Books published by Harvard University Press

The miniscule motion of a butterfly's wings can trigger a tornado half a world away, according to chaos theory. Catharine A. MacKinnon's collected work on gender inequality including new pieces argues that the right seemingly minor interventions in the legal realm can have a butterfly effect that generates major social and cultural transformations.

How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than any hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, set humans outside normal evolution. Darwin thought use of language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but this remained an intriguing guess--until now. Combining state-of-the-art research with forty years of writing and thinking about language origins, Derek Bickerton convincingly resolves a crucial problem that biology and the cognitive sciences have systematically avoided. Before language or advanced cognition could be born, humans had to escape the prison of the here and now in which animal thinking and communication were both trapped. Then the brain's self-organization, triggered by words, assembled mechanisms that could link not only words but the concepts those words symbolized--a process that had to be under conscious control. Those mechanisms could be used equally for thinking and for talking, but the skeletal structures they produced were suboptimal for the hearer and had to be elaborated. Starting from humankind's remotest past, More than Nature Needs transcends nativist thesis and empiricist antithesis by presenting a revolutionary synthesis that shows specifically and in a principled way how and why the synthesis came about.

In the early 1960s fewer than five percent of Japanese owned automobiles, China's per capita income was among the lowest in Asia, and living standards in rural South Korea put it among the world's poorest countries. Today, these are three of the most powerful economies on earth. Dwight Perkins draws on extensive experience in the region to explain how Asia sustained such rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. East Asian Development covers Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, as well as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and China--a behemoth larger than the other economies combined. While the overall picture of Asian growth is positive, no single economic policy has been effective regionwide. Perkins uncovers why some initially egalitarian societies have ended up in very different places, with Japan, for example, maintaining a modest gap between rich and poor while China has become one of Asia's most unequal economies. With Korean and Japanese growth sluggish and China losing steam, Perkins asks whether this is a regional phenomenon or typical of all economies at this stage of development. His inquiry reminds us that the uncharted waters of China's vast economy make predictions speculative at best.

Libanius (314-393 CE), who was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism, has much to tell us about the tumultuous world of the fourth century CE. His works include Orations, the first of which is an autobiography, and Letters.

Diodorus' Library of History, written in the first century BCE, is the most extensively preserved history by an ancient Greek author. The work is in three parts: mythical history to the Trojan War; history to Alexander's death (323 BCE); history to 54 BCE. Books 1-5 and 11-20 survive complete, the rest in fragments.

Nearly all the works Aristotle (384-322 BCE) prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as practical; logical; physical; metaphysical; on art; other; fragments.

Vol. 1 revised 1928; vol. 2 revised 1930; vol. 4 includes index.

How does Bitcoin mine money from 1s and 0s? Through blockchain, a tool for creating secure, decentralized peer-to-peer applications. The technology has been compared to the Internet in impact. But disintermediation-blockchain's greatest benefit-cuts out oversight along with middlemen. Blockchain and the Law urges the law to catch up.

In a monumental history of WWI, Germany's leading historian of the first great 20th-century catastrophe explains the war's origins and course, revealing how profoundly it shaped the world to come. Joern Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy, the tactics of arms and attrition, and the grim fate of frontline soldiers.

Alexander Bevilacqua shows that the Enlightenment effort to learn about Islam and its religious and intellectual traditions issued not from a secular agenda but from the scholarly commitments of a pioneering group of Catholic and Protestant Christians who cast aside inherited views and bequeathed a new understanding of Islam to the modern West.

In this dialogue between a famous atheist and a former radical, Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz invite you to join an urgently needed conversation: Is Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem drawn to extremism? The authors demonstrate how two people with very different views can find common ground.

Architects, we like to believe, shape the world as they please. Reinier de Graaf draws on his own tragicomic experiences to present a candid account of what it is really like to work as an architect. To achieve anything, he notes, architects must serve the powers they strive to critique, finding themselves in a perpetual conflict of interest.

First published 1920-1925. Frequently and varyingly republished and reprinted.

In a work as much about the present as the past, Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Reformation for the modern condition: a hyperpluralism of beliefs, intellectual disagreements that splinter into fractals of specialized discourse, the absence of a substantive common good, and the triumph of capitalism's driver, consumerism.

Kant declared that philosophy began in 1781 with his Critique of Pure Reason. In 1806 Hegel announced that it had been completed. Forster assesses the steps that led from Kant's "beginning" to Hegel's "end" and concludes that both Kant and Hegel were indeed right. His study reveals Goethe's significant contribution to post-Kantian thinking.

The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders replaced the Ming dynasty. This title explores what happened to China between these two invasions.

This is the first part of a two-volume edition of Statius's epics "Thebaid" and "Achilleid", with a freshly edited Latin text facing an English translation.

In letters to his dear friend Atticus, Cicero reveals himself as to no other, except perhaps his brother. These letters, in a four-volume series, provide a vivid picture of a momentous period in Roman history--years marked by the rise of Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Republic.

In 1889 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman met in a Lower East Side coffee shop. Over the next fifty years they became fast friends, fleeting lovers, and loyal comrades. This dual biography offers a glimpse into their intertwined lives, the influence of the anarchist movement they shaped, and their unyielding commitment to equality and justice.

Usually when we're bored, we try to distract ourselves. But soon enough, boredom returns. James Danckert and John Eastwood argue that we can learn to handle boredom more effectively by recognizing what research shows: boredom indicates unmet psychological needs. Boredom, therefore, can motivate us to change what isn't working in our lives.

No detailed description available for "Burgage Tenure in Mediaeval England".

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the revolutionary scientific thinker who discovered what stars are made of. But her name is hard to find alongside those of Hubble, Herschel, and other great astronomers. Donovan Moore tells the story of Payne-Gaposchkin's life of determination against all the obstacles a patriarchal society erected against her.

Appian (first-second century CE), a Greek from Antioch, offers a history of the rise of Rome but often shows us events from the point of view of the conquered peoples. Books on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, Mythridatic, and Civil wars are extant.

Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto, a term that has described legally segregated Jewish quarters, dense immigrant enclaves, Nazi holding pens, and black neighborhoods in the United States. Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with struggle and argument over the slippery meaning of a word.

We often think of the Balkans as a region beset by turmoil and backwardness, but from late antiquity to the present it has been a dynamic meeting place of cultures and religions. Marie-Janine Calic invites us to reconsider the history of this intriguing, diverse region as essential to the story of global Europe.

For 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel help us understand the evolution of the mind by exploring this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel, which is the root of so much that makes us uniquely human.

From 1820 to 1990 the share of world income going to today's wealthy nations soared from 20% to 70%. That share has recently plummeted. Richard Baldwin shows how the combination of high tech with low wages propelled industrialization in developing nations, deindustrialization in developed nations, and a commodity supercycle that is petering out.

Klaus Muhlhahn situates modern China in the nation's long, dynamic tradition of overcoming adversity and weakness through creative adaptation-a legacy of crisis and recovery that is apparent today in China's triumphs but also in its most worrisome trends. Muhlhahn's panoramic survey rewrites the history of modern China for a new generation.

We know more of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, than of any other Roman. Besides much else, his work conveys the turmoil of his time, and the part he played in a period that saw the rise and fall of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic.