Catalog All books

Luc Ferry

Facing the Crisis Building Blocks for a Politics of Civilisation

To overcome the crisis we will have to do more than salvage what we can by further expenditures, no matter how necessary or urgent these may seem.

Jean-Louis Fellous, Catherine Gautier

Facing Climate Change: What Is to Be Done?

Nicolas Mariot, Claire Zalc

Faced with persecution The Destruction of the Jews of Lens, 1940-1945

The history of the Holocaust in France, seen from an entirely new angle. This book does not simply describe the numerous possible attitudes: it aims to explain them.

Mani Saignavongs, Benjamin Baret

Extraordinary Stories (about Brains)

A dozen short stories, which can be read individually, depending on the reader’s inclination, each one illuminating an episode in the life of our brain: how it remembers, how it is afraid, how it sees, how it recognizes, how it speaks…

Jean Heidmann

Extra-terrestrial Intelligences

Jean Heidmann

Extra-terrestrial Intelligences

Pierre Bordage, Jean-Paul Demoule, Roland Lehoucq , Jean-Sébastien Steyer

Exquisite Planet

Adapting the form of an ‘Exquisite Corpse’ (a Surrealist technique in which collaborators draw in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it so that only a fragment remains visible, then pass it on to the next collaborator who improvises a new drawing), the four authors of this book have each described a possible planet and imagined the life forms that could have developed there, according to the laws of evolution.

Giovanni Bignami

Exploring Space to Explore the Past

Iannis Roder

Explaining the Shoah and Genocide to Our Children

This book desacralizes the Shoah and shows that though that genocide had specific characteristics, it can be compared to others.

Barry Eichengreen

Exorbitant Privilege The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System

As the dollar keeps falling, and in the run-up to the G20 summit, what are the options to reform the international monetary system? Barry Eichengreen urges the creation of a multipolar system

Stéphane Mazevet

Exoplanets and Life in the Universe In Search of Our Origins]

The tale of the great advances of the last half-century up to the discovery of extrasolar planets.

André Brahic, Bradford Smith

Exoplanets Looking for life in the Universe

A brilliant, enthusiastic and accessible work by two of the greatest living astronomers

Pierre Roubertoux

Existe-t-il des gènes du comportement ?

Recent advances in genetic research have had widespread and far-reaching influences in fields as varied as animal and plant biology and medicine. They have also upset some ethical rules. Genetics today is in a triumphant, seductive phase, but its limits are yet to be defined. In this book, the eminent French geneticist Pierre Roubertoux argues that genetics has strayed too far from its justifiable areas of application. Soon, genetics may even be applied to the mind and to consciousness, just as it is already being applied to behaviour by scientists who contend that each type of conduct has its corresponding gene (this is tantamount to saying a specific gene is responsible for each virtue and each vice). Scientists who defend this theory say that they have discovered genes linked to various degrees of activity in mice and flies. Thus, intemperance and gluttony would be linked to a genetic partiality to alcohol, sugar or fats. Pride could be explained by a gene for dominance which has allegedly been found in mice. Greed, too, could be explained by a gene. The supposed existence of an infidelity gene was much in the news three years ago. This is a sound scientific synthesis which will enable readers to grasp the contribution of genetics to our comprehension of who and what we are. It should also help them resist the temptation of reducing everything to genetics. Pierre Roubertoux is a professor at the University of Aix-Marseille and a research fellow at the Institute of Physiological and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

David Ignatius

Exfiltration The Increment

Nicolas Franck

Exercises to Maintain Your Brainpower

Practical exercises to maintain and enhance your mental capacities

Robert Nozick

The Examined Life

Claude Mollard

Evry Cathedral

Daniel C. Dennett

Evolutionist theory of freedom

Billions of years ago, there was no freedom on earth, for the simple reason that there was no life. What forms of freedom have evolved since the first stirrings of life? Can freedom and free will exist in a deterministic universe? If we are free, are we responsible for our freedom, or is it governed by chance? Drawing on evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences, Daniel Dennett provides a series of unorthodox replies to these traditional philosophical questions. It is generally held that what is determined is inevitable and that freedom can only exist in a non-deterministic universe. This is untrue, says Dennett. It is also held that in a pre-determined universe, we have no real choices: all we have is the illusion that we can choose. This too is false, argues Dennett. He then goes on to explain how, some day, we will be able to create robots endowed with free will. In this groundbreaking book, written in a striking, lively style, Dennett interweaves philosophical creativity with the latest scientific developments, and challenges a series of philosophical orthodoxies. Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Mass., U.S.A. He is the author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea.