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Books > Humanities > Philosophy
For thousands of years, mathematicians have used the timeless art of logic to see the world more clearly. In The Art of Logic, Royal Society Science Book Prize nominee Eugenia Cheng shows how anyone can think like a mathematician - and see, argue and think better.
Learn how to simplify complex decisions without over-simplifying them. Discover the power of analogies and the dangers of false equivalences. Find out how people construct misleading arguments, and how we can argue back.
Eugenia Cheng teaches us how to find clarity without losing nuance, taking a careful scalpel to the complexities of politics, privilege, sexism and dozens of other real-world situations. Her Art of Logic is a practical and inspiring guide to decoding the modern world.
Included in this volume is an introduction by the translator,
J.M.D. Meiklejohn. Revised edition, originally published by The
Colonial Press in 1899.
**The instant Sunday Times bestseller** What if you tried to stop
doing everything, so you could finally get round to what counts?
Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything
done,' Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for
constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying
their limitations. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and
contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers,
Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time -
and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny. Embrace your
limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.
'Life is finite. You don't have to fit everything in... Read this
book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living' Emma Gannon
'Every sentence is riven with gold' Chris Evans 'Comforting,
fascinating, engaging, inspiring and useful' Marian Keyes
One of the questions that philosophers discuss is: How can we
avoid, or at least reduce, errors when explaining the world? The
skeptical answer to this question is: We cannot avoid errors since
no statement is certain or even definitely plausible, but we can
eliminate some past errors. This book advocates the skeptical
position and discusses its practical applications in science,
ethics, aesthetics, and politics. It brings philosophy down to
earth and comprises an outline of a skeptical guide to the real
world.
In Everything Ancient Was Once New, Emalani Case explores
Indigenous persistence through the concept of Kahiki, a term that
is at once both an ancestral homeland for Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiians)
and the knowledge that there is life to be found beyond Hawai'i's
shores. It is therefore both a symbol of ancestral connection and
the potential that comes with remembering and acting upon that
connection. Tracing physical, historical, intellectual, and
spiritual journeys to and from Kahiki, Emalani frames it as a place
of refuge and sanctuary, a place where ancient knowledge can
constantly be made anew. It is in Kahiki, she argues, and in the
sanctuary it creates, that today's Kanaka Maoli can find safety and
reprieve from the continued onslaught of settler colonial violence,
while also confronting some of the often uncomfortable and
challenging realities of being Indigenous in Hawai'i, in the
Pacific, and in the world. Each chapter of the book engages with
Kahiki as a shifting term, employed by Kanaka Maoli to explain
their lives and experiences to themselves at different points in
history. In doing so, Everything Ancient Was Once New proposes and
argues for reactivated and reinvigorated engagements with Kahiki,
each supporting ongoing work aimed at decolonizing physical and
ideological spaces, and reconnecting Kanaka Maoli to other peoples
and places in the Pacific region and beyond in ways that are both
purposeful and meaningful. In the book, Kahiki is therefore traced
through pivotal moments in history and critical moments in
contemporary times, explaining that while not always mentioned by
name, the idea of Kahiki was, and is, always full of potential. In
writing that is both personal and theoretical, Emalani weaves the
past and the present together, reflecting on ancient concepts and
their continued relevance in movements to protect lands, waters,
and oceans; to fight for social justice; to reexamine our
responsibilities and obligations to each other across the Pacific
region; and to open space for continued dialogue on what it means
to be Indigenous both when at home and when away. Combining
personal narrative and reflection with research and critical
analysis, Everything Ancient Was Once New journeys to and from
Kahiki, the sanctuary for reflection, deep learning, and continued
dreaming with the past, in the present, and far into the future.
Included in this volume is an introduction by the translator,
J.M.D. Meiklejohn. Revised edition, originally published by The
Colonial Press in 1899.
Scholars have long been intrigued by the Buddha's defining action
(karma) as intention. This book explores systematically how
intention and agency were interpreted in all genres of early
Theravada thought. It offers a philosophical exploration of
intention and motivation as they are investigated in Buddhist moral
psychology. At stake is how we understand karma, the nature of
moral experience, and the possibilities for freedom. In contrast to
many studies that assimilate Buddhist moral thinking to Western
theories of ethics, the book attends to distinctively Buddhist ways
of systematizing and theorizing their own categories. Arguing that
meaning is a product of the explanatory systems used to explore it,
the book pays particular attention to genre and to the 5th-century
commentator Buddhaghosa's guidance on how to read Buddhist texts.
The book treats all branches of the Pali canon (the Tipitaka, that
is, the Suttas, the Abhidhamma, and the Vinaya), as well as
narrative sources (the Dhammapada and the Jataka commentaries). In
this sense it offers a comprehensive treatment of intention in the
canonical Theravada sources. But the book goes further than this by
focusing explicitly on the body of commentarial thought represented
by Buddhaghosa. His work is at the center of the book's
investigations, both insofar as he offers interpretative strategies
for reading canonical texts, but also as he advances particular
understandings of agency and moral psychology. The book offers the
first book-length study devoted to Buddhaghosa's thought on ethics
Any country can lawfully defend itself against terrorists who initiate
wars, shield themselves among civilians, and ignore the rules governing
armed combat—even the Jewish state of Israel.
“A necessary book that addresses a moral and military question: What
can a nation do to defend itself against terrorists who pay no mind to
the laws of war? Must it value the lives of its enemies more than its
own citizens?” – Jeb Bush, Two-term Governor of Florida and
Presidential candidate
Imagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians
and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and
religious buildings are used as command and communication centers, and
for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads;
the civilians who live inside…human shields. There are over 300 miles
of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons and passageways for
terrorists to take hostages and travel freely.
Beyond Proportionality examines Israel’s battles against Hamas and
Hezbollah under the laws of war and concludes that its wartime conduct
was based on military necessity and fought justly. The targets are
terrorists, weapons, and tunnels—not civilians. Israel relies upon
verifiable intelligence, deploys precise weapons, and endangers its own
soldiers in order to minimize civilian death.
The bombings over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden, and the urban
warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, produced large numbers of civilian
dead that were not considered acts of genocide; the war in Gaza was no
different.
The first book to use the Catholic theological tradition to explore
the importance of free time, The Fullness of Free Time addresses a
crucial topic in the ethics of everyday life, providing a useful
framework for scholars and students of moral theology and
philosophy as well as anyone hoping to make their free time more
meaningful.
The gruesome double-murder upon which the novel Crime and
Punishment hinges leads its culprit, Raskolnikov, into emotional
trauma and obsessive, destructive self-reflection. But
Raskolnikov's famous philosophical musings are just part of the
full philosophical thought manifest in one of Dostoevsky's most
famous novels. This volume, uniquely, brings together prominent
philosophers and literary scholars to deepen our understanding of
the novel's full range of philosophical thought. The seven essays
treat a diversity of topics, including: language and the
representation of the human mind, emotions and the susceptibility
to loss, the nature of agency, freedom and the possibility of evil,
the family and the failure of utopian critique, the authority of
law and morality, and the dialogical self. Further, authors provide
new approaches for thinking about the relationship between literary
representation and philosophy, and the way that Dostoevsky labored
over intricate problems of narrative form in Crime and Punishment.
Together, these essays demonstrate a seminal work's full
philosophical worth-a novel rich with complex themes whose
questions reverberate powerfully into the 21st century.
Philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain was diverse, vibrant, and
sophisticated. This was the age of Hume and Berkeley and Reid, of
Hutcheson and Kames and Smith, of Ferguson and Burke and
Wollstonecraft. Important and influential works were published in
every area of philosophy, from the theory of vision to theories of
political resistance, from the philosophy of language to accounts
of ways of governing the passions. The philosophers of
eighteenth-century Britain were enormously influential, in France,
in Italy, in Germany, and in America. Their ideas and arguments
remain a powerful presence in philosophy three centuries later.
