Oxford University Press Inc
The Western Esoteric Traditions A Historical Introduction549,-779,Western esotericism has now emerged as an academic study in its own right, combining spirituality with an empirical observation of the natural world while also relating the humanity to the universe through a harmonious celestial order. This introduction to the Western esoteric traditions offers a concise overview of their historical development. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke explores these traditions, from their roots in Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, and Gnosticism in the early Christian era up to their reverberations in today''s scientific paradigms. While the study of Western esotericism is usually confined to the history of ideas, Goodrick-Clarke examines the phenomenon much more broadly. He demonstrates that, far from being a strictly intellectual movement, the spread of esotericism owes a great deal to geopolitics and globalization. InHellenistic culture, for example, the empire of Alexander the Great, which stretched across Egypt and Western Asia to provinces in India, facilitated a mixing of Eastern and Western cultures. As the Greeks absorbed ideas from Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia, they gave rise to the first esotericmovements. From the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, post-Reformation spirituality found expression in theosophy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Similarly, in the modern era, dissatisfaction with the hegemony of science in Western culture and a lack of faith in traditional Christianity led thinkers like Madame Blavatsky to look East for spiritual inspiration. Goodrick-Clarke further examines Modern esoteric thought the light of new scientific and medical paradigms along with the analyticalpsychology of Carl Gustav Jung. This book traces the complete history of these movements and is the definitive account of Western esotericism.Published: August 31, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
The Elephant in the Brain Hidden Motives in Everyday Life399,-579,Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don''t like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is "the elephant in the brain." Suchan introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly - to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, onceeverything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?Our unconscious motives drive more than just our private behavior; they also infect our venerated social institutions such as Art, School, Charity, Medicine, Politics, and Religion. In fact, these institutions are in many ways designed to accommodate our hidden motives, to serve covert agendas alongside their "official" ones. The existence of big hidden motives can upend the usual political debates, leading one to question the legitimacy of these social institutions, and of standard policiesdesigned to favor or discourage them. You won''t see yourself - or the world - the same after confronting the elephant in the brain.Published: August 31, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
Creating Sounds from Scratch A Practical Guide to Music Synthesis for Producers and Composers599,-829,Creating Sounds from Scratch is a practical, in-depth resource on the most common forms of music synthesis. It includes historical context, an overview of concepts in sound and hearing, and practical training examples to help sound designers and electronic music producers to effectively manipulate presets and create new sounds from scratch.The book covers the all of the main main synthesis techniques including analog subtractive, FM, additive, physical modeling, wavetable, sample-based, and granular. While the book is grounded in theory, it relies on practical examples and contemporary production techniques to illustrate how the reader can utilize electronic sound design to maximize and improve his/her work.Creating Sounds from Scratch is ideal for all who work in sound creation, composition, editing, and contemporary commercial production.Published: August 31, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
The Linguistics Wars Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure449,-0,An updated and expanded history of the field of linguistics from the 1950s to the current dayThe Linguistics Wars tells the tumultuous history of language and cognition studies from the rise of Noam Chomsky''s Transformational Grammar to the current day. Focusing on the rupture that split the field between Chomsky''s structuralist vision and George Lakoff''s meaning-driven theories, Randy Allen Harris portrays the extraordinary personalities that were central to the dispute and its aftermath, alongside the data, technical developments, and social currents that fueled the unfolding and expanding schism. This new edition, updated to cover the more than twenty-five years since its original publication and to trace the impact of that schism on the shape of linguistics in the twenty-first century, is essential reading for all those interested in the study of language, the making of knowledge, and some of the most brilliant minds of our era.Published: August 27, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
The Musician''s Way A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness399,-0,In The Musician''s Way, veteran performer and educator Gerald Klickstein combines the latest research with his 30 years of professional experience to provide aspiring musicians with a roadmap to artistic excellence. Part I, Artful Practice, describes strategies to interpret and memorize compositions, fuel motivation, collaborate, and more. Part II, Fearless Performance, lifts the lid on the hidden causes of nervousness and shows how musicians can become confident performers. Part III, Lifelong Creativity, surveys tactics to prevent music-related injuries and equips musicians to tap their own innate creativity. Written in a conversational style, The Musician''s Way presents an inclusive system for all instrumentalists and vocalists to advance their musical abilities and succeed as performing artists.Published: August 27, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
Music in the Galant Style599,-0,Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body ofeighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the "galant style."Published: August 27, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
