Nils Matta (10 results)

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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Why do human beings, across cultures with no contact, keep inventing an afterlife with teeth?Inventing Hell treats the persistent idea of postmortem punishment not as a single doctrine but as a recurring solution to problems ordinary experience cannot resolve: unanswered injustice, unpayable guilt, the silence of the dead, and a universe that appears indifferent to human moral stakes. Drawing on cognitive science of religion, evolutionary and social psychology, comparative religious history, and philosophy, Nils Matta examines Hell as metaphysical claim, psychological representation, cultural institution, behavioral technology, literary symbol, and existential metaphor-without collapsing them into one another.Part I maps the underlying human needs: the demand for a moral cosmos, cosmic compensation for earthly failure, the projection of retribution, the externalized conscience, the omniscient witness, mortality anxiety, and the conversion of finite acts into infinite significance. It engages Lerner's just-world research, Norenzayan's Big Gods, Terror Management Theory, Foucault's Panopticon, and the enduring philosophical paradox of eternal punishment.Part II offers precise comparative portraits of major Hell traditions-Buddhist Narakas as nearly geological karmic processes, Hindu Naraka as bureaucratic metaphysics, Greek Tartarus as cosmic prison, Norse Hel as cold gray ordinary death, Dante's Inferno as moral machine, Tibetan bardo as consciousness itself, Gnostic Earth as the prison, and the Epicurean anti-Hell that simply removes the subject.Part III turns to the new Hells of modernity and the technological future: prisons and bureaucracies, digital archives and permanent records, algorithmic classification, personalized surveillance, virtual confinement, climate and nuclear eschatology, and speculative posthuman scenarios in which identity, memory, subjective time, and consciousness itself become design variables. The central claim is not prediction but diagnosis: Hell does not disappear when belief in the Devil declines. It changes technology.Neither a defense of eternal torment nor a simple dismissal of it, Inventing Hell asks why the idea remains so immediately intelligible-and what it reveals about a species that cannot quite bear the possibility that the universe keeps no ledger.For readers of Bart Ehrman, David Bentley Hart, Ernest Becker, Ara Norenzayan, and anyone who has ever wondered why "hell" remains one of the most durable words in the language. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Why do human beings, across cultures with no contact, keep inventing an afterlife with teeth?Inventing Hell treats the persistent idea of postmortem punishment not as a single doctrine but as a recurring solution to problems ordinary experience cannot resolve: unanswered injustice, unpayable guilt, the silence of the dead, and a universe that appears indifferent to human moral stakes. Drawing on cognitive science of religion, evolutionary and social psychology, comparative religious history, and philosophy, Nils Matta examines Hell as metaphysical claim, psychological representation, cultural institution, behavioral technology, literary symbol, and existential metaphor-without collapsing them into one another.Part I maps the underlying human needs: the demand for a moral cosmos, cosmic compensation for earthly failure, the projection of retribution, the externalized conscience, the omniscient witness, mortality anxiety, and the conversion of finite acts into infinite significance. It engages Lerner's just-world research, Norenzayan's Big Gods, Terror Management Theory, Foucault's Panopticon, and the enduring philosophical paradox of eternal punishment.Part II offers precise comparative portraits of major Hell traditions-Buddhist Narakas as nearly geological karmic processes, Hindu Naraka as bureaucratic metaphysics, Greek Tartarus as cosmic prison, Norse Hel as cold gray ordinary death, Dante's Inferno as moral machine, Tibetan bardo as consciousness itself, Gnostic Earth as the prison, and the Epicurean anti-Hell that simply removes the subject.Part III turns to the new Hells of modernity and the technological future: prisons and bureaucracies, digital archives and permanent records, algorithmic classification, personalized surveillance, virtual confinement, climate and nuclear eschatology, and speculative posthuman scenarios in which identity, memory, subjective time, and consciousness itself become design variables. The central claim is not prediction but diagnosis: Hell does not disappear when belief in the Devil declines. It changes technology.Neither a defense of eternal torment nor a simple dismissal of it, Inventing Hell asks why the idea remains so immediately intelligible-and what it reveals about a species that cannot quite bear the possibility that the universe keeps no ledger.For readers of Bart Ehrman, David Bentley Hart, Ernest Becker, Ara Norenzayan, and anyone who has ever wondered why "hell" remains one of the most durable words in the language. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Why do human beings, across cultures with no contact, keep inventing an afterlife with teeth?Inventing Hell treats the persistent idea of postmortem punishment not as a single doctrine but as a recurring solution to problems ordinary experience cannot resolve: unanswered injustice, unpayable guilt, the silence of the dead, and a universe that appears indifferent to human moral stakes. Drawing on cognitive science of religion, evolutionary and social psychology, comparative religious history, and philosophy, Nils Matta examines Hell as metaphysical claim, psychological representation, cultural institution, behavioral technology, literary symbol, and existential metaphor-without collapsing them into one another.Part I maps the underlying human needs: the demand for a moral cosmos, cosmic compensation for earthly failure, the projection of retribution, the externalized conscience, the omniscient witness, mortality anxiety, and the conversion of finite acts into infinite significance. It engages Lerner's just-world research, Norenzayan's Big Gods, Terror Management Theory, Foucault's Panopticon, and the enduring philosophical paradox of eternal punishment.Part II offers precise comparative portraits of major Hell traditions-Buddhist Narakas as nearly geological karmic processes, Hindu Naraka as bureaucratic metaphysics, Greek Tartarus as cosmic prison, Norse Hel as cold gray ordinary death, Dante's Inferno as moral machine, Tibetan bardo as consciousness itself, Gnostic Earth as the prison, and the Epicurean anti-Hell that simply removes the subject.Part III turns to the new Hells of modernity and the technological future: prisons and bureaucracies, digital archives and permanent records, algorithmic classification, personalized surveillance, virtual confinement, climate and nuclear eschatology, and speculative posthuman scenarios in which identity, memory, subjective time, and consciousness itself become design variables. The central claim is not prediction but diagnosis: Hell does not disappear when belief in the Devil declines. It changes technology.Neither a defense of eternal torment nor a simple dismissal of it, Inventing Hell asks why the idea remains so immediately intelligible-and what it reveals about a species that cannot quite bear the possibility that the universe keeps no ledger.For readers of Bart Ehrman, David Bentley Hart, Ernest Becker, Ara Norenzayan, and anyone who has ever wondered why "hell" remains one of the most durable words in the language. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability. …

