In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler’s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler’s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler’s ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions.

Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.

Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction.

In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.

100,000 years ago, at least six species of human inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. 
     Us. 
Homo Sapiens. 
     How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? 
     In Sapiens, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical -- and sometimes devastating -- breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology, and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? 
     Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power...and our future.

In the urban communities of medieval Germany and northern France, the beliefs, observances, and practices of Jews allowed them to create and define their communities on their own terms as well as in relation to the surrounding Christian society. Although medieval Jewish texts were written by a learned elite, the laity also observed many religious rituals as part of their everyday life. In Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz, Elisheva Baumgarten asks how Jews, especially those who were not learned, expressed their belonging to a minority community and how their convictions and deeds were made apparent to both their Jewish peers and the Christian majority.

Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz provides a social history of religious practice in context, particularly with regard to the ways Jews and Christians, separately and jointly, treated their male and female members. Medieval Jews often shared practices and beliefs with their Christian neighbors, and numerous notions and norms were appropriated by one community from the other. By depicting a dynamic interfaith landscape and a diverse representation of believers, Baumgarten offers a fresh assessment of Jewish practice and the shared elements that composed the piety of Jews in relation to their Christian neighbors.

This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By exploring the motivations for Christian interest in Yiddish, and the differing ways in which Yiddish was discussed and treated in Christian texts, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddishaddresses a wide array of issues, most notably Christian Hebraism, Protestant theology, early modern Yiddish culture, and the social and cultural history of language in early modern Europe.

Elyada's analysis of a wide range of philological and theological works, as well as textbooks, dictionaries, ethnographical writings, and translations, demonstrates that Christian Yiddishism had implications beyond its purely linguistic and philological dimensions. Indeed, Christian texts on Yiddish reveal not only the ways in which Christians perceived and defined Jews and Judaism, but also, in a contrasting vein, how they viewed their own language, religion, and culture.

לפני מאה אלף שנים חיו בכדור הארץ לפחות שישה מינים שונים של אדם. אף לאחד מהם לא היתה חשיבות מיוחדת. תפקידם בטבע לא היה גדול מזה של גורילות, גחליליות או סוסוני ים. לפני כשבעים אלף שנה התחולל שינוי מסתורי כלשהו בתודעתו של אחד ממיני האדם הללו - הומו סאפיינס - ודחף אותו להשתלט על העולם כולו.

ההיסטוריה של הומו סאפיינס מאז ועד היום היא לעתים מזעזעת, לעתים משעשעת ותמיד מרתקת. מה בדיוק קרה להומו סאפיינס לפני שבעים אלף שנה שדחף אותו להשתלט על העולם? איך ולמה נעלמו כל יתר מיני האדם?

 מתי הפך הכלב לידידו הטוב של האדם?
 מתי המציאו את הכסף ואת האלים הגדולים, ומדוע?
 על שום מה סברו כמעט כל החברות האנושיות בהיסטוריה שנשים נחותות מגברים? האם אפשר לקיים חברה אנושית ללא אפליה וללא דעות קדומות?
 האם אפשר לשלוט ביעילות ולאורך זמן בעמים כבושים? כיצד כבשו המדע, הקפיטליזם ואירופה את העולם?
 האם יש להיסטוריה כיוון? האם יש צדק בהיסטוריה?
 האם בני אדם נהיו מאושרים יותר לאורך ההיסטוריה?
 ומה הסיכוי שיהיו בני אדם בכדור הארץ בעוד מאה שנה?

קיצור תולדות האנושות מנסה להציע תשובות על שאלות אלו ואחרות, ולתת סקירת בזק על תהליכי המפתח ונקודות המפנה העיקריות של ההיסטוריה מאז הופעת האדם על בימת העולם ועד ימינו. הספר מזמין אותנו אל מאחורי הקלעים של ההיסטוריה, ומדגיש בפנינו עד כמה משונה היא העלילה, כמה בלתי צפויים הם השחקנים, וכמה מעט אנו יודעים על העבר שלנו.