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34754 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1574 of 1738

  • Third Part

  • from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
  • Edited by Robert Pippin, University of Chicago
  • Translated by Adrian Del Caro, University of Colorado, Boulder
  • Book:
    Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    15 June 2006, pp 119-188

  • Summary

    You look upward when you long for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated.

    Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?

    Whoever climbs the highest mountain laughs at all tragic plays and tragic realities.

    Zarathustra, “On Reading and Writing,” (i, p. 28).

    The Wanderer

    It was around midnight that Zarathustra started his route over the ridge of the island, in order to arrive at the other coast by early morning; for there he intended to board a ship. At that location there was safe harborage where even foreign ships liked to anchor; these would take the occasional passenger who wanted to cross the sea from the blessed isles. Now as Zarathustra climbed up the mountain he thought as he traveled about his many lonely wanderings since the time of his youth, and about how many mountains and ridges and peaks he had already climbed.

    I am a wanderer and a mountain climber, he said to his heart. I do not like the plains and it seems I cannot sit still for long.

    And whatever may come to me now as destiny and experience – it will involve wandering and mountain climbing: ultimately one experiences only oneself.

    The time has passed in which accidents could still befall me, and what could fall to me now that is not already my own?

Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  • Edited by Robert Pippin
  • Translated by Adrian Del Caro
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    15 June 2006
  • Nietzsche regarded 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' as his most important work, and his story of the wandering Zarathustra has had enormous influence on subsequent culture. Nietzsche uses a mixture of homilies, parables, epigrams and dreams to introduce some of his most striking doctrines, including the Overman, nihilism, and the eternal return of the same. This edition offers a new translation by Adrian Del Caro which restores the original versification of Nietzsche's text and captures its poetic brilliance. Robert Pippin's introduction discusses many of the most important interpretative issues raised by the work, including who is Zarathustra and what kind of 'hero' is he and what is the philosophical significance of the work's literary form? The volume will appeal to all readers interested in one of the most original and inventive works of modern philosophy.

  • Preface

  • Robert Wynn Jones, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book:
    Applied Palaeontology
    Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp xi-xii

  • Summary

    Mankind has always been fascinated by fossils, by their beauty and their mystery, their charm and their strangeness, their mute testimony to lives and worlds lost unimaginably long ago. In prehistoric times, our forebears not only collected fossils, but evidently treated them as valued artefacts, as indicated, for example, by the discovery of an ammonite at an Upper Palaeolithic burial site in Aveline's Hole in Burrington in the West Country (Rahtz, 1993), and numerous different types of fossil at Cro Magnon sites in the V´ez`ere valley in the P´erigord region of France, truly the birthplace of European civilisation (many of which are now displayed in the magnificent Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies). The habit persisted both in so-called primitive and so-called advanced societies through historical times (Mayor, 2000).

    Palaeontology, that is, the scientific study of fossils, may be said to have originated at least as long ago as the sixteenth century (Thackray, in Briggs and Crowther, 1990), and, obviously, continues to be practised to the present day. The earliest written observations on fossils were made by the German Bauer, or Agricola, in his book De natura fossilum, and the earliest illustrations by the Swiss Gesner in his book De rerum fossilium lapidum et gemmarum, both of which date from the sixteenth century. The usage by these and other early observers of the term ‘fossil’, from the Latin fodere, meaning ‘to dig’, pertained to literally anything dug up from the ground or mined, including what we would now classify as minerals, crystals and gemstones. The earliest interpretations as to the nature of what we would now accept as fossils were made by the Danish anatomist Stensen, or Steno, working in the Medici court in Florence, in his publications dating from the latter part of the seventeenth century (Cutler, 2003). Steno applied Descartes’ ‘method of doubt’ and his own deductive logic to demonstrate that the so-called glossopetrae or ‘tongue stones'much valued in medieval Europe for their supposed medicinal properties were in fact not the tongues of snakes turned to stone by St Paul, as was the superstition, but the fossilised equivalents of the shark's teeth he was familiar with from his dissection work.

