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The Great Philosophers:Heidegger
by Jonathan ReeHeidegger 1889-1976'We ourselves the entities to be analysed.' With those words, Martin Heidegger launched his assault on the 'sham clarity' of traditional Western thought. We are neither immortal souls nor disembodied intellects, he argues, but finite historical existences. And we are bound to the world by threads of interpretation and misinterpretation more strange and tangled than we can ever hope to comprehend.In his masterpiece Being and Time (1927) Heidegger used his technique of 'existential analysis' to undercut traditional dilemmas of objectivity and subjectivity, rationality and irrationality, absolutism and relativism. Truth itself, he argues, is essentially historical.The greatest adventures of twentieth-century thought can be seen as footnotes to Being and Time, and in this brilliantly lucid exposition Jonathan Rée spells out all its main arguments without blunting any of its disturbing paradoxes.
The Great Philosophers: Hume
by Anthony QuintonA short book combining extracts from the work of one of the world's greatest thinkers with commentary by one of Britain's most distinguished writers on philosophy.
The Great Philosophers:Kant (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Ralph Walker'Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.' KantIn today's increasingly fractured world of oppression and uncertainty, Kant's moral philosophy is more important than ever before. And never has the need for moral absolutes been more pressing than in this age of doubt, disillusion and cynicism. This is where Kant comes in, as his moral philosophy continues to compel the attention of every serious thinker in the field. Clear, concise - and overwhelmingly convincing - Ralph Walker's stimulating, highly accessible guide spells out the power and renewed relevance of his thinking: a genuinely objective, absolute basis for a modern moral law.
The Great Philosophers: Locke (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
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:Marx
by Terry Eagleton'We are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity' Karl MarxFor Marx, freedom entailed release from commercial labour. In this highly engaging account, 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 or churning out coat-hangers'. Combining extracts from Marx's revolutionary philosophy, along with insightful analysis, this is the perfect guide to one of the world's greatest thinkers.
The Great Philosophers: Nietzsche
by Ronald Hayman'God is dead', announced Nietzsche - before going on to abolish himself.Envious contemporaries of Nietzsche ridiculed him as a mad man - and yet they came closer than they knew in characterising a philosopher in whose thought ambivalence approximated to disintegration of the self. While the nineteenth century's coherent, consistent systems of certainty came crashing down ingloriously at the very first touch of the twentieth, Nietzsche's discourses survived. He was more modern, it seemed, than the moderns. In this stimulating and provocative guide, Hayman reveals how Nietzsche's work is more contemporary and relevant than ever in a new postmodern age.
The Great Philosophers:Pascal (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Ben RogersPascal 1623-1662The moralist who advocated dressing up, the ascetic who liked a flutter, the devout Christian who lauded vanity, Pascal is a funnier, more ironic philosopher than his reputation as an anguished existentialist would suggest.Yet however irreverent the terms of his ironic project, its underlying impetus is both serious and profound. In this superb new introduction to the thinker and his thought, Ben Rogers demonstrates the deep wisdom of Pascal's defence of popular folly - a defence which he used to highlight the higher delusions of the learned.Setting the Pensées in the context of Pascal's life and philosophical career, Rogers reveals how their apparent frivolity underpins a fascinating, far-reaching and still challenging body of moral and political thought. His remarkable guide offers an eye-opening account of the work of a marvellous and much neglected thinker.
The Great Philosophers: Plato (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Professor Bernard WilliamsPlato c428 - c348BCWithout the work of Plato, western thought is, quite literally, unthinkable. No single influence has been greater, in every age and in every philosophic field. Even those thinkers who have rejected Plato's views have found themselves working to an agenda he set.Yet between the neo-platonist interpretations and the anti-platonist reactions, the stuff of 'Platonism' proper has often been obscured. The philosopher himself has not necessarily helped in the matter: at times disconcertingly difficult, at other disarmingly simple, Plato can be an elusive thinker, his meanings hard to pin down. His dialogues complex and often ironically constructed and do not simply expand his views, which in any case changed and developed over a long life.In this lucid and exciting new introductory guide, Bernard Williams takes his reader back to first principles, re-reading the key texts to reveal what the philosopher actually said. The result is a rediscovered Plato: often unexpected, always fascinating and rewarding.
The Great Philosophers: Popper (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Frederic RaphaelKarl Popper 1902-1994The political history of the twentieth century has been full of savage 'certainties'. A similar idea of history warranted the callous savageries of both Marxism and Fascism. They shared a faith in what Karl Popper called 'Historicism': the belief that the future could be predicted and that man had to align himself with its bloody progress.Totalitarianism, Popper maintained, was based on ideas implicit in Western philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and Marx. It was his unique achievement to challenge the fundamental arguments in which Left and Right cloaked their authority.At a time when Communism and Fascism were devastatingly alluring to many intellectuals, Popper attacked their philosophical roots with passionate reasonableness and unflinching scepticism. As Frederic Raphael suggests in this elegant and intriguing introduction to his philosophy of science and history, Popper's epic modesty may have made him the most radical thinker of our times.
The Great Philosophers: Russell (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
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:Schopenhauer (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Michael TannerSchopenhauer 1788 - 1860Western philosophy's most profound and unrelenting pessimist, Schopenhauer hymned the miseries of human existence with a joylessness that was little short of lyrical. Yet he thrilled to the beauties of music and art.How did such deep bleakness and such sublime enthusiasm come to coincide in one man, one mind? Only by squaring these two sides of Schopenhauer can we truly hope to understand this most paradoxical - even perverse of thinkers. Only through his thoughts on Beauty can we apprehend his attitude towards Truth.The failure of later philosophers down the generations to resolve these apparent contradictions has seen Schopenhauer's thought unjustly marginalized and philosophy itself much poorer. Michael Tanner's enthralling introduction teases out the difficulties and unpicks the paradoxes to reveal the exhilarating coherence beneath. It amounts to nothing less than a rediscovery of one of Western tradition's greatest philosophers.
The Great Philosophers: Socrates (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Anthony Gottlieb'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: Spinoza (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Roger ScrutonBorn to be misunderstood, Spinoza was a man whose theology was banned for Godlessness. The very virtuosity of his reasoning left logicians unsettled, while even to professional thinkers in our own time, Spinoza has seemed too clever by half. And yet, as Roger Scruton shows in this strikingly readable introduction to the man and his though, Spinoza's concerns were both simple and sublime. Few philosophers, indeed, have shown such a straightforward, sustained and honest interest in uncovering the most fundamental aspects of existence. Too important to be dismissed as a mere genius, Spinoza is rediscovered here in all his quiet and consoling simplicity.
The Great Philosophers: Turing (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Andrew HodgesAlan 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 Artificial 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: Voltaire (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
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.
Great Philosophers Volume One: The Road to Inner Freedom, The Art of Philosophizing, and Pilgrimage to Humanity
by Baruch Spinoza Bertrand Russell Albert SchweitzerEssential teachings, brilliant musings, and provocative theories from three of history&’s greatest thinkers.The Road to Inner Freedom: The seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza views the ability to experience rational love of God as the key to mastering the contradictory and violent human emotions. The Art of Philosophizing: These groundbreaking essays by Bertrand Russell deal with &“the art of reckoning&” in the fields of mathematics, logic, and philosophy. With great clarity and simple exposition, Russell gets to the core of philosophical inquiry and analysis. Pilgrimage to Humanity: Albert Schweitzer discusses his philosophy of culture, the course of his life, his ministry to human needs in Africa, the idea of reverence for life, the ideal of world peace, the significance of liberal Christianity, and the lives, world-views, and contributions of Johann Goethe, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Jesus of Nazareth.
Great Philosophers Volume Two: Science and Philosophy, The Preservation of Youth, and Understanding History
by Alfred North Whitehead Moses Maimonides Bertrand RussellThree essential philosophers on the nature of reality, the health of the human body, and the meaning of history.Science and Philosophy: An essential introduction to Alfred North Whitehead&’s life and philosophy. From personal reflections to his groundbreaking essay &“Process and Reality&” to an enlightening discussion of Einstein&’s theories, Science and Philosophy is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand one of the modern world&’s greatest thinkers. The Preservation of Youth: Capitalizing on his experience as a physician as well as his knowledge of classical and medieval principles of healing, Moses Maimonides provides a comprehensive theory of wellbeing. In this work he addresses common medical conditions including asthma, diabetes, hepatitis, and pneumonia, and makes recommendations on diet and exercise, sex life, and the underlying psychological causes of illness. Understanding History: Written during the height of World War II, these vigorous essays by Bertrand Russell present his influential theories on the nature of history. The title piece exposes the deadliness of the academic approach to the past, and shows how the reading of history can be a vivid intellectual pleasure.
Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love
by Andrew ShafferFew people have failed at love as spectacularly as the great philosophers. Although we admire their wisdom, history is littered with the romantic failures of the most sensible men and women of every age, including:Friedrich Nietzsche: "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent." (Rejected by everyone he proposed to, even when he kept asking and asking.)Jean-Paul Sartre: "There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty." (Adopted his mistress as his daughter.)Louis Althusser: "The trouble is there are bodies and, worse still, sexual organs." (Accidentally strangled his wife to death.)And dozens of other great thinkers whose words we revere—but whose romantic decisions we should avoid at all costs.Includes an excerpt from Andrew Shaffer's new book Literary Rogues.
