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Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Peter Baofu, PhD
Why are some individuals relatively more successful than others in achievement? And why are some countries (or regions), for that matter, relatively more successful than others in development? Contrary to…
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Contrary to the conventional wisdom held by many, not only the dominance of the U.S. in the post-Cold War era is much exaggerated, but also its days as a hyper-power…
Contrary to the conventional wisdom held by many, Dr. Peter Baofu argues that the current popularity of postmodernism in the humanities (especially though not exclusively in relation to the arts)…
There is something fundamentally wrong with the conventional wisdom in the field of Comparative Politics, Political Theory, and even Political Science as a whole, which rigidly conceptualize and theorize political…
Why should anomalous experience, in a general sense, be proven to exist, before they can be taken seriously?
Is chemistry really so valuable that, as Theodore L. Brown (2011) and his colleagues continue to claim in the twelfth edition of their work in 2011, chemistry is the central…
Are the performing arts really supposed to be so radical that, as John Cage once said in the context of music, there is no noise, only sound, since he argued…
Is semantics really so indeterminate that, as W. V. Quine (1960) once argued in Word and Object, in the example about a previously undocumented, primitive tribe, it is impossible in…
Is history really so universalistic (even when similar events happen in different contexts) that, as George Santayana (1905) once famously wrote, [t]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to…
Is migration really so constructive that, as Ralph Emerson (1909) once wrote, in the context of the New World, asylum of all nations … will construct a new race, a…
Can transportation really have such a destructive impact on society that, as Jay Holtz Kay (1998) once forcefully wrote, with the automobile industry as an example, that the modern consequences…
Is culinary art really so exact that, as Delia Smith once wrote, cooking is an exact art and not some casual game ?
Is waste (or trash) really so useless that, as William Faulkner once wrote, [r]ead everything-trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it… . If it is good…
Are natural resources really so limited that, as Mahatma Gandhi once famously said, Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed ?
Is positive thinking really so healthy that, as Martin Seligman (2000) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi passionately thus argued, we believe that a psychology of positive human functioning will arise, which achieves…
Is the degree of probability that an individual holds when betting on a particular outcome really so subjective that, as Frank Ramsey once argued, objective logical relations do not exist…
Is the nature of the atmosphere really so predictable that, as James Mahoney confidently said, we know that humans are influencing the climate. There’s no question about that ? (TE…
Is the traditional understanding of cause and effect in aetiology so certain that Arthur Eddington therefore proposed in 1927 the arrow of time, or time’s arrow involving the ‘one-way direction’…
Is it really true that, as the Roman philosopher Seneca famously said in antiquity, It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters ? (TE 2013) This popular view…
Is public administration so effective that, as William Poole once wrote, it is highly desirable that policy practice be formalised to the maximum possible extent ? (FAM 2014). This favourable…
Is public administration so effective that, as William Poole once wrote, it is highly desirable that policy practice be formalised to the maximum possible extent ? (FAM 2014) This favourable…
Is moral goodness really so desirable in the way that its proponents through the ages would like us to believe? For instance, in our time, there is even this latest…
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Why should mathematical logic be grounded on the basis of some formal requirements in the way that it has been developed since its classical emergence as a hybrid field of…
Why should mass media be informational and accurate as much as its proponents would claim-and, conversely, disinformational and propagandistic as much as its critics would argue?
What exactly makes creative thinking so magical that, somehow, everyone can be creative and, by implication, creativity is a good thing to have-to the point that this popular view is…
Why should some essential properties of geometry (i.e., infinity, symmetry, and dimensionality) be both necessary and desirable in the way that they have been constructed-albeit with different modifications over time-since…
Why should urban planning in our time be obsessed with the issue of sustainability? Or differently put, is sustainability really as desirable and possible as its proponents in urban planning…
To what extent is there really a universal structure, whether innate or not, of language for learning? Or conversely, is language learning mainly context-based?
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What exactly makes the nature of organizations so miracular that their very purpose is to achieve performance and that it is now regarded, in this capitalist age of ours, as…
Is it really true that martial arts, in spite of their popularity in this day and age of ours, have, at their deepest level, the promised land of self-knowledge, the…
What precisely resides in sexuality which warrants the popular discourse on sexuality as part of our world freedom, or something as an inspiring source for our own creation of new…
What exactly is so appealing in formal science, such that its influence can be seen in numerous disciplines nowadays, for practical purposes like better functionality, performance, and so on-as Pythagoras…
What makes the rule of law so special that it is to conscientiously punish the bad doers and reward the good ones-such that, where there is the rule of law…
Is peace really so precious that it is popularly viewed in irenology (peace studies) of our time as natural and a prime force in human behavior -whereas war, its opposite…
Contrary to the thinking of many contemporaries, both capitalism and democracy will not last and are to be superceded one day by post-capitalism and post-democracy. The short-lived triumph of market…
Peter Baofu, PhD (-)
Strives to demolish some of the myths surrounding the nature of complexity and, in the process, to provide an original theory to understand it in this world and beyond. This…
Is the invention of accounting so useful that, as Charlie Munger once said, you have to know accounting. It’s the language of practical business life. It was a very useful…
The seemingly preposterous thesis that civilization is as evil and as good as barbarity and that civilization will not last is contrary to the conventional wisdom held by many in…
Contrary to the conventional wisdom held by many in much of human history, in this book Peter Baofu here proposes what he calls the perspectival theory of space-time. According to…
Are the visual arts really so central in our time that, as Doug Adams once said, people under 60, raised on television remember by what they see [F]ilm and television…
Are the visual arts really so central in our time that, as Doug Adams once said, people under 60, raised on television remember by what they see. [F]ilm and television…
In recent years, philosophical debate of the concept of beauty has seen a remarkable renaissance.
