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Simon Sebag Montefiore's The Romanovs: 1613-1918 is a chronicle of the Romanov dynasty over its 300-year reign in Russia. The book focuses on the personalities, choices, and actions of the royal family, including their sexual and romantic relationships. Montefiore provides extensive quotations from the letters and diaries of the Romanovs, many of them unpublished. By telling the story of the Romanovs, Montefiore also tells the story of Russia's rise to empire.
A must-listen for anyone interested in philosophical psychology, moral epistemology, or Kant interpretation, this brisk monograph provides a long-overdue alternative to the dreary and opaque tomes on which Kant aficionados have thus far had to rely.
A number attempts to provide a rational basis for religious sentiment are clearly stated and carefully critiqued, most of them being shown to fail. At the same time, it is argued that the legitimacy of religious sentiment is in no way undermined by such failings, since any outlook whose legitimacy depends on the outcome of logical or empirical inquiry is for that very reason a non-religious outlook. And the reason for this is not that a religious outlook is a stubbornly irrational one.
Do we choose our values or do our values choose us?
In this concise study, the basic principles of measurement-theory are stated.
It is made clear what analytic truth is and how it differs from formal truth. Some important theorems about incompleteness are stated both comprehensibly and accurately.
Simon Sebag Montefiore's The Romanovs: 1613-1918 is a chronicle of the Romanov dynasty over its 300-year reign in Russia. The book focuses on the personalities, choices, and actions of the royal family, including their sexual and romantic relationships. Montefiore provides extensive quotations from the letters and diaries of the Romanovs, many of them unpublished. By telling the story of the Romanovs, Montefiore also tells the story of Russia's rise to empire.
A must-listen for anyone interested in philosophical psychology, moral epistemology, or Kant interpretation, this brisk monograph provides a long-overdue alternative to the dreary and opaque tomes on which Kant aficionados have thus far had to rely.
A number attempts to provide a rational basis for religious sentiment are clearly stated and carefully critiqued, most of them being shown to fail. At the same time, it is argued that the legitimacy of religious sentiment is in no way undermined by such failings, since any outlook whose legitimacy depends on the outcome of logical or empirical inquiry is for that very reason a non-religious outlook. And the reason for this is not that a religious outlook is a stubbornly irrational one.
Do we choose our values or do our values choose us?
In this concise study, the basic principles of measurement-theory are stated.
It is made clear what analytic truth is and how it differs from formal truth. Some important theorems about incompleteness are stated both comprehensibly and accurately.
This short work proves that we have knowledge that cannot possibly be derived from observation.
In this book, each of the possible positions concerning the relationship between mind and body is clearly explained and thoroughly critiqued. It is concluded that, although mental events are identical with physical events, mentalistic statements are not equivalent with physicalistic statements.
According to David Hume (1743), for an event series to be a causal series is simply for that series to instantiate a regularity. According to Carl Hempel (1945), to explain an event is simply to identify a regularity of which that event is the final component. Both analyses are wrong but philosophers have failed in their attempts to identify the flaws in those arguments and, more importantly, in their attempts to produce viable alternative analyses. Here, the flaws in those arguments are identified and viable analyses of causation and explanation are put forth.
It is said what it is to persist in time, and on that basis it is shown that time-travel, teleportation, and other mainstays of science fiction are impossible.
This volume describes the ruinous consequences of pseudo-professions.
In this work, Descartes' metaphysics and epistemology are clearly stated and assiduously analyzed. It is shown that Descartes' epistemic foundationalism is tenable, and that his mind-body dualism is correct if taken to concern the relationship of mentalistic (mind-related) data to physicalistic data, even though it is incorrect if taken to concern the relationship of mind per se to body per se. Descartes' analysis of causation is shown to be correct, notwithstanding the copious criticism to which centuries have subjected it.
This work gives clear rigorous answers to the fundamental questions of epistemology, these being: What is knowledge? How does declarative knowledge differ from procedural knowledge? How does intuitive knowledge differ from discursive knowledge? How does scientific knowledge differ from non-scientific knowledge? What is the difference between discovery and justification? And much more.
A brisk introduction to the basic problems of ethics, this work consists of sharp, deep answers to foundational questions. Rigorous yet approachable, this work is an ideal introduction to analytic ethics and value theory.
In this fictitious dialogue, it is clearly explained how quantum physics is deterministic and how it is indeterministic, and it is also clearly said what Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is.
It is made clear what is involved in knowing will happen, what has happened, and what might have happened (but didn't). It is also made clear why the standard skeptical objections to the presumption that we have such knowledge are misconceived.
Scholars and laymen generally assume that emotions are not judgments - that whereas judgments are expressions of rationality, emotions are expressions of irrationality. In this concise volume, it is shown that emotions are in fact judgments, with the qualification that emotions are hewed to egocentric frame of reference, whereas garden-variety judgments are hewed to a non-egocentric frame of reference.
Emotivism is the doctrine that ethical beliefs are nothing more than projections of emotion. In this concise study, it is shown that emotions themselves embody ethical beliefs and that, for that reason, emotivism implicitly presupposes the truth of a non-emotivism conception of ethical truth and therefore fails.
The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world's surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world's greatest empire? And how did they lose it all? This is the intimate story of 20 tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore's gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance, with a global cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries and poets, from Ivan the Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin, to Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria and Lenin.
To rule Russia was both imperial-sacred mission and poisoned chalice: six of the last 12 tsars were murdered. Peter the Great tortured his own son to death while making Russia an empire, and dominated his court with a dining club notable for compulsory drunkenness, naked dwarves and fancy dress. Catherine the Great overthrew her own husband (who was murdered soon afterward), enjoyed affairs with a series of young male favorites, conquered Ukraine and fascinated Europe. Paul I was strangled by courtiers backed by his own son, Alexander I, who in turn faced Napoleon's invasion and the burning of Moscow, then went on to take Paris. Alexander II liberated the serfs, survived five assassination attempts and wrote perhaps the most explicit love letters ever composed by a ruler. The Romanovs climaxes with a fresh, unforgettable portrayal of Nicholas II and Alexandra, the rise and murder of Rasputin, war and revolution - and the harrowing massacre of the entire family.
Dazzlingly entertaining and beautifully written from start to finish, The Romanovs brings these monarchs - male and female, great and flawed, their families and courts - blazingly to life. Drawing on new archival research, Montefiore delivers an enthralling epic of triumph and tragedy, love and murder, encompassing the seminal years 1812, 1914 and 1917, that is both a universal study of power and a portrait of the empire that helps define Russia today.
This summary is aimed for those who want to capture the gist of the book but don't have the current time to devour all of it. You get the main summary along with all of the benefits and lessons the actual book has to offer. This summary is not intended to be used without reference to the original book.