Meynell is a vary lucid writer and he is quite good at giving a general overview of the philosophical positions that he thinks are incorrect.

This book includes arguements against extreme and moderate scepticism. On the first of these scepticisms his arguements are cogent. He does not, however, overcome the force of Hume's arguements for moderate scepticism.

Next, Meynell explains his version of the correspondence theory of truth, based on how we come to know. Sense-data are taken to be metaphysical simples, from which we articulate intelligable theories about the world. These theories approximate reality, Meynell claims, because they can predict how things would have been if they were true. Since we may combine this feature of expirimentation with intelligent thinking and our experience of a designed world we can have knowledge about the world.

Although Meynell does not state Theism at the beginning of the book his theory does not seem plausable without it, due to the fact that his realism is permeated with idealism. If there were no Necessary being what reason do we have to hold that the world, reached through our experience of knowing, is a world for knowing? In short, Meynell's world looks like a world made to be known. His order of presentation leads me to think that he wanted to show the reverse of this point: that because the world is knowable it is made.

Meynell then claims that this view of correspondence implies a radical Cartesian internalism and a Thomistic metaphysics of immaterial essences along with mind\body interactionist deulism. By the end of the book his realism surely does require these positions, however I cannot see how Meynell arrives at his Thomistic conclusion from his initial chapterrs on truth, reality and data. It seems to me that Meynell's love for God makes him exagerate the implications of his premises. Naturally, my claim here instanciates both the fallacy of "to the man" and the so-called "genetic fallacy." Here I hope not to argue against Meynell, but simply to give my impression of his book.

I also think he fails to explain the metaphysics of causation, in most of the particular details of his Lonerganian philosophy.

This book is fun and worth reading because of its broad outlook and its innocent, though not uninformed, and speculative view of philosophical problems. Indeed, correspondence theories of truth are not dead, as long as we have articulate and acute Englishmen like Meynell to endorse them. Meynell also seems like a good person.

Having been married for 30 years and still raising some of our four children, there have been times that I've wondered what my married life would have been like if we hadn't had children. Of course we love our children and they have taught us how to be parents, but sometimes they also take a lot of time and care. "Tired" is the word that often came to my mind when they were younger, not "passion". In his insightful book, "Rekindle the Passion while Raising Your Kids" Anthony Garascia unlocks some secrets and opens our hearts to new inspiration. I especially liked his many stories of ordinary couples with typical marital issues which help us see that it isn't love that we've lost with the advent of children, we just need to imagine our love in new forms. Stories can prompt that imagination. Mr. Garascia reminds us to recapture the romantic dreams of our youth and refashion them to fit our changing family as we look at our spouse as not only lover, but also partner, companion, and friend. Each has it's own kind of excitement when given a chance.
As a family life educator for over 25 years, I also heard numerous parents ask how to keep their love alive with toddlers running around and little money for babysitters. In my mind "Rekindle the Passion" passes both the professional and personal test of a book well worth reading. If for no other reason than just chuckling over the short quotes at the beginning of each chapter, it's worth the money.

The theory of representations of semisimple Lie groups is very complete from a mathematical perspective and is of enormous importance in high energy physics. This book gives a comprehensive overview of this theory, and deals with both the noncompact and compact cases. My interest was with the noncompact case and in topics such as the Langland's classification, and so I read only chapters 5 - 10. Therefore my review will be confined to these chapters. Throughout the book, G denotes the group in question and K denotes the elements of G fixed under the Cartan involution. The author endeavors, and this is reflected in the title of the book, to employ many examples to illustrate the main results. This makes the book considerably more easy to follow than others that are written in the "Bourbaki" style.

The Iwasawa and Bruhat decompositions and the Weyl group construction are shown to hold for non-compact groups in chapter 5. The Borel-Weil theorem is proven for compact connected Lie groups using the results of the chapter. The Harish-Chandra decomposition fo linear connected reductive groups is proven in chapter 6. The author shows clearly the role of holomorphic representations in obtaining this result and the construction of holomorphic discrete series. The principal series representations of SL(2, R) and SL(2, C) are use to motivate the notion of an 'induced representation" in chapter 7. The theory of induced representations involves the Bruhat theory and its use of distribution theory, and relates via the 'intertwining operators', irreducible representations of two subgroups.

