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Great Jewish Wisdom
by Rabbi Moshe BambergerA compact gift volume featuring short, philosophical quotations on life and living by noted Jewish scholars and Torah greats. Each citation is accompanied by a brief biography of its author, and placed against a stunning visual, which adds a whole new dimension to the meaning of the words.
The Great Learning
by ConfuciusThe Great Learning is the first of the Four books which were selected by Zhu Xi during the Song Dynasty as a foundational introduction to Confucianism. It was originally one chapter in Classic of Rites. The book consists of a short main text, attributed to Confucius, and nine commentaries chapters by Zeng Zi, one of Confucius' disciples. Its importance is illustrated by Zeng Zi's foreword that this is the gateway of learning. Some of the terms within the text form an important part of both classical and modern Chinese political discourse. For example, the concept of world peace has been the stated goal of Chinese statecraft from the Zhou dynasty to the Kuomintang to the Communist Party of China. Another term used in the text qin-min which Legge translates as renovating the people is the name of the People First Party, one of the minor parties in Taiwan. The Great Learning is significant because it expresses many themes of Chinese philosophy and political thinking, and has therefore been extremely influential both in classical and modern Chinese thought. Government, self cultivation and investigation of things are linked. It links together individual action in the form of self-cultivation with higher goals such as ultimate world peace as well as linking together the spiritual and the material. By defining the path of learning (tao) in governmental and social terms, the Great Learning both links the spiritual with the practical, and creates a vision of tao that is radically different than that presented by Taoism. In particular, the Great Learning sets Confucianism as being this-worldly rather than other-worldly. Instead of basing its authority on an external deity, the Great Learning bases its authority on the practices of ancient kings. The text also sets up a number of controversies that have underlain Chinese philosophy and political thinking. For example, one major controversy has been to define exactly the investigation of things. What things are to be investigated and how has been one of the crucial issues of Chinese philosophy.
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike: Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality, and the Human
by Marcelo GleiserDoes technology change who we are, and if so, in what ways? Can humanity transcend physical bodies and spaces? Will AI and genetic engineering help us reach new heights or will they unleash dystopias? How do we face mortality, our own and that of our warming planet? Questions like these—which are only growing more urgent—can be answered only by drawing on different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. They challenge us to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities and bring together perspectives that are too often kept apart.Great Minds Don’t Think Alike presents conversations among leading scientists, philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals that exemplify openness to diverse viewpoints and the productive exchange of ideas. Pulitzer and Templeton Prize winners, MacArthur “genius” grant awardees, and other acclaimed writers and thinkers debate the big questions: who we are, the nature of reality, science and religion, consciousness and materialism, and the mysteries of time. In so doing, they also inquire into how uniting experts from different areas of study to consider these topics might help us address the existential risks we face today. Convened and moderated by the physicist and author Marcelo Gleiser, these public dialogues model constructive engagement between the sciences and the humanities—and show why intellectual cooperation is necessary to shape our collective future.Contributors include David Chalmers and Antonio Damasio; Sean Carroll and B. Alan Wallace; Patricia Churchland and Jill Tarter; Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Lightman; Jimena Canales and Paul Davies; Ed Boyden and Mark O’Connell; Elizabeth Kolbert and Siddhartha Mukherjee; Jeremy DeSilva, David Grinspoon, and Tasneem Zehra Husain.
