Responding to those who argue that resources spent saving lives in impoverished and overpopulated regions are wasted, Klaus Leisinger and Karin Schmitt set forth the components of strategies that can bring down birth rates in an ethically acceptable way. They explain that development must: foster a political, legal, and economic environment that supports human development focus on the satisfaction of basic human needs improve the social status of women All Our People provides an in-depth, balanced treatment of such factors as human consumption patterns, the ethical issues surrounding population policy, and the role of women in development issues. The authors consider the wide range of conditions necessary to mitigate problems associated with population growth and the environment, including reformed attitudes and behavior patterns among people in industrial countries as well as global changes in economic, social, and political structures.

Sir Samuel Brittan, the doyen of British economic journalists, explores the connections between economics, ethics, and politics while assessing the merits and defects of capitalism in this post-socialist era.

The first comprehensive collection in English of Antonin Artaud’s writings on his artworks.

The many major exhibitions of Antonin Artaud’s drawings and drawn notebook pages in recent years—at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst, and Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou—have entirely transformed our perception of his work, reorienting it toward the artworks of his final years. This volume collects all three of Artaud’s major writings on his artworks. “The Human Face” (1947) was written as the catalog text for Artaud’s only gallery exhibition of his drawings during his lifetime, focusing on his approach to making portraits of his friends at the decrepit pavilion in the Paris suburbs where he spent the final year of his life. “Ten years that language is gone” (1947) examines the drawings Artaud made in his notebooks—his main creative medium at the end of his life—and their capacity to electrify his creativity when language failed him. “50 Drawings to assassinate magic” (1948), the residue of an abandoned book of Artaud’s drawings, approaches the act of drawing as part of the weaponry deployed by Artaud at the very end of his life to combat malevolent assaults and attempted acts of assassination. Together, these three extraordinary texts—pitched between writing and image—project Artaud’s ferocious engagement with the act of drawing.
 

Humans possess the most expressive faces in the animal kingdom. Adam Wilkins presents evidence ranging from the fossil record to recent findings of genetics, molecular biology, and developmental biology to reconstruct the fascinating story of how the human face evolved. Beginning with the first vertebrate faces half a billion years ago and continuing to dramatic changes among our recent human ancestors, Making Faces illuminates how the unusual characteristics of the human face came about—both the physical shape of facial features and the critical role facial expression plays in human society.

Offering more than an account of morphological changes over time and space, which rely on findings from paleontology and anthropology, Wilkins also draws on comparative studies of living nonhuman species. He examines the genetic foundations of the remarkable diversity in human faces, and also shows how the evolution of the face was intimately connected to the evolution of the brain. Brain structures capable of recognizing different individuals as well as “reading” and reacting to their facial expressions led to complex social exchanges. Furthermore, the neural and muscular mechanisms that created facial expressions also allowed the development of speech, which is unique to humans.

In demonstrating how the physical evolution of the human face has been inextricably intertwined with our species’ growing social complexity, Wilkins argues that it was both the product and enabler of human sociality.

The time has come to reform philosophy, says Hilary Putnam, one of America’s great philosophers. He calls upon philosophers to attend to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to represent. Putnam’s goal is to embed philosophy in social life.

The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions. Putnam rejects the contemporary metaphysics that insists on describing both the mind and the world from a God’s-eye view. In its place he argues for pluralism, for a philosophy that is not a closed systematic method but a human practice connected to real life. Philosophy has a task, to be sure, but it is not to provide an inventory of the basic furniture of the universe or to separate reality in itself from our own projections. Putnam makes it clear that science is not in the business of describing a ready-made world, and philosophy should not be in that business either.

The author moves on to show that the larger human context in which science matters is a world of values animated by ethics and aesthetic judgments. No adequate philosophy should try to explain away ethical facts. The dimension of history is added in the third part of the book. Here Putnam takes up a set of American philosophers, some firmly within and others outside the canon of analytic philosophy, such as William James and C. S. Peirce, and he explores the pragmatist contribution to philosophy from James to Quine and Goodman.

This book connects issues in metaphysics with cultural and literary issues and argues that the collapse of philosophical realism does not entail a fall into the abyss of relativism and postmodern skepticism. It is aimed primarily at philosophers but should appeal to a wide range of humanists and social scientists.

In October of 1992, the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies sponsored the Roger Revelle Memorial Symposium on Population and Environment. Two dozen eminent scientists—all friends, colleagues, or students of Roger Revelle—presented papers in a broad range of disciplines that reflect the remarkable scope of Revelle’s professional and academic contributions during his lifetime. This volume is a selection of the symposium papers.

A memoir of Revelle’s exposure to poverty in Pakistan, igniting his interest in the contribution that science could make to improving the lives of people in developing countries, serves as a moving introduction to the volume. This book stands as an enduring memorial to Roger Revelle’s lifelong concern that scientific developments contribute to comfortable, civilized survival in all countries of this increasingly crowded world.