This book focuses on material culture as a subject of philosophical inquiry and promotes the philosophical study of material culture by articulating some of the central and difficult issues raised by this topic and providing innovative solutions to them, most notably an account of improvised action and a non-intentionalist account of function in material culture. Preston argues that material culture essentially involves activities of production and use; she therefore adopts an action-theoretic foundation for a philosophy of material culture. Part 1 illustrates this foundation through a critique, revision, and extension of existing philosophical theories of action. Part 2 investigates a salient feature of material culture itself―its functionality. A basic account of function in material culture is constructed by revising and extending existing theories of biological function to fit the cultural case. Here the adjustments are for the most part necessitated by special features of function in material culture. These two parts of the project are held together by a trio of overarching themes: the relationship between individual and society, the problem of centralized control, and creativity.

Product Description: An Archaeology of the Immaterial examines a highly significant but poorly understood aspect of material culture studies: the active rejection of the material world. Buchli argues that this is evident in a number of cultural projects, including anti-consumerism and asceticism, as well as other attempts to transcend material circumstances...read more

Product Description: This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why we talk to our cars, our refrigerators, our computers; rosary beads and worry beads; Cuban cigars; why we no longer wear hats that we can tip to one another and why we don't seem to long to; what has been described as bourgeois longing...read more

For microprocessor courses teaching the 80x86 family.Praised by experts for its clarity and topical breadth, this visually appealing, one-stop source on PCs uses an easy-to-understand, step-by-step approach to teaching the fundamentals of 80x86 assembly language programming and PC architecture. Offering students a fun, hands-on learning experience, it uses the Debug utility to show what action the instruction performs, then provides a sample program to show its application. Reinforcing concepts with numerous examples and review questions, its oversized pages delve into dozens of related subjects, including DOS memory map, BIOS, microprocessor architecture, supporting chips, buses, interfacing techniques, system programming, memory hierarchy, DOS memory management, tables of instruction timings, hard disk characteristics, and more. (view table of contents)