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From the New York Times bestselling author comes a riveting collection of short fiction, marked by the piercing psychological insight and brilliant characterization that are hallmarks of his acclaimed novels

Ever since the publication of his first mystery featuring Detective Inspector Alan Banks, Peter Robinson has been steadily building a reputation for compulsively readable and perceptive novels that probe the dark side of human nature. Plumbing the territory that he has so successfully staked, The Price of Love and Other Stories includes two novellas and several stories featuring the Yorkshire policeman at his finest.

In the novella "Going Back," never before published in the United States, Banks returns home for a family reunion, only to find it taking a decidedly sinister turn. In "Like a Virgin," written especially for this volume, Banks revisits the period in his life and the terrible crime that led him to leave London for Eastvale. And in between, the disparate motives that move us to harm one another, from love and jealousy to greed and despair, are all explored with fascinating depth.

Edgy and smart, thrilling and suspenseful, this remarkable collection is a must-have for Robinson fans—and any fan of compelling crime fiction.

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Product Description

From the New York Times bestselling author comes a riveting collection of short fiction, marked by the piercing psychological insight and brilliant characterization that are hallmarks of his acclaimed novels

Ever since the publication of his first mystery featuring Detective Inspector Alan Banks, Peter Robinson has been steadily building a reputation for compulsively readable and perceptive novels that probe the dark side of human nature. Plumbing the territory that he has so successfully staked, The Price of Love and Other Stories includes two novellas and several stories featuring the Yorkshire policeman at his finest.

In the novella "Going Back," never before published in the United States, Banks returns home for a family reunion, only to find it taking a decidedly sinister turn. In "Like a Virgin," written especially for this volume, Banks revisits the period in his life and the terrible crime that led him to leave London for Eastvale. And in between, the disparate motives that move us to harm one another, from love and jealousy to greed and despair, are all explored with fascinating depth.

Edgy and smart, thrilling and suspenseful, this remarkable collection is a must-have for Robinson fans—and any fan of compelling crime fiction.

Product Description

From the New York Times bestselling author comes a riveting collection of short fiction, marked by the piercing psychological insight and brilliant characterization that are hallmarks of his acclaimed novels

Ever since the publication of his first mystery featuring Detective Inspector Alan Banks, Peter Robinson has been steadily building a reputation for compulsively readable and perceptive novels that probe the dark side of human nature. Plumbing the territory that he has so successfully staked, The Price of Love and Other Stories includes two novellas and several stories featuring the Yorkshire policeman at his finest.

In the novella "Going Back," never before published in the United States, Banks returns home for a family reunion, only to find it taking a decidedly sinister turn. In "Like a Virgin," written especially for this volume, Banks revisits the period in his life and the terrible crime that led him to leave London for Eastvale. And in between, the disparate motives that move us to harm one another, from love and jealousy to greed and despair, are all explored with fascinating depth.

Edgy and smart, thrilling and suspenseful, this remarkable collection is a must-have for Robinson fans—and any fan of compelling crime fiction.

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Students, academics and professionals will find this book the living debate around the developing ideas which are Tajfel's legacy. Social Groups and Identities will be the most exciting state-of-the-art survey for 1996 in the field of social psychology.
It is also a fitting tribute to Henri Tajfel, which acknowledges and builds on his major contribution to social psychology in Europe.
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InNeuroscience and Philosophy three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist clash over the conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience. The book begins with an excerpt from Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker'sPhilosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003), which questions the conceptual commitments of cognitive neuroscientists. Their position is then criticized by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, two philosophers who have written extensively on the subject, and Bennett and Hacker in turn respond.

Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness.

In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging,Neuroscience and Philosophy is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience.

Customer Reviews (3)

Not long enough!
What happens when you put a neuroscientist, a Wittgenstein scholar, a self-described teleofuctionalist and a qualiaphile in the same ring? Well, for one thing, there's barely enough space for neutral corners but the arguments, rebuttals and discourse among these four erudite persons couldn't be more entertaining. Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, arguing for the existence of a human consciousness residing in the whole person, are taken on by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, who argue that the locus and milieu of consciousness lies solely in the brain. With an introduction and arguably biased conclusion by Daniel Robinson, this concise but informative book must be admired for its detail and descriptive character. Debates between weak and strong emergence abound: are we reducible to our component parts, or is there a complex confluence at work that produces consciousness? What causes it all: firing neurons and chemical combinations, or a mysterious alliance of constituent parts, brain/mind/body/environment? Are qualia simply qualities of objects or interpersonal properties of phenomenological experience?