This Oxford Handbook is the first book ever to provide
comprehensive coverage of the full range of philosophical writing
in Britain in the eighteenth century. It provides accounts of the
writings of all the major figures, but also puts those figures in
the context provided by a host of writers less well known today.
The book has five principal sections: 'Logic and Metaphysics', 'The
Passions', 'Morals', 'Criticism', and 'Politics'. Each section
comprises four chapters, providing detailed coverage of all of the
important aspects of its subject matter. There is also an
introductory section, with chapters on the general character of
philosophizing in eighteenth-century Britain, and a concluding
section on the important question of the relation at this time
between philosophy and religion. The authors of the chapters are
experts in their fields. They include philosophers, historians,
political theorists, and literary critics, and they teach in
colleges and universities in Britain, in Europe, and in North
America.
Stephen C. Ferguson II provides a philosophical examination of
Black popular culture for the first time. From extensive discussion
of the philosophy and political economy of Hip-Hop music through to
a developed exploration of the influence of the
postmodernism-poststructuralist ideology on African American
studies, he argues how postmodernism ideology plays a seminal role
in justifying the relationship between corporate capitalism and
Black popular culture. Chapters cover topics such as cultural
populism, capitalism and Black liberation, the philosophy of
Hip-Hop music, and Harold Cruse’s influence on the “cultural
turn” in African American studies. Ferguson combines case studies
of past and contemporary Black cultural and intellectual
productions with a Marxist ideological critique to provide a
cutting edge reflection on the economic structure in which Black
popular culture emerged. He highlights the contradictions that are
central to the juxtaposition of Black cultural artists as political
participants in socioeconomic struggle and the political
participants who perform the rigorous task of social criticism.
Adopting capitalism as an explanatory framework, Ferguson
investigates the relationship between postmodernism as social
theory, current manifestations of Black popular culture, and the
theoretical work of Black thinkers and scholars to demonstrate how
African American studies have been shaped.
In the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, news spread
about Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page document published by the
conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The debates—and
anxiety—surrounding this initiative have only increased as authors of
the Project assume positions of power in the second Trump
administration.
So, what is Project 2025, exactly? Who wrote it, what does it actually
say, and what does it mean for everyday people around the world, across
the political spectrum, in the years to come?
In The Project, award-winning journalist David A. Graham offers
much-needed context and distills the essential elements of this
sprawling document. Breaking down the Project’s strategy for
transforming—and radically empowering—the executive branch, Graham then
explains what the architects behind Project 2025 would do with that
power: restoring traditional gender norms and the supremacy of the
nuclear family, decimating the civil service, performing mass
deportations, reducing corporate regulation and worker protections, and
more.
Project 2025 is the intellectual blueprint for the new administration,
Graham argues, and its tenets should not be legible only to policy
wonks. Authoritative yet highly accessible, The Project demystifies it
for those whose lives it will impact most.
In Oktober 2015 het die Algemene Sinode van die NG Kerk ’n merkwaardige besluit oor selfdegeslagverhoudings geneem. Die besluit het erkenning gegee aan sulke verhoudings en dit vir predikante moontlik gemaak om gay en lesbiese persone in die eg te verbind. Ook die selibaatsvereiste wat tot op daardie stadium vir gay predikante gegeld het, is opgehef. Met hierdie besluit het die NG Kerk die eerste hoofstroomkerk in Suid-Afrika en Afrika geword wat totale gelykwaardige menswaardige behandeling van alle mense, ongeag seksuele oriëntasie, erken – en is gedoen wat slegs in ’n handjievol kerke węreldwyd uitgevoer is. Die besluit het egter gelei tot groot konsternasie. Verskeie appčlle en beswaargeskrifte is ingedien, distriksinodes het hulle van die besluit distansieer, en in die media was daar volgehoue kritiek en debat.
