others, divides the book into five parts. The introduction contains two dialogues, entitled General Theory of Religion and Theory of Humanity. Parts 1–3 respectively consider the Positivist's private and public 'worship'; 'doctrine', including the external world and human society and ethics; and 'regime' or way of life, private and public. The final two dialogues cover polytheism, monotheism and theocracy. This book remains of interest as an early precursor of secular hum
Spanning from the 1876 exposition in Philadelphia, through Paris 1889, and culminating in Paris 1900, this book examines how Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico forged the image of a modernizing Latin Ameri
This book is an essay on the epistemology of classifications. Its main purpose is not to provide an exposition of an actual mathematical theory of classifications, that is, a general theory which woul
Shame is one of our most central feelings and a universal human characteristic. Why do we experience it? For what purpose? How can we cope with excessive feelings of shame?In an elegant exposition inf
Blake, Mortimer and Nasir are en route to Antarctica, hoping to locate Olrik and his Indian and KGB allies and to stop his attack on the Brussels Universal Exposition. Little do they know that their o
Robin Fox's study of systems of kinship and alliance has become an established classic of the social science literature. It has been praised above all for its liveliness of style and clarity of exposition in an area that students and general readers have found difficult to master. It was the first attempt to produce an overview of this central subject and has maintained its unique position over the years. Fox's reconciliation of 'descent' and 'alliance' theories, and his 'deductive' approach to the logic of kinship systems based on four universal premises, give the book its distinctive flavour and make it not only the best available introductory text but a contribution to theory in its own right. It has been used throughout the world as an introduction for both academic and lay readers and has been translated into numerous languages.
This book examines the critical writing and journalistic reportage on Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, from the time of his renunciation of the Salon in 1834 until his large retrospective at the 1855 Universal Exposition, the crucial middle decades of his career. This massive body of writing demonstrates how Ingres shaped his career in the rapidly evolving art world of mid-nineteenth century Paris. Enjoying the benefits of his affiliation with the Academy, the artist also employed certain modes of presentation, most notably the single-artist exhibition and illustrated monograph, through which he distanced himself and his work from the embattled world of artistic officialdom. Pursuing both paths, he assumed the new modernist ideal of a self-generating creative genius. The fluctuation in Ingres's critical persona - between puffed-up academician and unassuming artiste-maudit - provides a new context through which the formal qualities of his work, which vacillate between academic banality an
With hundreds of worked examples, exercises and illustrations, this detailed exposition of the theory of Vassiliev knot invariants opens the field to students with little or no knowledge in this area. It also serves as a guide to more advanced material. The book begins with a basic and informal introduction to knot theory, giving many examples of knot invariants before the class of Vassiliev invariants is introduced. This is followed by a detailed study of the algebras of Jacobi diagrams and 3-graphs, and the construction of functions on these algebras via Lie algebras. The authors then describe two constructions of a universal invariant with values in the algebra of Jacobi diagrams: via iterated integrals and via the Drinfeld associator, and extend the theory to framed knots. Various other topics are then discussed, such as Gauss diagram formulae, before the book ends with Vassiliev's original construction.