All this and more, it's confrontational, it's accessible and it's neuroscience, cognition, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics all rolled together for the sake of consideration and understanding. This book, more than anything, serves as the impetus to further explore themes in neuroscience and consciousness. All four contributors offer their own insights in a wide range of independent publications.

Not impartial enough
Granted, Bennett and Hacker were the impetus behind this book's creation, but I feel they could have allowed more back-and-forth with Dennett and Searle, their two primary interlocutors.Instead, they republish sections of their own original arguments to give some context to Dennett and Searles' responses, which don't differ except in tone from their positions at the conference from which the book came.Then the book grants Bennett and Hacker another answer (composed, so far as I could tell, of almost willful misreadings of Searle's and Dennetts' criticisms), then a conclusion from a "referee" who, naturally, mostly judges them to have come out ahead in the argument.I expected more interlocution, but instead it seems to be a vehicle for Hacker and Bennett's position.

Conceptual confusions
That philosophy should unravel conceptual confusions in neuroscience or other sciences is a principal theme of the authors of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which book is in the presently reviewed one discussed by those authors, Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, and defended by them in response to criticisms by Daniel Dennett and John Searle.

However, major conceptual confusion characterizes the arguments of authors Bennett and Hacker themselves.

Let me begin by noting that all of these authors appear to subscribe to physicalism, describable as holding that all reality is reducible to physical phenomena. Consequently it is understandable that they will aim to fit their arguments into that straightjacket. A well-known expression of this attitude is the intense opposition to Cartesian dualism, the view by Descartes that mind and body, or mind and matter, are two distinct substances.

How derided this view is by the authors can be seen from the manner in which they speak of it: "crippling Cartesianism" (p.75, Dennett), "find themselves in bed with Descartes" (p.100, Searle), "the long, dark shadow of Descartes" (p.159, Bennett and Hacker). Only the commentator in the book, Daniel Robinson, expresses (pp.192-3) reservations about "how many kinds of different sorts of 'stuff' might be constitutive of all reality", but he considers such questions "best to leave unanswered".

They need not be left unanswered in philosophy, which with the aid of logic is here to try to resolve them. I may immodestly note that I deal with such questions in my On Proof for Existence of God, and Other Reflective Inquiries, but now I wish to point out confusions by the principal reviewed authors, whose object is to prevent confusion.

In their arguments they contend (p.208, note 6) that "the idea that the mind is a SUBSTANCE [I capitalized italics] of any kind is not coherent", i.e. that it makes no "sense" to speak of mind as contrasted with the body. But the authors are confused by words. "Substance" is usually defined by the likes of "essential nature", and the main issue, regardless of words used, is whether there is an entity customarily termed "mind" which is distinct from the body. The entity in question is obviously, in Descartes' and other discussions of interaction between mind and body, consciousness--leaving aside particulars like recent propounding of an unconscious. And it certainly makes sense to inquire about the relation between conscious and bodily occurrences.

But the most prominent area of confusion by the authors is in their primary contention of a "mereological fallacy" (e.g. p.22), regarding "the logic of part/whole relations". The authors repeatedly contend such as: "psychological predicates are ascribable to the whole animal, not to its constituent parts". The underlying dispute is with neuroscientists who ascribe "psychological predicates" to the brain, and the presently discussed authors insist: "Human beings, but not their brains, can be said to be thoughtful or to be thoughtless; animals, but not their brains..., can be said to see, hear, smell and taste things..." And the authors repeat: "psychological predicates apply paradigmatically to the HUMAN BEING (OR ANIMAL) AS A WHOLE, and NOT to the body or its parts".

It should be noted that the shift to the brain by neuroscientists is done from the traditional "mind" or consciousness, since the latter does not lend itself to their physical scrutiny. And the turn by the discussed authors to the "whole" of the animal is evidently born of the like physicalist presupposition that one cannot speak of a mind separate from the body. Ironically, their phrase "psychological predicates" itself relies on the word "psyche" for "soul", and it is easy to see that their arguments correspondingly confuse the concepts involved.

