Stuart Walton
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English
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The five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been, held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorized about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins, viewing them as at best a distraction from higher thinking, and at worst a positive deception. Paradoxically, what one could not...
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The First Day in Paradise tells the story of a young orphaned family who have been passed on from one set of relations to another, and whose eldest sibling, Adam, becomes enthralled by the impending opening nearby of a gigantic and beautiful shopping-mall by a flamboyant entrepreneur. To the consternation of his aunt and uncle, who run a small business, he joins the staff of one of its stores, and begins a dizzying ascent through the ranks, until...
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While Theodor Adorno has continued to be influential since his death in 1969, his very centrality has led to the left simplifying his ideas while the right placed him at the center of a myriad of wild conspiracy theories, all of them filed under the category of Cultural Marxism. Adorno has wrongly been blamed for everything from the Beatles to postmodernism, but he has continued to be read, if read badly. Stuart Walton's introduction to Adorno attempts...
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Using Charles Darwin's survey of emotions as a starting point, Stuart Walton's A Natural History of Human Emotions examines the history of each of our core emotions-fear, anger, disgust, sadness, jealousy, contempt, shame, embarrassment, surprise, and happiness-and how these emotions have influenced both cultural and social history. We learn that primitive fear served as the engine of religious belief, while a desire for happiness led to humankind's...
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Stuart Walton's The Devil's Dinner looks at the history of hot peppers, their culinary uses through the ages, and the significance of spicy food in an increasingly homogenous world.
The Devil's Dinner is the first authoritative history of chili peppers. There are countless books on cooking with chilies, but no book goes into depth about the biological, gastronomical, and cultural impact this forbidden fruit has had upon people all over the world....