'Everything he writes is an enlightening education in how to be human.' - Elizabeth Day To fix a machine, first you need to find out what's wrong with it. To fix unhappiness, you need to find out what causes it. That Little Voice in Your Head is the practical guide to retraining your brain for optimal joy by Mo Gawdat, the internationally bestselling author of Solve for Happy. Mo reveals how by beating negative self-talk, we can change our thought processes, turning our greed into generosity, our apathy into compassion and investing in our own happiness. This book provides readers with exercises to help reshape their mental processes. Drawing on his expertise in programming and his knowledge of neuroscience, Mo explains how - despite their incredible complexity - our brains behave in ways that are largely predictable. From these insights, he delivers this user manual for happiness. Inspired by the life of his late son, Ali, Mo Gawdat has set out to share a model for happiness based on generosity and empathy towards ourselves and others. Using his experience as a former Google engineer and Chief Business Officer, Mo shares his 'code' for reprogramming our brain and moving away from the misconceptions modern life gives us.

The Enigma of Justice: Freedom and Morality in the Work of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F Hegel, Agnes Heller, and Axel Honneth offers a novel perspective on the idea of justice. Claire Nyblom argues that justice is a cultural and historical constant, routinely summoned as if it were a foundational concept to legitimate or challenge social arrangements. Instead, justice is characterized by a plurality of theories, containing regulative and critical dimensions that are in tension. Nyblom argues that the categorical imperative can be positioned as a strong evaluative standard that mediates plurality, creating a revisable idea of justice resistant to relativism. After identifying the originating architecture of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F Hegel, the discussion engages with the work of Agnes Heller and Axel Honneth, using the "pivots of justice" as an analytic lens focused on commonalities rather than differences. This framework leads to a dialogue between Heller and Honneth that strengthens their respective positions. The Enigma of Justice provides a valuable study and insight into the contemporary nature of justice. The book provides a useful orientation for students and scholars interested in debates about justice, and to those working in the areas of European philosophy, social and political theory, sociology, and the law.

People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind. And for this new edition, they supply an afterword both extending their arguments and offering a fascinating overview of the current state of thinking on the subject of the metaphor.

A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.� Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time. In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship� (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.

'An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.' Sylvia Townsend Warner There are many ways of telling the story of a life and how we've got to where we are. The questions of why and how we think the way we do continues to preoccupy philosophers. In The Stuff of Life, Timothy Morton chooses the objects that have shaped and punctuated their life to tell the story of who they are and why they might think the way they do. These objects are 'things' in the richest sense. They are beings, non-human beings, that have a presence and a force of their own. From the looming expanse of Battersea Power Station to a packet of anti-depressants and a cowboy suit, Morton explores why 'stuff' matters and the life of these things have so powerfully impinged upon their own. Their realization, through a concealer stick, that they identify as non-binary reveals the strange and wonderful ways that objects can form our worlds. Part memoir, part philosophical exploration of the meaning of a life lived alongside and through other things, Morton asks us to think about the stuff, things, objects and buildings that have formed our realities and who we are and might be.