Critique of Western Philosophy and Social Theory Review

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Critique of Western Philosophy and Social Theory Review"David Sprintzen's book is an ambitious, learned, probing, daring, and controversial work, reflecting decades of Sprintzen's thinking and action in regard to many of life's most engaging metaphysical, existential, and social issues. Convinced that we are experiencing the `death throes' of the `modern Western world,' Sprintzen assiduously offers us the contours of a global metaphysical and cultural transformation that is struggling to give birth to a `new world.' In the process, he criticizes modernity's substance- or object-oriented reductionist metaphysics, unabashedly dismisses religion as outdated through scientific progress, and outlines an alternative naturalistic but non-reductive metaphysics of `emergence.' Using that as base, he radically deconstructs and indicts the theory and practice of free market capitalism, atomistic Individualism, the New Colonialism, and all forms of exploitative social competition. His distinct call to all of us is to effect a transformation of values and social institutions coherent with his proposed field theory. Agree or disagree (I do, at times!) with Sprintzen on any given issue, yet his book brings pause to modernity's metaphysical or societal assumptions, and returns us to the task of cultivating and/or restoring human dignity. Open inquirers must not overlook this challenging book."--Ronald E. Santoni, Maria Barney Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Denison University, Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and Associate Fellow of Berkeley College at Yale, and author of Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy and Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent.Critique of Western Philosophy and Social Theory Overview

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Scale-Free Networks: Complex Webs in Nature and Technology (Oxford Finance) Review

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Scale-Free Networks: Complex Webs in Nature and Technology (Oxford Finance) ReviewThis book is a welcome fix to a gap in the complex network literature. It is sufficently detailed to enable the
reader to enter into research in the field, but does not assume any technical background knowledge. It is divided into two parts: the first gives an overview of the theory of complex networks; the second, a collection of applications from different areas of academia.
The author is a leading researcher in the field, and because of this many of the applications are the subject of current research. The book does not attempt to be exhaustive, which is one of its strengths: it is a highly readable and fascinating survey of the more exciting aspects of complex networks. The book will likely be taken up as one of the standard undergraduate textbooks in the field.
Finally, I note that Caldarelli makes use of an amusing literary device: the first sentence of each chapter is an adaptation of a first sentence from a famous book. While this will provide mirth for most readers, it seems to have confounded one reviewer.
For example:
Foundation by Isaac Asimov: His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
Caldarelli: His name was Leonard Euler and he was just a country boy who had never seen Königsberg before.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
Caldarelli: You don't know about graphs without you have read the previous chapter; but that ain't no matter.
Scale-Free Networks: Complex Webs in Nature and Technology (Oxford Finance) Overview

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The Structure and Dynamics of Networks: (Princeton Studies in Complexity) Review

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The Structure and Dynamics of Networks: (Princeton Studies in Complexity) ReviewCriticism of this book thus far stems from the following:
1) It is a collection of papers.
2) Some of those papers are fairly technical and may be a little daunting for beginners.
While both of these criticisms are accurate, they don't stop the book from being an excellent resource.
While it is a collection of papers, it is a very well-chosen one which includes some of the most important and influential papers in the field, and covers a wide array of subjects within it. Furthermore, each section has an intro written by the authors, which summarizes the works in the section in a fairly nontechnical manner.
This book saved me from days of basic research and frustration in trying to locate full-text articles, and when I was done with it I felt that I had a fairly good working knowledge of the field. I imagine it will be fairly handy for future reference as well.
As for (2), this book was my introduction to network analysis, and while I admit I was unable to read every paper, I was able to understand the main point of almost all of them. Caveat: I am a mathematician. However, as I said, I was previously unfamiliar to the field--and my background gave me little advantage considering I didn't care to go through the equations in detail.
I would recommend this book to anyone with a mildly technical background (say, a few years of university-level science, engineering, or math under their belt) interested in learning about network theory.The Structure and Dynamics of Networks: (Princeton Studies in Complexity) Overview

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Weak Links: The Universal Key to the Stability of Networks and Complex Systems (The Frontiers Collection) Review

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Weak Links: The Universal Key to the Stability of Networks and Complex Systems (The Frontiers Collection) ReviewIf you ever needed another good reason to value your grandmother even more, you'll find the answer in "Weak links".
Structurally, his book starts with an exposition on network theory and
terminology, then the application and discussion of these concepts to
real-life complex systems on many scales and applied to many domains (physical, natural, technological, social). His main point is, as the reviewer noted above, that 'weak' links (weak: additional/removal does not statistically affect the average of some metric) stabilize systems.
The book has thorough footnotes, one can delve as deep as one would like
into the professional papers. In addition, Csermely is an honest scholar - he shows his hands when there is mere speculation (you have to see the book's unique pictograms to appreciate the effects)
After pouring through several alternatives, I have adopted this book as a
textbook for my Science of Networks class (I'm CS fac at an elite US liberal arts school), and I recommend it to anyone without hesitation for a readable, and learned exposition.
I only have two or three caveats from a specialist's point of view: The
phenomenological discovery of power laws in complex systems is not unusual
and may not be evidence of any SF properties. Scale-free is an abused
term, and I wish the controversy about it were explained a bit more. Also, from a modelling point of view, I wish Doyle and Carlson's work on HOT systems were discussed in more depth.
But these are minor points, relatively speaking. This is a gem of a book:
erudite, humane, funny, accessible and thoroughly fascinating. On every
page, there are delights that lead down new intellectual paths.
Csermely did a great service to pedagogy and to this budding science with
this magisterial survey. Outstanding in its ease of access for intelligent
undergraduates and commendable for intellectual honesty - I wish more
books (textbooks and otherwise) were written this way.Weak Links: The Universal Key to the Stability of Networks and Complex Systems (The Frontiers Collection) Overview

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