  • 4 - Palaeobiology

  • Robert Wynn Jones, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book:
    Applied Palaeontology
    Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 221-240

  • Summary

    Palaeobiology deals with the documentation, analysis and interpretation of the relationships of fossils to evolving earth and life processes and environments, and their application to the elucidation thereof. This chapter deals with applications of fossils in the interpretation of earth and life processes (excluding evolution, covered in Chapter 5), and environments. Readers interested in further details of the principles and practice of palaeobiology are referred to the works of Briggs and Crowther (1990), Dodd and Stanton (1990), Bosence and Allison (1995), Brenchley and Harper (1998), Erwin and Wing (2000), Gastaldo and DiMichele (2000), Briggs and Crowther (2001) and Cohen (2003).

    Life strategy

    There are a number of theoretical biological models of population dynamics, one of the most elegant and influential of which involves only two variables, r and K, at either end of a continuum (Pianka, 1970). Of these, r refers to the theoretically initially limitless rate of increase of the population of a species, assuming no competition, for example, on occupying a new environmental niche; K to the ultimately limiting, carrying capacity of that niche. Whether a species or a higher-level taxon selects in favour of a strategy that tends to maximise K, through the ability to compete, or r, through the ability to reproduce at a high rate, will depend on a number of factors, including population density etc. K-strategy selection typically involves slow development to reproductive maturity, at large size, sexual reproduction, small numbers of progeny, typically in more than one issue or confinement (iteroparity), long generation time, and a long lifespan; r-strategy selection, rapid development to reproductive maturity, at small size, asexual reproduction in some groups, large numbers of progeny, typically in one issue (semelparity), short generation time and a short lifespan.

    In general, there appears to be a tendency towards conservative, or specialist, K-strategy selection in stable environments, and radical, or generalist opportunistic, r-strategy selection in unstable or otherwise stressed environments. Interestingly, environments that are both stable and stressed favour selections involving a combination of components of both strategies. For example, deserts favour plants characterised by a K-type tolerance of long periods of drought, and an r-type ability to react by reproducing rapidly whenever it rains.

  • 1 - The birth of humanist culture

  • Charles G. Nauert, University of Missouri, Columbia
  • Book:
    Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 8-24

  • Summary

    Both the classical enthusiasms of Paduan lawyers and notaries and the literary works of Florentines like Brunetto Latini and Dante show that about 1300 the prosperous educated laymen in the Italian cities were groping their way towards a new culture distinct from both the chivalric culture of the medieval nobility and the scholastic culture of the clergy. This was a natural response to the conditions of their life. Since the nineteenth century, historians have labelled this new culture ‘humanism’, though that abstract term was coined by a German scholar in 1808 and appears nowhere in the writings of the Renaissance itself. The term that did exist then was ‘humanistic studies’ (studia humanitatis), used to designate a cluster of academic subjects much favoured by humanists. By the first half of the fifteenth century, the term ‘humanist’ (in Latin, humanista) had come into use, originally as student slang used to designate masters who taught those particular academic subjects: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. ‘Humanism’, the bundle of subjects taught by ‘humanists’ in the Latin grammar schools and university faculties of liberal arts, made no claim to embrace the totality of human learning, nor even all of the traditional seven ‘liberal arts’ (embracing the trivium, or grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and the quadrivium, or arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) that in theory were studied by all who received the bachelor and master of arts degrees from a university. The studia humanitatis did not include the subjects taught in the three higher faculties of medieval universities: law, medicine, and theology.

