Internationally recognized physicist and philosopher Mario Bunge (McGill University), has taken the challenge to formulate with rigour, and to bring up-to-date Materialist Philosophy (the philosophy of modern science and technology). He begins by examining the common criticisms to materialism, then he states the principles of scientific materialism in an exact, precise and systematic way. Subsequently, the author implacably criticizes dialectics, teleology, psycho-physical dualism and other doctrines that are incompatible with logic or science. He also formulates three new theories on mind, values and culture. Finally, he attacks Popper's doctrine of the 3 worlds and Berkeley's idealism. This book will be very valuable for anyone interested in having a clear, rational, realistic and scientific conception of the world.

Mario Bunge (McGill, Montreal) has contructed an entire philosophical system that espouses a consistently realist, materialist-emergentist, and science-oriented outlook.
His chef d'oeuvre is the monumental 8-volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy (1974-1989), in which he treats semantics, ontology, epistemology and ethics from a unified and unique perspective.
In order to present a panorama of such a system, Martin Mahner has collected in Scientific Realism, 30 articles that illustrate most aspects of Bunge's thought, from metaphysics and epistemology, to moral, social and political philosophy.
This book will be of great interest for anyone who shares a scientific, realist, materialist, naturalist and humanist outlook.

I am a colleague of the author and have used the book in my own work.

This book will be equally invaluable to those seriously working to understand society and improve it, and repentent postmodernists wishing to be cured of their affliction. The book covers, in a scholarly, systemic, and often humorous and entertaining manner, all the social sciences (including anthropology, demography, linguistics, economics, sociology, political science, culturology and history) and sociotechnologies (including the law, management science, normative economics, and action theory). The following are excerpts from various professional reviews:

From the dust jacket:

"We should welcome the book for its author, subject, and style" (Charles Tilly, Columbia University).

"The book is scholarly yet lively; comprehensive yet unified around a few central powerful ideas; profound yet entertaining reading with one bon mot after another; unorthodox yet constructive" (Joseph Agassi, Tel Aviv and York Universities).

"No one can read [this volume] without learning a great deal, and [it] could be used as backbone of a teaching course, or an intelligent person could use it in an initiation to each of the fields [covered by the book]. Clarity, erudition and range are the merits" (the late Ernest Gellner).

The inspiring and sometimes inspired messages from these talks by men from Montessori, Fourth Way, Buddhist, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Quaker, and Subud backgrounds are surprisingly of one accord: We risk poisoning our children with our over-weening efforts to "give them" what we scarcely can claim to possess ourselves. Rather, our role, according to a broad concensus ascertained here, is to put our own inner lives in order that we might see clearly the balance of structure and freedom necessary to let the child's spirituality mature naturally. Clearly, Mr. Bennett understood developmental psychology well and could himself recognize the stages in a child's inner as well as outer development, as well as articulate what is crucial in each stage.

St. Leonard's Way of the Cross is reflections by St. Leonard of Port Maurice on each station of the cross. The pamphlet includes a very short introduction regarding St. Leonard; an opening prayer; a line drawing of each station with a short reflection of the station by St. Leonard; a short history of the Stations of the Cross; and a handful of prayers appropriate for the Way of the Cross or prayers before a crucifix. This volume is intended for personal rather than group use; as such, it can be an excellent choice.

If you love the game, but you need some tips on racing, this is an informative strategy guide. It has clear directions on how to succeed on the pod-racing circuit along with very clear maps of the shortest routes through the tracks. There's even some directions on how to unlock the secret characters. This book is a great resource for pod-racers everywhere!

This Strategy Guide is a very good thing to have! When I got this it helped me through all the things I had no idea how to get to, like Darkice Mines, I had no idea how to get up to that vortex but now I do haa! anyways anyone who has this game get this guide its very good and well written! The game isawesome too so ppl who don't have it get it holla!!!!!!!!!!!!

