Sorensen – författare

Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Riddles, paradoxes, conundrums--for millennia the human mind has found such knotty logical problems both perplexing and irresistible. Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before He made the world, he was told: "Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that." A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at "questions like that" and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning with the folk riddles that inspired Anaximander to erect the first metaphysical system and ending with such thinkers as Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine. Organized chronologically, the book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of which pairs a philosopher with a major paradox, allowing for extended consideration and putting a human face on the strategies that have been taken toward these puzzles. Readers get to follow the minds of Zeno, Socrates, Aquinas, Ockham, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, and many other major philosophers deep inside the tangles of paradox, looking for, and sometimes finding, a way out. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and vividly written, A Brief History of the Paradox will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavor.

The world wide web has been in existence for just over twenty-five years, but already its potential for impacting education appears to be infinite. Online platforms provide increasingly sophisticated tools for the mass dissemination of knowledge and sharing of ideas. These platforms can currently be accessed by the more than half of the people on Earth who have access to the internet in 2017, and the infrastructure for the internet continues to expand rapidly intodeveloping global locations. Today, online learning is an important current topic for contemporary educators in diverse fields. The chapters in this book address these topics specifically for the field of chemistry, giving overviews of existing work as well as "snapshot in time" examples of the workbeing conducted in this area. The purpose of the book is to examine the relevant successes, challenges, research findings, and practical examples in online approaches to chemistry education.