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - Designing EternityFrom Mythic Realms to Simulated AfterlivesNils MattaHeaven has never been one thing.Across cultures and centuries it has been a better place, a better society, a better state of mind-and, most radically, an escape from the conditions that make place, society, and mind possible at all. From the Greek Elysian Fields and Norse Valhalla to the Christian Beatific Vision, Islamic Jannah, Jewish Olam Ha-Ba, Hindu Svarga and Moksha, Buddhist Nirvana and Sukhavati, the Egyptian Field of Reeds, the Zoroastrian House of Song, the Aztec House of the Sun, Polynesian ancestral isles, and the Gnostic Pleroma, humanity has endlessly redesigned the afterlife in the image of its deepest longings and fears.Now the tools are changing.Artificial intelligence, neural interfaces, virtual environments, life extension, and the first serious proposals for digital immortality are turning what was once pure speculation into an engineering problem. Paradise is no longer only a story about what happens after death. It is becoming a design specification for what finite-or post-finite-minds might yet make of themselves.Designing Eternity traces the full arc: the oldest mythic and religious visions of heaven in their historical richness, the internal tensions they never resolved, and the unprecedented pressure that emerging technology places upon them. It asks the questions that matter once the capacity to manufacture experience becomes real:¿ What happens when every traditional function of Heaven can be approximated in simulation ¿ Who designs the afterlives, who is excluded, and what becomes of meaning when pleasure can be made infinite ¿ Does technology abolish the need for transcendence-or make the oldest spiritual questions more urgent than ever Part intellectual history, part philosophical inquiry, part clear-eyed look at the technological frontier, this is a book about the oldest human design problem-and what happens when we finally acquire the means to solve it.For readers of comparative religion, philosophy of mind, and the future of technology who want the full picture: the heavens we inherited, and the heavens we may yet build. …