The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State
by Russell CobbLook down as you buzz across America, and Oklahoma looks like another &“flyover state.&” A closer inspection, however, reveals one of the most tragic, fascinating, and unpredictable places in the United States. Over the span of a century, Oklahoma gave birth to movements for an African American homeland, a vibrant Socialist Party, armed rebellions of radical farmers, and an insurrection by a man called Crazy Snake. In the same era, the state saw numerous oil booms, one of which transformed the small town of Tulsa into the &“oil capital of the world.&” Add to the chaos one of the nation&’s worst episodes of racial violence, a statewide takeover by the Ku Klux Klan, and the rise of a paranoid far-right agenda by a fundamentalist preacher named Billy James Hargis and you have the recipe for America&’s most paradoxical state. Far from being a placid place in the heart of Flyover Country, Oklahoma has been a laboratory for all kinds of social, political, and artistic movements, producing a singular list of weirdos, geniuses, and villains. In The Great Oklahoma Swindle Russell Cobb tells the story of a state rich in natural resources and artistic talent, yet near the bottom in education and social welfare. Raised in Tulsa, Cobb engages Oklahomans across the boundaries of race and class to hear their troubles, anxieties, and aspirations and delves deep to understand their contradictory and often stridently independent attitudes. Interweaving memoir, social commentary, and sometimes surprising research around the themes of race, religion, and politics, Cobb presents an insightful portrait that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about the American Heartland.
The Great Partnership
by Jonathan SacksAn impassioned, erudite, thoroughly researched, and beautifully reasoned book from one of the most admired religious thinkers of our time that argues not only that science and religion are compatible, but that they complement each other--and that the world needs both. "Atheism deserves better than the new atheists," states Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "whose methodology consists of criticizing religion without understanding it, quoting texts without contexts, taking exceptions as the rule, confusing folk belief with reflective theology, abusing, mocking, ridiculing, caricaturing, and demonizing religious faith and holding it responsible for the great crimes against humanity. Religion has done harm; I acknowledge that. But the cure for bad religion is good religion, not no religion, just as the cure for bad science is good science, not the abandonment of science." Rabbi Sacks's counterargument is that religion and science are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth. Science teaches us where we come from. Religion explains to us why we are here. Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning. We need scientific explanation to understand nature. We need meaning to understand human behavior. There have been times when religion tried to dominate science. And there have been times, including our own, when it is believed that we can learn all we need to know about meaning and relationships through biochemistry, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. In this fascinating look at the interdependence of religion and science, Rabbi Sacks explains why both views are tragically wrong.
The Great Philosophers: Locke (Great Philosophers Ser. #12)
by Michael AyresPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.John Locke 1632-1704What Newton did for physics in the seventeenth century, Locke did for philosophy. The revolution wrought by these two giants established the intellectual underpinnings of the modern world.Yet out own age has called their contributions into question. While Newton's universe has come to seem unduly mechanistic, Locke has been out of favour for his wordy rhetoric, the apparent imprecision of his thought and the perceived irrelevance of his once-radical empiricism.This fascinating guide restores an underrated thinker to his rightful place at the very centre of modern philosophical enquiry. Basing his exposition upon a resourceful re-reading of An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Michael Ayers explains the historical significance of Locke's philosophical project, and its continuing capacity to challenge and compel.
The Great Philosophers: Berkeley (Great Philosophers Ser. #Vol. 12)
by David BermanPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series. George Berkeley 1685-1753 A scientist, theologian and writer on medicine and economics, George Berkeley was in his way a most improbable philosopher. A master of English prose, he was suspicious of language; scornful of abstractions, he looked instead to immediate experience for the basis of his thought. David Berman's readable guide traces Berkeley's experimentalism - for experiments with sight and touch to near-death experience - finding in his writings an intriguing marriage of philosophy and psychology.
The Great Philosophers: Rorty (Great Philosophers Ser.)
by Gideon CalderPopular Great Philosopher's Series.An accessible overview of the work of one of our most influential living philosophers, as part of the popular Great Philosophers series. Richard Rorty is often cited as the most prominent philosophical defender of postmodernism. Best known for his unusually readable books and articles on philosophy - most notably Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) - Rorty has for some years now been a wide-ranging public intellectual, unwilling to be confined within the boundaries of academe. There is no real school of Rortianism. But Rorty-bashing is almost an industry in itself. He is a renegade to purists, a reactionary to radicals and a subversive to conservatives. And yet he presents his ideas as the culmination and extension of many of the most familiar and fashionable trends in contemporary thinking.
The Great Philosophers: Democritus
by Paul CartledgePart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.Democritus c. 460-c. 370BCThe Renaissance's 'Laughing Philosopher'; our own age's 'Prophet of Quark': throughout the modern philosophical tradition, Democritus has been a man little known beyond his labels.Yet if the image of the cheerful ironist understates his true seriousness, that of father of modern nuclear physics - though by no means entirely unfounded - loses sign of the man in the hyperbole. Flattering as it is, it fails to do justice either to the full range of Democritus' interests or to the astonishing originality of his ideas.For Democritus' remarkable investigations took him far beyond the realms of physics and chemistry to explore the science of existence as a whole. Perception, selfhood and society; ethic, politics and the law: as Paul Cartledge's enthralling introduction makes clear, Democritus has much to teach us, in all these fields and more.
The Great Philosophers: Descartes (The\great Philosophers Ser. #7)
by John CottinghamRené Descartes 1596-1650 The `father of modern philosophy?, René Descartes has been accorded all the admiration a father customarily receives ? and all the resentment. That mind-body duality by which he so deftly made sense of us now seems less paradigm than prison. And yet, to unthink it appears impossible. For better of worse, Descartes must remain our starting-point in the attempt to understand ourselves and our relation to our world. Yet if the problems begin with Descartes, so too may some of the solutions. John Cottingham?s fascinating guide finds in the French philosopher?s own neglected later work some intriguing hints as to how the stumbling-blocks might be surmounted. The father of modern philosophy, it seems, might yet be his child?s deliverer.
The Great Philosophers: Marx (The\great Philosophers Ser. #13)
by Terry EagletonPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series. Terry Eagleton explains that freedom, for Marx, entailed release from commercial labour, "a kind of creative superabundance over what is materially essential". Eagleton outlines the relationship between production, labour and ownership which lie at the core of Marx's thinking. Marx's utopia was a place in which labour is increasingly automated, emancipating the wealth of sensuous individual development so that "savouring a peach [is an aspect] of our self-actualisation as much as building dams".
The Great Philosophers: Socrates (Great Philosophers Ser. #No. 6)
by Anthony GottliebSocrates 469 ? 399BC `If you put me to death,? Socrates warned his Athenian judges, `you will not easily find anyone to take my place.? So indeed it would prove, a single cup of hemlock robbing the western philosophical tradition of the man with best claims to be its founding father. Yet Socrates? influence was not so easily to be done away with. His words lovingly recorded by his devoted disciple Plato, his doctrines reached a posterity which has, through twenty-seven centuries now, taken him as its teacher. The marriage of idealism and scepticism in his though; his sense of education as self-discovery; his view of philosophy as preparation for life: these have been the stuff of western thought at its best. So completely did Socrates embody these values, he was prepared to die in their defence?
The Great Philosophers: Voltaire
by John GrayPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.Voltaire's savage laughter range out across eighteenth-century Europe, puncturing the pomposities and hypocrisies of power. Kings and cardinals felt the sting of his satire; governments and aristocracies endured his derision.Yet the aims of the Enlightenment's clown were nothing if not serious: to throw back the blinds of ignorance and superstition and let the sun of science and intellect stream in; to rebuild benighted Christendom as a new civilisation, secular and free.Herald of reason and revolution, Voltaire's mocking voice has echoed through two centuries of change. But as the Enlightenment's achievements have come increasingly into question, the joke has rebounded on the comedian himself. A creation of Christianity in way he never realised, Voltaire owed more to his epoch's orthodoxies than he could have ever guessed.John Gray's absorbing provocative introduction offers a radical reassessment of a fascinating and important figure, at once demythologizing the icon and revealing his genuine greatness.
The Great Philosophers: Wittgenstein (Great Philosophers Ser.)
by Peter HackerLudwig Wittgenstein 1889 ? 1951 P.M.S. Hacker?s Wittgenstein offers an illuminating introduction to Wittgenstein?s philosophy of mind and to his conception of philosophy. Combining passages from Wittgenstein?s writings with detailed interpretation and commentary, Hacker leads us into a world of philosophical investigation in which `to smell a rat is ever so much easier than to trap it.? Wittgenstein claimed that the role of philosophy is to dissolve conceptual confusions, to untie the knots in our understanding that result from entanglement in the web of language. He overturned centuries of philosophical reflection on the nature of `the inner?, of our subjective experience and of our knowledge of self and others. Traditional conceptions of `the outer?, of human behaviour, were equally distorted and so too was the relation between the inner and the outer. Hacker shows how Wittgenstein?s examination of our use of words clarifies our notions of mind, body and behaviour.
The Great Philosophers: Ayer (The\great Philosophers Ser. #2)
by Oswald HanflingPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series. A.J. Ayer 1910-1989 Ayer is best remembered for Language, Truth and Logic (1936), which introduced British and American readers to the logical positivism of the Vienna circle. Hanfling shows in this introduction to Ayer's work how he turned this philosophy into a form of British empiricism in the tradition of Hume. According to Ayer, philosophy is an activity of analysts. Metaphysical truths can be neither established nor refuted by philosophical enquiry: they are meaningless. In support of this claim, he deployed his 'principle of verifiability'. But he found it difficult to refine the principle 'in such a way as to find a middle ground between [an] over-strict requirement' which would disqualify perfectly ordinary statements as meaningless, and 'the over-indulgent licensing of gibberish' - including that of metaphysics.
The Great Philosophers: Nietzsche (The\great Philosophers Ser. #No. 5)
by Ronald HaymanA short book combining extracts from the work of one of the world's greatest thinkers combined with commentary from one of Britain's most distinguished writers on philosophy.
The Great Philosophers: Turing (Great Philosophers Ser. #No. 3)
by Andrew HodgesAlan Turing 1912 ? 1954 Alan Turing?s 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, introducing the Turing machine, was a landmark of twentieth-century thought. It settled a deep problem in the foundations of mathematics, and provided the principle of the post-war electronic computer. It also supplied a new approach to the philosophy of the mind. Influenced by his crucial codebreaking work in the Second World War, and by practical pioneering of the first electronic computers, Turing argued that all the operations of the mind could be performed by computers. His thesis, made famous by the wit and drama of the Turing Test, is the cornerstone of modern Artifical Intelligence. Here Andrew Hodges gives a fresh and critical analysis of Turing?s developing thought, relating it to his extraordinary life, and also to the more recent ideas of Roger Penrose.
The Great Philosophers
by Karl JaspersOver the last half century philosophy seems to have succumbed to irresponsibility, while at the same time casting off the chains of academia. In our struggle to secure the substance of our own day amid the storm of arbitrary, fortuitous, anarchic thinking, we shall be helped if the historic substance can be made to break through the crusts of philosophical convention and if we learn to hear its message. With this book I hope to participate in this process of transformation.
The Great Philosophers: Derrida (Great Philosophers Ser. #5)
by Christopher JohnsonPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series. Jacques Derrida 1930-2004 As critics investigate the 'death of the author', they find Derrida's prints all over the murder weapon. No other recent philosopher has aroused so much suspicion - or been so badly misrepresented. His every idea a tug at the rug beneath us, questioning our sense of ourselves, our world and the language by which both are articulated, Derrida would make uncomfortable reading under any circumstances. Add to this an at time vertiginous abstruseness and a following whose 'deconstructive' readings appear to be doing away with writing as we know it, and the hostility is understandable. Yet as Christopher Johnson shows in this eloquent, exhilarating guide, 'deconstruction' doesn't mean 'destruction' - nor does it involve any 'con'. In what may seem mere convoluted cleverness, momentous consistencies can be found; in Derrida's apparently rarefied rhetoric can be read the most radical, relevant commentary we have on the world we inhabit today.