This textbook is well-conceived and well-executed. The authors have a strong background in science as well as a keen interest in making technical subjects accessible to a broad audience. They have succeeded in presenting statistics with a minimum of mathematics. Emphasis is placed upon the application of these concepts to real life situations taken from news sources, the internet and individual experiences. The graphics, sidebars, focus sections and case studies are timely, relevant, engaging, lucidly written and enlightening. A one-page epilog provides a nice summary statement to the entire textbook. A glossary, index, answer key , appendices and suggestions for further reading are also included.
This is an excellent textbook for a general education student whose career would not require the direct use of statistical tools. None of the usual tables are discussed or present in this textbook, but all of the main topics are treated in a thorough and thought-provoking fashion. The authors' discussion of correlation and causality is especially good, although their definition of causality in the glossary as " the relationship present when one variable is a cause of another " is circular. Instead, the authors should reiterate their assertion from the main text that a "cause" is a "physical mechanism" based upon a "physical model" which is generally acceptable as a scientific explanation.

"The Story of the English Language" Not only, tells the story of the language, but also examines the history of the people who developed it's use.

The book will not only satisfy anglophiles, but anyone intrested in linguistics in general.

Very readable... you will want to learn other languages!

"Sunshine Enemies" is the Mario Balzic novel (note it is not called a mystery any more) that I have been waiting for K. C. Constantine to write ever since the second book in the series ("The Man Who Like to Look at Himself"), where the chief's family life was thrust into the background. One of the strengths of the first Mario Balzic story, "The Rocksburg Railroad Murders," was that the chief's wife, kids and mother were part of his life and part of the world in which he lived. But with each subsequent novel Ruth and the rest of the Balzics were scarcely seen; sometimes Mario would ask his mom for some information about someone from the old neighborhood, but more often than not there would be a note from Ruth reminding Balzic she had not seen him awake and/or sober for a while. All that changes big time with "Sunshine Enemies."

The title is a drunken twist on one of Balzic's caustic comments on the way of the world. It takes us a while to learn that in this novel, just as it takes us a while to understand why this is not a mystery novel. "Sunshine Enemies" is a character study that digs deep into the psyche of someone we are still getting to understand after eight novels. The set up is a series of distractions: the Police Chief of Rocksburg has to deal with a minister complaining about a recently opened porno shop, but gets a bigger headache when a brutal knife murder takes place outside the shop. A reluctant witness tentatively comes forward, and it does not seem that we have much of a mystery here. But then Balzic's mother suffers a massive stroke and suddenly brutal crimes in the small western Pennsylvania town become insignificant.

The prognosis for Marie Petraglia Balzic is not good and suddenly Balzic is face to face with his deepest insecurities. His wife confronts him with the brutal truth about how they have both used his mother, Ruth's best friend, as the chief means of staying connected. Balzic looks at his daughters and realizes they have become grown women, who tend to curse just like their father, a fact that horrifies him. The novel becomes a series of crushing body blows for Balzic, one after another, in which he finds himself shaken to the depths of his soul as his world is turned upside down.

The hallmark of this novel, like Constantine's other novels, are the conversations that Balzic has with the other characters. But this time the key difference is that the vast majority of such dialogues are not about a crime under investigation. Instead, they are about such issues as what Balzic thinks about what happens to people after they die, what he thinks about Marie dying her hair, and what really happened when his mother defended him from the attacks of a nun when he was a child. There are some conversations about the crime at hand, allowing Mo Valcanas to hold forth on the relationship between pornography and sex crimes, but they become meaningless as Balzic contemplates the great impact his mother has had on not only his life but also that of everybody who knows her.

The fact that this is not a "true" mystery per se should not matter to readers of the series. The chief attraction here is Balzic's compelling personality not the sordid little crimes he is solving in each novel. Of course, I appreciate the irony in getting what I wanted in a way that almost makes me wish events in Balzic's life did not take such a tragic turn. But the character has needed to reclaim his soul for several novels now, and it has been clear from the beginning that his soul is with his family.