The Great Philosophers: Wittgenstein (GREAT PHILOSOPHERS)
by Peter HackerThis highly accessible account 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.
Great Plains Politics (Discover the Great Plains)
by Peter J. LongoThe Great Plains has long been home to unconventional and leading-edge politics, from the fiery Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to the country’s first female U.S. representative and first female governor to the nation’s only single-house state legislature. Great Plains Politics provides a lively tour of the Great Plains region through the civic and political contributions of its citizens, demonstrating the importance of community in the region.Great Plains Politics profiles six men and women who had a profound impact on the civic and community life of the Great Plains: Wilma Mankiller, the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and a political activist at both the local and the national levels; Virginia Smith, an educator from Nebraska who served as a U.S. representative in Congress; Junius Groves, an African American farmer and community builder from Kansas; George McGovern, a South Dakota senator whose 1972 presidential campaign galvanized widespread grassroots support; Robert Dole, a Kansas congressman and longtime senator as well as the Republican candidate for U.S. president in 1988; and Harriet Elizabeth Byrd, the first African American elected as a state representative in Wyoming. The lives of these individuals illustrate the robust and enduring civic and community involvement of inhabitants of the Great Plains and presage a hopeful continuation of its storied political tradition.
Great Powers and International Hierarchy
by Daniel McCormackHierarchical relationships—rules that structure both international and domestic politics—are pervasive. Yet we know little about how these relationships are constructed, maintained, and dismantled. This book fills this lacuna through a two-pronged research approach: first, it discusses how great power negotiations over international political settlements both respond to domestic politics within weak states and structure the specific forms that hierarchy takes. Second, it deduces three sets of hypotheses about hierarchy maintenance, construction, and collapse during the post-war era. By offering a coherent theoretical model of hierarchical politics within weaker states, the author is able to answer a number of important questions, including: Why does the United States often ally with autocratic states even though its most enduring relationships are with democracies? Why do autocratic hierarchical relationships require interstate coercion? Why do some hierarchies end violently and others peacefully? Why does hierarchical competition sometimes lead to interstate conflict and sometimes to civil conflict?
Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony: The World Order since 1500 (War, History And Politics Ser.)
by Jeremy BlackThis timely book provides a general overview of Great Power politics and world order from 1500 to the present. Jeremy Black provides several historical case-studies, each of which throws light on both the power in question and the international system of the period, and how it had developed from the preceding period. The point of departure for this
The Great Promise of Educational Technology: Citizenship and Education in a Globalized World (New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics)
by Dan MamlokThis book critically looks at the tensions between the promise to transform education through the use of digital technology and the tendency to utilize digital technology in instrumental and technical ways. The widespread use of digital technology has had a remarkable effect on almost every domain of human life. This technological change has caused governments, educational departments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to recognize the need to develop educational plans that would support the social and the cultural changes that have occurred with the ubiquitous permeation of digital technology into our everyday lives. This book challenges common assumptions regarding digital technology and education, through critical exploration of educational policies, interviews, and class observations in the US and Israel. In doing so, the author sheds light on the possibilities of advancing digital citizenship under current educational policies.
The Great Psychic Outdoors: Adventures in Low Fidelity
by Enrico MonacelliExplores the weird world of lo-fi music to investigate its revolutionary potential and its ability to subvert what we think music can do.Homemade records, tape-hiss worship and a taste for a very peculiar kind of psychedelia have carved themselves a weird niche in the contemporary musical landscape under the name of lo-fi.This genreless genre, characterized by poor recordings and rough sounds, spanning from the most extreme heavy metal to the sweetest ear-candies pop can offer, has become a solid presence in our collective sensibility. And yet, it has largely been neglected: this staunch refusal of anything hi-fi and hi-tech has fallen under the radar of the categories we use to analyse ourselves and our times.The Great Psychic Outdoors, dedicated to the most interesting and controversial artists in this movement, will rectify this injustice and vindicate the revolutionary potential of lo-fi music, engaging with this weird genre on its own terms and facing head on the contradictions and possibilities of this multi-faceted phenomenon. Confronting the aesthetic and conceptual stakes of this sonic craft, The Great Psychic Outdoors shows what lo-fi says about us, our lives under capitalism and the strange ways we cope with pain, madness and beauty.
The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic
by Paolo GerbaudoWhat comes after neoliberalism?In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, deficit spending and climate planning. This is the Great Recoil, the era when the neo-statist endopolitics of national sovereignty, economic protection and democratic control overrides the neoliberal exopolitics of free markets, labour flexibility and business opportunity. Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left, Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against redistributive demands, as proposed by the right&’s authoritarian protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the left&’s social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation.