Pushing back against the potential trivialization of moral psychology that would reduce it to emotional preferences, this book takes an enactivist, self-organizational, and hermeneutic approach to internal conflict between a basic exploratory drive motivating the search for actual truth, and opposing incentives to confabulate in the interest of conformity, authoritarianism, and cognitive dissonance, which often can lead to harmful worldviews. The result is a new possibility that ethical beliefs can have truth value and are not merely a result of ephemeral altruistic or cooperative feelings. It will interest moral and political psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and all who are concerned with inner emotional conflicts driving ethical thinking beyond mere emotivism, and toward moral realism, albeit a fallibilist one requiring continual rethinking and self-reflection. It combines 'basic emotion' theories (such as Panksepp) with hermeneutic depth psychology. The result is a realist approach to moral thinking emphasizing coherence rather than foundationalist theory of knowledge.

Plato was the first philosopher in the western tradition to reflect systematically (and often critically) on rhetoric. In this book, Tushar Irani presents a comprehensive and innovative reading of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, the only two Platonic dialogues to focus on what an 'art of argument' should look like, treating each of the texts individually, yet ultimately demonstrating how each can best be understood in light of the other. For Plato, the way in which we approach argument typically reveals something about our deeper desires and motivations, particularly with respect to other people, and so the key to understanding his views on the proper practice of argument lies in his understanding of human psychology. According to this reading, rhetoric done well is simply the practice of philosophy, the pursuit of which has far-reaching implications for how we should relate to others and how we ought to live.

Baroque philosopher Balthasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom consists of three hundred maxims spanning a wide range of topics relating to all aspects of life and human behavior. Gracian was a Spanish Jesuit Priest whose sermons and writings were disapproved of by his superiors. Admired by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for the depth and subtlety of his observations, Gracian's collection of pithy insights deserves place alongside similar classic manuals of self-improvement from antiquity like the Enchiridion of Epictetus and Seneca's Letters.

Over a period of three years, Henry David Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He scaled peaks, paddled a canoe, and dined on hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes, he acutely observed the rich flora and fauna, as well as the few people he met dotting the landscape, like lumberers, boat-men, and the Abnaki Indians. - The Maine Woods is an American classic, a voyage into nature and the heart of early America.