  • 6 - Biostratigraphy and sequence stratigraphy

  • Robert Wynn Jones, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book:
    Applied Palaeontology
    Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 282-305

  • Summary

    Biostratigraphy deals with the documentation, analysis and interpretation of the ordered succession of fossils, their relationships to evolving earth and life history, and their application to the elucidation thereof (Emery and Myers, 1996; Jones, 1996; Doyle and Bennett, 1998; Backman, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Bowring and Martin, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Marshall, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Rawson, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Coe, 2003; Harries, 2003; Gradstein et al., in Gradstein et al., 2005; McGowran, in press). Together with sequence stratigraphy, it is one of the principal bases for chronostratigraphic subdivision and correlation of lithological units, thus providing a spatiotemporal context for their interpretation, and is a fundamental building-block of earth science. This chapter deals with applications of biostratigraphy and sequence stratigraphy in the interpretation of earth – and life – history.

    Biostratigraphy

    The stratigraphic distributions of the principal fossil groups discussed in Chapter 3 are summarised in Fig. 6.1. The ranges over which they are stratigraphically useful are shown by broad bands. It is evident that most are only useful over certain time intervals, and then only in the appropriate facies. Note also that the potential biostratigraphic usefulness of fossils can be impaired by natural factors, such as post-mortem transportation and diagenetic effects (see Section 2.2), and reworking. The biostratigraphic usefulness of fossils can also be impaired by artificial factors, such as sample acquisition and processing, and subjectivity in specific identification.

    Some of the more stratigraphically useful fossil groups are the dinoflagellates, diatoms, calcareous nannoplankton, acritarchs, Bolboforma, foraminiferans, radiolarians, calpionellids, plants, archaeocyathans, ammonoids, belemnites, tentaculitids, trilobites, graptolites, chitinozoans, conodonts and mammals (see appropriate sections in Chapter 3; see also Sub-section 6.1.1). Other groups are only locally important.

    Significantly, the more stratigraphically useful fossil groups share two common characteristics: firstly, relatively rapid rates of evolutionary turnover, and hence restricted stratigraphic distributions, and/or essentially isochronous first and last appearances; and secondly, essentially unrestricted ecological distributions (for example, throughout the marine realm, and across a range of biogeographic provinces, in the case of many planktonic or nektonic forms). The most useful groups for practical purposes are also, typically, abundant, well preserved, and easy to identify. These are referred to as ‘marker fossils’ or ‘index fossils’. Conversely, the less stratigraphically useful groups characteristically exhibit relatively slow rates of evolutionary turnover, and/or diachronous or time-transgressive first and last appearances.

  • 3 - Humanism and Italian society

  • Charles G. Nauert, University of Missouri, Columbia
  • Book:
    Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 60-101

  • Summary

    By the closing decades of the Quattrocento (the fifteenth century), humanism dominated the culture of the ruling groups in all important Italian cities, from Rome north to the Alps. Although Florence deservedly has received the most attention and provides the best evidence of a link between the new culture and an ethic of political action and public service, humanism fitted almost as neatly into the need of the many princely courts for a distinctive lay culture and for a cadre of classically educated administrators and advisers to the ruler. Even the papal curia at Rome found the linguistic and scholarly skills of humanists useful in the chancery, the department that drafted papal letters and many other official documents. Although the sympathy of Pope Nicholas V for humanism, expressed in his library and his programme of sponsoring translations from the Greek, quickened this process, humanists played an important role in curial administration even under Paul II (1471–84), who began his pontificate by dismissing many curial humanists and even arrested several of them in 1468 on trumped-up charges of impiety that probably masked his fear of political conspiracies. By 1500, Rome was on its way to outstripping Florence as the most brilliant centre of humanistic culture, just as it was also taking leadership in the patronage of art.

    Printing and the new culture

    The rise of curial and courtly humanism and the growing dominance of humanist schoolmasters in the Latin grammar schools of the peninsula did much to establish humanism as the major force in Italian culture. Another source of humanism's growing dominance was the new art of printing.

  • 5 - Key biological events in earth history

  • Robert Wynn Jones, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book:
    Applied Palaeontology
    Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 241-281

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the generalities and specifics of the evolutionary and extinction events and trends that have controlled past and present, and will control future, biodiversity on Earth.

