This book was created as a result of the seminar Voorbij de Kaart: Beschrijvingen van de buiten-Europese wereld in Joan Blaeu’s Grooten Atlas [= Beyond the Map: Descriptions of the non-European World in Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Maior] which was lectured at the University of Groningen in the academic year 2023/24.

During the seminar the students critically analysed the texts of non-European regions in the renowned Atlas by Blaeu. About their findings they also wrote short contributions, intended for a broader audience. These student contributions were used for a digital exhibition, hosted by the Special Collections department of the University of Groningen Library, and re-used here in this format as an open textbook.

The book is available in Dutch and English

About the book:
Publisher Joan Blaeu (1599-1673) – following the example of other publishers of cartographic work – also provided his renowned Atlas with extensive accompanying texts. The Dutch-language edition of Atlas Maior, the Grooten Atlas, has nearly 4,000 pages of text. The texts of 20 selected non-European regions have been subjected to careful analysis by History students of the University of Groningen and presented in a beautiful digital exhibition.

This text is accessible to anyone interested in the brain. It is specifically targeted to students and instructors of undergraduate neuroscience or biopsychology courses. It encourages an active exploration of the intersection of neuroscience with other disciplines through a large number of activities, demonstrations, reflection prompts, and critical thinking questions. The book complements material presented in more conventional neuroscience or biopsychology textbooks, portions of which are linked to throughout this text.

This book was created as an open educational resource in the course Philosophy beyond Academia at the University of Groningen in 2023. Except for this introduction and the chapter Martin Buber’s I-It versus I-You Distinction, all of the chapters have been created by students of the MA Philosophy Programme of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen.

About the book:
Migration has been part of human history for as long as we can remember. The geographic movements of large groups of people have shaped human history, and also individuals have moved from one place to another in search of a better life. Migration has also been investigated from a philosophical perspective. In particular, immigration has been considered philosophically from the perspective of political philosophy and ethics. Next to various arguments for open and closed borders, there has also been work looking at more applied questions.

The approach of the present collection of articles on the philosophy of migration has been guided by a concern for philosophical methodology. This book explores the application of both philosophical methods and philosophical tools to the topic of migration. The aim is on the one hand to demonstrate what these tools and methods are and how they can be applied, and on the other hand to demonstrate how rich the topic of migration is from a philosophical perspective.

The Shallow and the Deep is a collection of lecture notes that offers an accessible introduction to neural networks and machine learning in general. However, it was clear from the beginning that these notes would not be able to cover this rapidly changing and growing field in its entirety. The focus lies on classical machine learning techniques, with a bias towards classification and regression. Other learning paradigms and many recent developments in, for instance, Deep Learning are not addressed or only briefly touched upon.

Biehl argues that having a solid knowledge of the foundations of the field is essential, especially for anyone who wants to explore the world of machine learning with an ambition that goes beyond the application of some software package to some data set. Therefore, The Shallow and the Deep places emphasis on fundamental concepts and theoretical background. This also involves delving into the history and pre-history of neural networks, where the foundations for most of the recent developments were laid. These notes aim to demystify machine learning and neural networks without losing the appreciation for their impressive power and versatility.

This book contains 14 lectures on the topic of Global Hermeneutics. It can be used in philosophy classes to discuss the concept of the self, as it showcases different theoretical avenues of how the self is conceived. The synopsis reads as follows:

Why do human beings interpret their overall experience in terms of selfhood? How was the notion and sense of self shaped at different times and in different cultures? What sort of problems or paradoxes did these constructions face? These lectures address these and related questions by sketching a roadmap of possible theoretical avenues for conceiving of the self, bringing to the foreground its soteriological implications, while also testing this theoretical outlook against insights offered by various disciplines. Exploring the crosscultural spectrum of possible ways of conceiving of the self invites the more existential question of whether any of these possibilities might offer resources for dealing with the tragedies of today’s world, or maybe even saving it from some of them.