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - Why do human beings, across cultures with no contact, keep inventing an afterlife with teeth Inventing Hell treats the persistent idea of postmortem punishment not as a single doctrine but as a recurring solution to problems ordinary experience cannot resolve: unanswered injustice, unpayable guilt, the silence of the dead, and a universe that appears indifferent to human moral stakes. Drawing on cognitive science of religion, evolutionary and social psychology, comparative religious history, and philosophy, Nils Matta examines Hell as metaphysical claim, psychological representation, cultural institution, behavioral technology, literary symbol, and existential metaphor-without collapsing them into one another.Part I maps the underlying human needs: the demand for a moral cosmos, cosmic compensation for earthly failure, the projection of retribution, the externalized conscience, the omniscient witness, mortality anxiety, and the conversion of finite acts into infinite significance. It engages Lerner's just-world research, Norenzayan's Big Gods, Terror Management Theory, Foucault's Panopticon, and the enduring philosophical paradox of eternal punishment.Part II offers precise comparative portraits of major Hell traditions-Buddhist Narakas as nearly geological karmic processes, Hindu Naraka as bureaucratic metaphysics, Greek Tartarus as cosmic prison, Norse Hel as cold gray ordinary death, Dante's Inferno as moral machine, Tibetan bardo as consciousness itself, Gnostic Earth as the prison, and the Epicurean anti-Hell that simply removes the subject.Part III turns to the new Hells of modernity and the technological future: prisons and bureaucracies, digital archives and permanent records, algorithmic classification, personalized surveillance, virtual confinement, climate and nuclear eschatology, and speculative posthuman scenarios in which identity, memory, subjective time, and consciousness itself become design variables. The central claim is not prediction but diagnosis: Hell does not disappear when belief in the Devil declines. It changes technology.Neither a defense of eternal torment nor a simple dismissal of it, Inventing Hell asks why the idea remains so immediately intelligible-and what it reveals about a species that cannot quite bear the possibility that the universe keeps no ledger.For readers of Bart Ehrman, David Bentley Hart, Ernest Becker, Ara Norenzayan, and anyone who has ever wondered why 'hell' remains one of the most durable words in the language.…

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Designing Eternity | Nils Matta | Taschenbuch | Englisch | 2026 | NBM House | EAN 9798235998162 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Inventing Hell | Nils Matta | Taschenbuch | Englisch | 2026 | NBM House | EAN 9798235656185 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - What if the highest form of intelligence is knowing when you do not know In an age of confident experts, viral conspiracies, overconfident algorithms, and endless demands for certainty, The Suspension of Judgment recovers a radical ancient practice and puts it to work on the hardest problems of modern life.From Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus to Bayesian probability, scientific method, conspiracy culture, and artificial intelligence, Nils Matta traces a living tradition that refuses both dogmatic belief and lazy relativism. The Pyrrhonian skeptic does not doubt everything. He suspends judgment precisely where the evidence balances-and keeps living, deciding, and learning without the false comfort of premature closure.This is not a call to indecision. It is a practical philosophy of calibrated uncertainty: how to act when you must bet, how to keep an open mind without becoming empty-headed, how to recognize when skepticism itself has hardened into dogma, and what it would mean to build machines that report the limits of their knowledge instead of manufacturing false certainty.Clear, rigorous, and urgently contemporary, The Suspension of Judgment is for anyone tired of being told they must either 'believe' or 'doubt' on command-and ready to master the far more demanding art of not knowing.The open question is not a failure of intelligence.It is often its highest achievement.…

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. The Suspension of Judgment | Nils Matta | Taschenbuch | Englisch | 2026 | NBM House | EAN 9798237707854 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.