The Number Sense How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Revised and Updated Edition449,-0,Our understanding of how the human brain performs mathematical calculations is far from complete, but in recent years there have been many exciting breakthroughs by scientists all over the world. Now, in The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene offers a fascinating look at this recent research, in an enlightening exploration of the mathematical mind. Dehaene begins with the eye-opening discovery that animals—including rats, pigeons, raccoons, andchimpanzees—can perform simple mathematical calculations, and that human infants also have a rudimentary number sense. Dehaene suggests that this rudimentary number sense is as basic to the way the brain understands the world as our perception of color or of objects in space, and, like these other abilities, our numbersense is wired into the brain. These are but a few of the wealth of fascinating observations contained here. We also discover, for example, that because Chinese names for numbers are so short, Chinese people can remember up to nine or ten digits at a time—English-speaking people can only remember seven. The book also explores the unique abilities of idiot savants and mathematical geniuses, and we meet people whose minute brain lesions render their mathematical ability useless. This new andcompletely updated edition includes all of the most recent scientific data on how numbers are encoded by single neurons, and which brain areas activate when we perform calculations. Perhaps most important, The Number Sense reaches many provocative conclusions that will intrigue anyone interested inlearning, mathematics, or the mind. "A delight." —Ian Stewart, New Scientist"Read The Number Sense for its rich insights into matters as varying as the cuneiform depiction of numbers, why Jean Piaget''s theory of stages in infant learning is wrong, and to discover the brain regions involved in the number sense." —The New York Times Book Review"Dehaene weaves the latest technical research into a remarkably lucid and engrossing investigation. Even readers normally indifferent to mathematics will find themselves marveling at the wonder of minds making numbers." —BooklistPublished: August 27, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
Market Liquidity Theory, Evidence, and Policy549,-0,The way in which securities are traded is very different from the idealized picture of a frictionless and self-equilibrating market offered by the typical finance textbook. In Market Liquidity, Thierry Foucault, Marco Pagano, and Ailsa Röell offer a more accurate take on the liquidity of securities markets, its determinants, and its effects. They start from the assumption that not everyone is present at all times simultaneously on the market, and that even the limited number of participants who are have quite diverse information about the security''s fundamentals. As a result, the order flow is a complex mix of information and noise, and a consensus price only emerges gradually over time as the trading process evolves and the participants interpret the actions of other traders. Thus, a security''s actual transaction price may deviate from its fundamental value, as it would be assessed by a fully informed set of investors. Market Liquidity takes these deviations seriously, and explains why and how they emerge in the trading process and are eventually eliminated. Drawing on the analytical tools and empirical methods from a well-defined field within financial economics--market microstructure--the authors confront many striking phenomena in securities markets, from liquidity changes over time to temporary deviations from asset fair values. In the fully revised second edition of Market Liquidity, Foucault, Pagano, and Röell bring readers up to speed on recent changes in market structures and financial regulation. New chapters cover the relationship between financial instability and market liquidity, as well as the role and effects of algorithmic and high-frequency trading. Including new illustrative examples of market malfunction and novel insights from recent research on security markets, Market Liquidity provides a comprehensive and authoritative account on market microstructure.Published: August 27, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker
The Islamic Secular449,-0,The basic point of the secular in the modern West is to "liberate" certain pursuits--the state, the economy, science--from the authority of religion. This is also assumed to be the goal and meaning of "secular" in Islam. Sherman Jackson argues, however, that that assumption is wrong. In Islam the "secular" was neither outside "religion" nor a rival to it. "Religion," in Islam was not identical to Islam''s "sacred law," or "shari''ah." Nor did classical Muslim jurists see shari''ah as the all-encompassing, exclusive means of determining what is "Islamic." In fact, while, as religion, Islam''s jurisdiction was unlimited, shari''ah''s jurisdiction, as a sacred law, was limited. In other words, while everything remained within the purview of the divine gaze of the God of Islam, not everything could be determined by shari''ah or on the basis of its revelatory sources. Various aspects of state-policy, the economy, science, and the like were "differentiated," from shari''ah and its revelatory sources, without becoming non-religious or un-Islamic. Given the asymmetry between the circumference of shari''ah and that of Islam as religion, not everything that fell outside the former fell outside the latter. In other words, an idea or action could be non-shar''i (not dictated by shari''ah) without being non-Islamic, let alone anti-Islam. The ideas and actions that fall into this category are what Jackson terms "the Islamic Secular." Crucially, the Islamic Secular differs from the Western secular in that, while the whole point of the Western secular is to liberate various pursuits from religion, the Islamic Secular differentiates these disciplines not from religion but simply from shari''ah. Similarly, while both secularization and secularism play key roles in the Western secular, both of these concepts are alien to the Islamic Secular, as the Islamic Secular seeks neither to discipline nor to displace religion, nor expand to its own jurisdiction at religion''s expense. The Islamic Secular is a complement to religion, in effect, a "religious secular." Nowhere are the practical implications of this more impactful than in Islam''s relationship with the modern state. In this book, Jackson makes the case for the Islamic Secular on the basis of Islam''s own pre-modern juristic tradition and shows how the Islamic Secular impacts the relationship between Islam and the modern state, including the Islamic State.Published: August 27, 2026 04:51Oxford University Press IncBøker