In WHY POLITICAL LIBERALISM?, Paul Weithman offers a fresh,
rigorous, and compelling interpretation of John Rawls's reasons for
taking his so-called "political turn". Weithman takes Rawls at his
word that justice as fairness was recast as a form of political
liberalism because of an inconsistency Rawls found in his early
treatment of social stability. He argues that the inconsistency is
best seen by identifying the threats to stability with which the
early Rawls was concerned. One of those threats, often overlooked
by Rawls's readers, is the threat that the justice of a
well-ordered society would be undermined by a generalized
prisoner's dilemma. Showing how the Rawls of "A Theory of Justice"
tried to avert that threat shows that the much-neglected third part
of that book is of considerably greater philosophical interest, and
has considerably more unity of focus, than is generally
appreciated. Weithman painstakingly reconstructs Rawls's attempts
to show that a just society would be stable, and just as carefully
shows why Rawls came to think those arguments were inconsistent
with other parts of his theory. Weithman then shows that the
changes Rawls introduced into his view between "Theory of Justice"
and "Political Liberalism" result from his attempt to remove the
inconsistency and show that the hazard of the generalized
prisoner's dilemma can be averted after all. Recovering Rawls's two
treatments of stability helps to answer contested questions about
the role of the original position and the foundations of justice as
fairness. The result is a powerful and unified reading of Rawls's
work that explains his political turn and shows his enduring
engagement with some of the deepest concerns of human life.
"Weithman has written a masterful work of Rawls scholarship. This
book will deepen our understanding of how and why Rawls
restructured his theory, and illuminate this fascinating transition
in the history of political philosophy." Leif Wenar, Chair of
Ethics, Kings College London "Weithman's reconstruction of Rawls's
arguments is masterful, convincing and in many ways revelatory.
Readers will find that the text provides compelling answers to a
lot of puzzling questions about Rawls's project that have lingered
for some time. Perhaps most importantly, Weithman gives the best
explanation to date of exactly why Rawls felt compelled to revise
his theory as he did." Colin Bird, Department of Politics,
University of Virginia
A thoroughly updated edition of the witty and engaging exploration
of the history, application, and tenets of literary theory in ten
lessons. The first edition of Ten Lessons served as a
“literary” introduction to theoretical writing, a strong set of
pedagogical prose poems unpacking Lacanian psychoanalysis,
continental philosophy, Marxism, cultural studies, feminism, gender
studies, and queer theory. Calvin Thomas returns to these ten
“lessons,” each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from
the canons of theory, each exploring the basic assumptions and
motivations of theoretical writing. But while every lesson explains
the working terms and core tenets of theory, each also attempts to
exemplify theory as a “liberatory practice” (bell hooks), to
liberate theory as a “practice of creativity” (Foucault) in and
of itself. Features: - Critical keywords bolded for easy reference
- Expanded footnotes with detailed discussion of key concepts -
Anti-racist overhaul of each lesson in the wake of Trumpism, Black
Lives Matter, and #MeToo - Urgent emphasis on Afropessimism,
critical race theory, and other developments in postcolonial Black
cultural production - Designed to cross-reference with: Adventures
in Theory: A Compact Anthology, edited by Calvin Thomas The
Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by
Jeffrey R. Di Leo The Bloomsbury Handbook to 21st Century Feminist
Theory, edited by Robin Truth Goodman The revised, updated, and
expanded second edition, featuring 25% new material, still argues
for theoretical writing as a genre of creative writing, a way of
engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences
that make trouble, that desire to make radical changes in very
fabrication of social reality.
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935,
are the work of one of the most original thinkers in twentieth
century Europe. Gramsci has had a profound influence on debates
about the relationship between politics and culture. His complex
and fruitful approach to questions of ideology, power and change
remains crucial for critical theory. This volume was the first
selection published from the Notebooks to be made available in
Britain, and was originally published in the early 1970s. It
contains the most important of Gramsci's notebooks, including the
texts of The Modern Prince, and Americanism and Fordism, and
extensive notes on the state and civil society, Italian history and
the role of intellectuals. 'Far the best informative apparatus
available to any foreign language readership of Gramsci.' Perry
Anderson, New Left Review 'A model of scholarship' New Statesman
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