    Readers interested in further details of a general nature are referred to Nisbet (1991), van Andel (1994), Moore et al. (1996), Smith and Szathmary (1999), Stanley (1999), Wicander and Monroe (2000), Groombridge and Jenkins (2002), Conway Morris (2003), Southwood (2003), Dawkins (2004), Erwin, in Moya and Font (2004), Prothero and Dott (2004) and Cowen (in press).

    Evolution and extinction

    The history of life on Earth, insofar as it can be captured in words, can be said to have been one of general evolutionary diversification intermittently interrupted by mass extinction and recovery (Benton, 1995; Rosenzweig, 1995; Foote, in Erwin and Wing, 2000; Miller, in Erwin and Wing, 2000; Benton, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Groombridge and Jenkins, 2002). Certain of the difficulties in description arise from difficulties in quantifying diversity, in part in turn arising from uncertainties as to the representativeness of the fossil record, and from biases and inconsistencies in sampling and interpreting same (see Box 5.1). There are particular problems associated with taxonomic bias and inconsistency, that is, the definition of taxa across different fossil groups. The two main models that have been proposed to date for the evolution of diversity are the equilibrium model, which assumes – logistic – diversification only up to and not beyond a critical point, and the expansion model, which assumes continuous – either additive or exponential – diversification (Benton, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001).

    Evolution

    This is not the appropriate forum for a detailed discussion of the complex and contentious subject of evolution, that is, the process whereby species and higher-level taxa evolve – or are transformed – into and replaced by others. Suffice it to say here that empirical observations of the fossil record should leave little doubt, even in the mind of the most ardent creationist, that evolution has manifestly evidently been taking place throughout geological time. The difficulties that sceptics have in understanding and accepting evolution perhaps arise in part from the fact that the process cannot actually be observed, other than under artificial laboratory conditions, as it occurs over generations (Lazarus, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001).

  • 6 - Humanism in the late Renaissance

  • Charles G. Nauert, University of Missouri, Columbia
  • Book:
    Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 172-199

  • Summary

    The bright hopes of a dawning golden age of peace, social justice, and religious renewal that Erasmus expressed in his famous letter of 1517 to the young humanist Capito (Ep. 541, in Collected Works of Erasmus 4: 261–68) evaporated in the fires of religious controversy. For Erasmus personally, the bitter divisions that separated Protestant from Catholic were both a social disaster and a personal tragedy, causing sharp alienation between him and many of his younger disciples. Christian humanism, Erasmian humanism, as a coherent programme of religious and cultural renewal ceased to be a unified movement. Some historians would therefore end the history of Renaissance humanism with the outbreak and rapid spread of the Reformation, taking the open break between Erasmus and Luther in 1524 as the symbolic final act. Though such a conclusion reflects the bleak despair with which Erasmus and his friends viewed the religious schism, it overlooks some deeper and more lasting consequences of the spread of humanistic learning. Despite the uncertainties and violence of the Reformation era, humanism was alive. Although divided by confessional hostilities, humanism remained a major force in religion, both Protestant and Catholic. Its penetration of schools and universities continued almost everywhere, so that even the most self-consciously conservative educational systems produced graduates equipped with humanistic knowledge and skills. The humanist penetration of the schools inevitably led also to a more shallow but unmistakable diffusion of the new Latin culture into the vernacular world, through popular and courtly literature, translations, imitations, and the fine arts.

Applied Palaeontology
  • Robert Wynn Jones
  • Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006
  • This book was first published in 2006. Palaeontology has developed from a descriptive science to an analytical science used to interpret relationships between earth and life history. Applied Palaeontology adopts a holistic, integrated approach to palaeontology, highlighting its key role in the study of the evolving earth, life history and environmental processes. After an introduction to fossils and their classification, each of the principal fossil groups are studied in detail, covering their biology, morphology, classification, palaeobiology and biostratigraphy. The latter sections focus on the applications of fossils in the interpretation of earth and life processes and environments. It concludes with case histories of how our knowledge of fossils is applied, in industry and elsewhere. This is a valuable reference for anyone involved in the applications of palaeontology, including earth, life and environmental scientists, and petroleum, minerals, mining and engineering professionals.

  • Introduction

  • Charles G. Nauert, University of Missouri, Columbia
  • Book:
    Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 1-7

  • Summary

    The last thing readers want from the authors of history books is arcane historiographical debates among contending schools of interpretation. Yet in the case of Renaissance humanism, any serious reader needs some knowledge of where we have been since 1860, when the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt put forward what long remained the dominant concepts of the key terms, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘humanism’, in his masterpiece of cultural history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Although few specialists today would give unqualified endorsement to his description of the age, it was profoundly appealing to his contemporaries, and it still has much to offer.

    Burckhardt's book quickly captured the imagination of educated readers because it was a subtle and learned synthesis of opinions about the Renaissance that had been accumulating for centuries and had grown powerful during the Age of the Enlightenment (Ferguson 1948). Burckhardt seemed to confirm a story that had already become prevalent but had never before been given such a powerful and coherent presentation. This story, or historical myth, was the product of the secular intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were searching for the origins of their own beliefs and values. According to this story, after the collapse of ancient civilization in the fifth century AD, a thousand years of darkness and barbarism ensued, with the Christian church acting simultaneously to preserve some few shreds of ancient civilization and to suppress any intellectual or religious revivals that might weaken the stranglehold that the higher clergy and the warrior aristocracy held over the minds as well as the bodies of ordinary people.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Robert Wynn Jones, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book:
    Applied Palaeontology
    Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    04 May 2006, pp 1-4

  • Summary

    Palaeontology incorporates several, overlapping, areas, the principal of which are:

  • • Systematic palaeontology, or taxonomy, that is, the documentation, description and classification of new species and higher-level taxa of fossils

  • • Phylogenetics, that is, the analysis and interpretation of their evolutionary relationships

  • • Palaeobiology, that is, the documentation, analysis and interpretation of their relationships to evolving earth and life processes and environments, and their application to the elucidation thereof

  • • Biostratigraphy, that is, the documentation, analysis and interpretation of their ordered succession, their relationships to evolving earth and life history, and their application to the elucidation thereof.

    • The former two areas of study, systematics and phylogenetics, interfacing with life science, constitute pure palaeontology; the latter two, palaeobiology and biostratigraphy, interfacing not only with life science, but also with earth and environmental science and other disciplines, applied palaeontology (Fig. 1.1).

    There is a logical progression from pure to applied aspects through the course of the book. The purer parts will perhaps be of most value to earth and life science undergraduate and postgraduate students and professionals in academia (and also to interested amateurs). The applied parts will be of value to professionals in industry, including not only applied palaeontologists, palaeobiologists and biostratigraphers, but also petroleum, minerals, mining and engineering geologists, environmental scientists and environmental archaeologists.

    Chapter 2 (‘Fossils and fossilisation’) essentially deals with what fossils are, how they form, how they are collected, and how they are classified and identified, described and illustrated, and curated. It includes sections on fossils, on the fossilisation process (taphonomy), on collection of fossils, on classification and identification (systematic palaeontology or taxonomy), on description and illustration (palaeontography), and on preparation, conservation and curation (museology). The section on the fossilisation process contains sub-sections on the representativeness of the fossil record, and on exceptional preservation of fossil assemblages. The section on collection contains sub-sections on surface collection of macrofossils, and collection of surface samples for microfossil analysis, and contains a code of conduct. It also covers equipment and safety.

    Chapter 3 (‘Principal fossil groups’) deals with the principal fossil groups. It includes sections on bacteria, plant-like protists or algae, animal-like protists or ‘protozoans’, plants, fungi, invertebrate and vertebrate animals, and trace fossils. The section on bacteria covers cyanobacteria and stromatolites. The section on plant-like protists or algae contains sub-sections on: dinoflagellates; silicoflagellates; diatoms; calcareous nannoplankton; calcareous algae; and Problematica (acritarchs and Bolboforma).

Page 1574 of 1738