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The COVID-19 crisis has brought about a proliferation of conspiracy theories that reject, among other things, official accounts of the virus’s origins and remedies, and sometimes even the existence of the virus itself. Conspiratorial thinking usually links events to secret plots concocted by powerful conspirators, whether it be Bill Gates or Big Pharma. In this book, I point to another dominant driving force: the desire to find simple and apparently reasonable explanations for phenomena that are actually purely random and contingent. Often, unfounded conspiracy theories emerge because contingency is not accepted, and necessities are looked for at all costs. Nothing happens by chance, and there must be a plan or an intelligent design behind everything.  This book deals with ‘contingency phobia’. This special phobia is not only manifest in most unwarranted conspiracy theories, but it also appears, in Western culture, as a recurrent psychological, cognitive and scientific pattern. It is the cause of a variety of other phenomena that have become emblematic for liberal democracies, such as the contemporary algorithm culture or the obsession with merit and ranking. Not only the conspiratorial mindset rejects a world of contingency and strives to create a universe structured by a necessary order; life coaches, algorithm engineers and neoliberal meritocrats all do the same. This book analyses these phenomena by using the same criteria: how do humans deal with contingency and how do they try to establish necessities?  Some philosophies, such as Daoism and Zen Buddhism, make unwarranted conspiracy theories quasi-impossible because they find original ways of combining contingency with ontological, theological or cosmological premises. I identify sources that other disciplines examining conspiracy theories, for example, political science, anthropology, psychology or sociology, have rarely seen as primary. 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The book compares Western and Eastern traditions. It examines lines in the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henri Michaux, as well as in Chinese and Japanese art and calligraphy. Lines are not merely a matter of aesthetics but also reflect the psychological states of entire cultures. In the nineteenth century, non-Euclidean geometry sparked the phenomenon of the “self-negating line,” which influenced modern art; it also prepared the ground for virtual reality. Straight lines, distorted lines, blurred lines, hot and cold lines, dynamic lines, lines of force, virtual lines, and on and on, lines narrate the development of human civilization.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52150634381585,"sku":"NLS9783030653453","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9783030653453.jpg?v=1757610738"},{"product_id":"philosophy-of-viagra-book-thorsten-botz-bornstein-9789042033368","title":"The Philosophy of Viagra","description":"The impotency remedy Viagra is the fastest selling drug in history. It has grown beyond being simply a medical phenomenon, but has achieved the status of cultural icon, appearing on television as a pretext for jokes or even as a murder weapon. Viagra has socio-cultural implications that are not limited to sexuality. The Philosophy of Viagra offers a unique perspective as it examines the phenomenon of Viagra through ideas derived from more than two thousand years of philosophical reasoning. In philosophy, Eros has always had a central position. Since Plato, philosophy has held that desire is not only a medical but also a spiritual phenomenon and that scientific explanations claiming to give an exhaustive account of erotic perception are misleading. Philosophical ideas are able to debunk various scientific rationalizations of sexuality – one of which is the clinical-sexological discourse on Viagra. In this volume, several authors interpret Viagra through the lens of classical philosophy explicating the themes of immortality and hedonism. Others offer psychoanalytical considerations by confronting clinical sexology with psychological realities. 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