The author discusses the notion of an admissible representation in chapter 8, which are representations on a Hilbert space by unitary operators and each element in K has finite multiplicity when the representation is restricted to K. Equivalence of admissible representations are discussed via the concept of an "infinitesimal equivalance", which is the usual notion if the representation is unitary and irreducible. The Langlands classification of irreducible admissible representations is discussed in detail. The Langlands program shows to what extent irreducible admissible representations of a group are determined by the parabolic subgroups. The construction of discrete series, used throughout the proof of the Langlands classification, is then done in detail in the next chapter. Ths concept of an admissible infinitesimally unitary representation plays particular importance here. Here the representation operators act like skew-Hermitian operators with respect to an inner product on the space of K-finite vectors. If one reads this chapter from a physics perspective, the representations constructed using discrete series are somewhat 'exotic' and will probably not enter into applications, in spite of the fact that physical considerations do dictate sometimes the use of noncompact groups.

Chapter 10 addresses the question as to the completeness of irreducible admissible representations using discrete series. If there not enough discrete series representations this will show up in the Fourier analysis of square integrable functions on the group. In the compact case, Fourier analysis proceeded via the characters of irreducible representations. The author shows how to do this in the noncompact case via 'global characters' of representations, which are well-behaved generalizations of the compact case. The well-behavedness of global characters comes from their being of trace class, with the result of the trace being a distribution. The author gives explicit formulas for the case of SL(2, R), and shows hows differential equations can be used to limit the possibilities for how characters behave. In fact, the author shows to what extent characters are functions, proving that the restriction of any irreducible global character of G to the 'regular set' is a real analytic function.

i love this game but i can't bet the game

A great physics text Tony Pitucco is one of the best physics profs there are even though he gave me an f.

This book gives practical advice on how to topple society's ancient religious establishment and replace it with reason-based principles and values. Most ideas in our culture are carefully scrutinized, but religious ideas are considered beyond criticism by most people. Those committed to reason must begin the public debate over the truth claims of religions. The author argues persuasively that to get a place at the table of public opinion, reason-based people must put aside their minor differences and unify. Many activists belong to groups that call themselves atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, rationalists, or infidels, and spend too much time focusing on the 1 percent of difference that sets them apart, rather than the 99 percent that can bring them together. The author advocates that by showing strength in numbers, along with an effective public relations campaign, a unified humanist movement can win the minds of most Americans. He would be happy to know that the Secular Coalition for America is a newly-formed organization working to unify and amplify the voices of the nontheistic community.

Return to Mars was first published in Australia 14 years ago but has lost none of its relevance and immediacy despite many missions to Mars in the intervening years. The authors are to be congratulated upon the fact that the new edition by Black Rabbit Press has needed no corrections of importance. Looking at reviews posted on the net, one is struck by the reviewers' words- ''incomparable'' and ''highly commendable''. The authors insist that at least part of the human race has a blend of Martian genes, introduced 40,000 years ago, meaning that in the ancient past, people like us lived on that planet. Crowley and Pollock do not speculate, but produce previously untold stories of how the Martian refugees arrived on our world, landing at such places as Armenia and at Kariba in Africa. They go on to give correlations with the mythology of numerous peoples, and even with the tarot pack, which they say requires yet another analysis in terms of stellar history. The writers are obviously initiates but deny it. Beautifully written, fully illustrated with numerous explanatory sketches, and a delight to delve into. One can only wish it were longer. The new cover shows Mars as it was many aeons ago when the planet still had an ocean- now admitted to by NASA after many many years of obfuscation. Highly recommended.

J ANTHONY BROWN IS A GREAT ACTOR, COMEDIAN AND NOW WRITER. I LISTEN TO HIM ON THE TJM SHOW EVERYDAY J, TOM, CYBIL, MYA AND MRS DUPREE KEEP ME LAUGHING ON MY WAY TO WORK EACH MORNING. SO WHEN I HEARD ABOUT THE BOOK I HAD TO GET IT. CHURCH ANNOUNCEMENTS IS SO TRUE THAT ITS FUNNY. YOU GOTTA LOVE MISS WIDE LOAD WALLACE. ONE MY FAVORITES WAS "............... THE CHURCH SHOT GLASS FOR COMMUNION. UNTIL IT CAME INTO BEING, EVERYONE HAD TO TAKE A SWIG AND PASS THE BOTTLE" IF YOU LIKED 150 WAYS TO TELL IF YOUR GHETTO THEN YOU'LL LIKE THIS ONE AS WELL

click on the thumbnail to view the book cover - see?

Click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture of the book - see what I mean?

Well balanced, insightful review.