It is not the "whole" of the human or animal that thinks, sees, hears, smells and tastes things. The arm does not take part in thinking, or the leg in seeing. It is indeed a truism that it is the conscious part in us that performs those tasks, enlisting in cases some of the body. Try as they may, thinkers cannot dismiss the role of consciousness in our lives.
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Handy Guide for Starting A Pool
"This book shows, through informative text and colorful photos, how to install garden ponds and pools, including such decorative features as edgings, stepping stones, bridges, and lighting. It also offers instructions on how to introduce moving water, how to care for fish and plants, and how to troubleshoot problems and maintain a pool throughout the seasons."(summary by South Texas Library System)
It's so much fun to have a pool in your yard with goldfish, but there's a lot to know about setting up and caring for one.Keeping it in balance and keeping the fish healthy is well worthwhile when you get hours of enjoyment sitting by the water watching the fish.One of our fish even had babies, and some outgrew the size of pond that we had.They were relocated to a larger pond. ... Read more

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A selection from a quarter-century's worth of poetic work, this book draws on Peter Robinson's four books of poetry, adding a group of early poems and a section of new work. The poems focus on the challenges facing expatriate poets, including how to negotiate cultural differences, how to relate to the world they have left, and how to distinguish themselves from their predecessors. Robinson's writing is remarkable for its emotional complexity. ... Read more

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Word count: 3669. ... Read more

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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Novels by Peter Robinson, Quintaglio Ascension, Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy, Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Caedmon's Song, Gifts and Bones, Foreigner, Innocent Graves, Whale Song, in a Dry Season, Wednesday's Child, Gallows View, a Piece of My Heart, Aftermath, Cold Is the Grave, Forty Words for Sorrow, a Dedicated Man, Dead Right, the Summer That Never Was, Strange Affair, Dry Bones That Dream, Past Reason Hated, a Necessary End, the Hanging Valley, Playing With Fire, Friend of the Devil, Uphill Climb, All the Colours of Darkness. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy is a series of award-winning novels written by acclaimed Canadian science fiction author, Robert J. Sawyer. The books depict an Earth-like world on a moon which orbits a gas giant, inhabited by a species of highly evolved, sentient Tyrannosaurs, among various other creatures from the late cretaceous period, imported to this moon by aliens 65 million years prior to the story. The series consists of three books: Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner. The Quintaglio are a fictional species of sentient theropods which first appeared in Robert J. Sawyer's short story "Uphill Climb", and later on starred in his Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy. Descended from earth's dinosaurs, (specifically, Tyrannosaurs), they live on a moon orbiting a gas giant that they refer to as "The Face of God". As stated above, Quintaglios are Tyrannosaurs. It is stated in Fossil Hunter that they're directly descended from Nanotyrannus, (although debate among paleontologists since the series' initial creation suggests Nanotyrannus might simply be a juvenile form of Tyrannosaurus rex; if so, that species would be the Quintaglio's true direct ancestor.) Isolatio...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=5654744 ... Read more

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This is a collection of essays about the contemporary Liverpool poet, Peter Robinson. His poetry is subtle and moving about domestic scenes of intense feeling, and shows how one might get through difficult experiences including the rape of a loved one, a brain tumour operation, the condition of exile in Italy and Japan, the perils of raising children. The essays aim to help ordinary readers and students gain insight into Robinson's subtle, astonishing poems. ... Read more

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Poems of wet shirts and 'wonder-awakening dresses'; honey, wasps and bees; orchards and apples; rivers, seas and tides; storms, rain, weather and clouds; waterworks; labyrinths; amazing perfumes; the Cornish landscape (Penzance, Perranporth, Falmouth, Boscastle, the Lizard and Scilly Isles); the sixth sense and 'extra-sensuous perception'; witchcraft; alchemical vessels and laboratories; yoga; menstruation; mines, minerals and stones; sand dunes; mud-baths; mythology; dreaming; vulvas; and lots of sex magic. This book gathers together poetry (and prose) from every stage of Redgrove's career, and every book. It includes pieces that have only appeared in small presses and magazines, and in uncollected form. ... Read more

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What makes a good argument?
How is language used to create social influence?
How social is computer-mediated communication?

This new, fully updated and revised The New Handbook of Language and Social Psychology reflects the increasingly diverse range of linguistic topics that social psychologists have investigated over the decade since the previous edition of this seminal work was published.

Whilst the basic organization of the text remains the same, explanatory frameworks are accorded greater prominence than before and persons are seen as agents of communicative interaction rather than as victims of external of forces. Processes and actions are highlighted, i.e. how people do what they do and how they manage the discourse. In the final section, several applied topics reflect our changing lifestyle: computer-mediated communication, mass media, and organizations.

The New Handbook of Language and Social Psychology is an essential source book for all psychologists concerned with language and how it functions in human communication. Those interested in interpersonal and intergroup social relations will find much relevance, as will practitioners and other professionals working in health and welfare, multilingual contexts, and organizations.

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