The Great Philosophers: The Lives and Ideas of History's Greatest Thinkers
by Stephen LawSince the beginning of time mankind has struggled with the big questions surrounding our existence. Whilst most people have heard of Socrates, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, many are less clear on their theories and key concepts. In The Great Philosophers, bestselling author Stephen Law condenses and deciphers their fundamental ideas. Avoiding the technical jargon and complex logic associated with most books on philosophy, Law brings the thoughts of these great thinkers, from Confucius and Buddha to Wittgenstein and Sartre, to life.
The Great Philosophers: The Lives and Ideas of History's Greatest Thinkers
by Stephen LawSince the beginning of time mankind has struggled with the big questions surrounding our existence. Whilst most people have heard of Socrates, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, many are less clear on their theories and key concepts.In The Great Philosophers, bestselling author Stephen Law condenses and deciphers their fundamental ideas. Avoiding the technical jargon and complex logic associated with most books on philosophy, Law brings the thoughts of these great thinkers, from Confucius and Buddha to Wittgenstein and Sartre, to life.
The Great Philosophers: The Lives and Ideas of History's Greatest Thinkers
by Stephen LawSince the beginning of time mankind has struggled with the big questions surrounding our existence. Whilst most people have heard of Socrates, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, many are less clear on their theories and key concepts. In The Great Philosophers, bestselling author Stephen Law condenses and deciphers their fundamental ideas. Avoiding the technical jargon and complex logic associated with most books on philosophy, Law brings the thoughts of these great thinkers, from Confucius and Buddha to Wittgenstein and Sartre, to life.
The Great Philosophers: Aristotle
by Kenneth McleishAristotle c. 384- c.322 BCThe ideas Aristotle outlined in his Poetics have formed the foundation for the whole history of western critical theory. No work has had more influence upon the literature of centuries - neither has any been so profoundly, so perversely misunderstood.Mystification, moralization, recruitment into the cause of this or that literary culture... with all the interpretations, Aristotle has too seldom been permitted to speak for himself. If the prescriptive rigidities of the Renaissance went entirely against the grain of his open, accepting empiricism, the psychologising mania of the moderns has been no truer a reflection of his thought.Kenneth McLeish's introduction cuts through centuries of accreted obscurity to reveal the forthright, astonishingly original book which Aristotle actually wrote. The philosopher who emerges proves more 'modern' than any of his interpreters.
The Great Philosophers: Russell
by Ray MonkBertrand Russell 1872-1970Bertrand Russell discovered mathematics at the age of eleven. It was, he recalled, a transporting experience: 'as dazzling as first love.'From that moment on, he would pursue his passion with undying devotion and all but erotic fervour. Mathematics might succeed, he felt, where philosophy had failed, reducing thought to its purest form, and freeing knowledge from doubt and contradiction.And so, for a time, it seemed. Russell's mathematical investigations effortlessly resolved at a stroke some of philosophy's most intractable problems. Yet if mathematics could be a liberating mistress, she was an unreliable one...Opening up the work of one of our age's undisputed giants, Ray Monk's exhilaratingly clear, readable guide tells a compelling human tale too: a moving story of love and loss, of ecstatic triumph and deep disillusion.
The Great Philosophers: Hegel
by Raymond PlantPart of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series.G.W.F. Hegel 1770-1831Without Hegel, modern thought is unthinkable. From Marx to Merleau-Pontyh, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, those whose ideas have made the modern age have all worked in his shadow.For Hegel's preoccupations have turned out to be our own. The isolation of the individual adrift in society, the yearning of the divided self for an integrated wholeness: these are anxieties his successors have shared. The rival claims of the personal and the public, the immediate instant and the wider historic narrative: these have remained pressing problems through two hundred years of change.Yet if his 'philosophy' seems as contemporary as ever, Hegel's 'religious' views have been dismissed as irrelevant anachronism. The distinction is false, however. In his theological explorations, suggests Raymond Plant in this illuminating new guide, Hegel tackled the issues of interest to us all.