What does everyone in the modern world need to know? A renowned psychologist answers hard questions with a unique combination of ancient wisdom and clinical experience.

Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychologist has reshaped the modern understanding of personality, and now he has become one of the world's most popular public thinkers, with his lectures on topics ranging from the Bible to romantic relationships drawing tens of millions of viewers. In an era of polarizing politics, echo chambers and trigger warnings, his startling message about the value of personal responsibility and the dangers of ideology has resonated around the world.

In this book, he combines ancient wisdom with decades of experience to provide twelve profound and challenging principles for how to live a meaningful life, from setting your house in order before criticising others to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not someone else today. Gripping, thought-provoking and deeply rewarding, 12 Rules For Life offers an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to our modern problems.

In Critique Of Black Reason, eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness - from the Atlantic slave trade to the present - to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations between colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital.

Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion.

With Critique Of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

Does life have any meaning for you? Is it possible to create meaning? What do you think life is about? Do you think life is worth living?

These questions, taken from the text of Rethinking Our World, challenge the reader to look critically and creatively at many of society’s traditional beliefs. They encourage readers to look at their world differently by asking questions about change, identity and direction. The authors outline the major figures and basic principles of each philosophy, then analyse the type of thinking each approach encourages. They go on to challenge readers to examine ways in which the different approaches can be used to understand the world.

Rethinking Our World will be invaluable to undergraduate students in the human and social sciences, as well as to a more general readership seeking an understanding of the arguments in the major philosophies.

A hugely topical collection of essays from a cross-disciplinary group of leading academics focussing on the implications for an understanding of human identity in light of the current possibilities in medical science. The book brings together an international body of medical experts alongside philosophers, sociologists, theologians and ethicists in order to discuss these vital issues.

The ensuing discussion will allow public debate to be more informed about the actual possibilities inherent in medical science, alongside a sophisticated treatment of ethical and theological issues. The result is a focused collection of essays that raises new and challenging questions.

Should we believe in God? In this new book, written for a new generation, the brilliant science writer and author of The God Delusion, explains why we shouldn’t.

Should we believe in God? Do we need God in order to explain the existence of the universe? Do we need God in order to be good? In twelve chapters that address some of the most profound questions human beings confront, Dawkins marshals science, philosophy and comparative religion to interrogate the hypocrisies of all the religious systems and explain to readers of all ages how life emerged without a Creator, how evolution works and how our world came into being.

For anyone hoping to grapple with the meaning of life and what to believe, Outgrowing God is a challenging, thrilling and revelatory read.

Ubuntu is a Xhosa word originating from a South African philosophy that encapsulates all our aspirations about how to live life well, together. It is the belief in a universal human bond: I am only because you are. And it means that if you are able to see everyone as fully human, connected to you by their humanity, you will never be able to treat others as disposable or without worth. By embracing the philosophy of Ubuntu and living it out in daily life it's possible to overcome division and be stronger together in a world where the wise build bridges, not walls.

These 14 lessons from the Rainbow Nation are an essential toolkit to helping us all to live better, together. In stories that recognise our common humanity, our connectedness and interdependence, Everyday Ubuntu helps to make sense of the world and our place in it. Exploring ideas of kindness and forgiveness, tolerance and the power of listening, it shows how we can all benefit from embracing others.

Including practical applications and mindful exercises, it is an inspirational guide to a more fulfilling life as part of the large family to which we all belong.

From Confucius and Plato to Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky, this book brings together more than 100 illustrated biographies of the world's great philosophers. Introduced with a stunning portrait of each featured philosopher, the biographies trace the ideas, friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired the great thinkers and influenced their work, providing revealing insights into what drove them to question the meaning of life, and come up with new ways of understanding the world and the history of ideas. Lavishly illustrated with photographs and paintings of philosophers, their homes, friends, studies, and their personal belongings, together with pages from original manuscripts, first editions, and correspondence, this book introduces the key ideas, themes, and working methods of each featured individual, setting their ideas within a wider historical and cultural context. Charting the development of ideas across the centuries in both the East and West, from ancient Chinese philosophy to the work of contemporary thinkers, Philosophers provides a compelling glimpse into the personal lives, loves, and influences of the great philosophers as they probed into life's "big ideas".

As the western world struggles with its legacies of racism and colonialism, what can we learn from the past in order to move forward? Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman, who grew up as a white girl in the American South during the civil rights movement, is a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. In clear and gripping prose, she uses this unique perspective to combine philosophical reflection, personal history and conversations with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through focusing on the particularities of those histories, she provides examples for other nations, whether they are facing resurgent nationalism, ongoing debates over reparations or controversies surrounding historical monuments and the contested memories they evoke. It is necessary reading for all those confronting their own troubled pasts.

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 wêreldwyd uitgevoer is. Die besluit het egter gelei tot groot konsternasie. Verskeie appèlle en beswaargeskrifte is ingedien, distriksinodes het hulle van die besluit distansieer, en in die media was daar volgehoue kritiek en debat.

A deeply comforting and enlightening book on how Stoicism can inspire us to lead more thoughtful lives What aspects of your life do you really control? What do you do when you cannot guarantee that things will turn out in your favour? And what can Stoicism teach us about how to live together? In the past few years, Stoicism has been making a comeback. But what exactly did the Stoics believe? InLessons in Stoicism, philosopher John Sellars weaves together the key ideas of the three great Roman Stoics -- Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius -- with snapshots of their fascinating lives, to show us how their ideas can help us today. In vivid prose, Sellars shows how the works of these three Stoics have inspired readers ever since, speaking as they do to some of the perennial issues that face anyone trying to navigate their way through life. Their works, fundamentally, are about how to live -- how to understand one's place in the world, how to cope when things don't go well, how to manage one's emotions and how to behave towards others. Consoling and inspiring, Lessons in Stoicism is a deeply thoughtful guide to the philosophy of a valuable life.

From one of our preeminent philosophers-winner of the Berggruen Prize-a work that engages critically with important examples of the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting the equal worth of all human beings. Nussbaum pursues this "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, Adam Smith during the eighteenth century, and various contemporary thinkers. She confronts its inherent tensions: the ideal suggests that moral personality is complete, and completely beautiful, without any external aids, while reality insists that basic material needs must be met if people are to realize fully their inherent dignity. Given the global prevalence of material want, the lesser social opportunities of people with physical and cognitive disabilities, the conflicting beliefs of a pluralistic society, and the challenge of mass migration and asylum seekers, what political principles should we endorse? Nussbaum brings her version of the Capabilities Approach to these problems, and she goes further: she takes on the challenge of recognizing the moral claims of nonhuman animals and the natural world. The insight that politics ought to treat human beings both as equal to each other and as having a worth beyond price is responsible for much that is fine in the modern Western political imagination. The Cosmopolitan Tradition extends Nussbaum's work, urging us to focus on the humanity we share rather than all that divides us.

The story of the greatest of all philosophical friendships "and how it influenced modern thought David Hume is arguably the most important philosopher ever to have written in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as oethe Great Infidel for his religious skepticism and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith, now hailed as the founding father of capitalism, was a revered professor of moral philosophy. Remarkably, Hume and Smith were best friends, sharing what Dennis Rasmussen calls the greatest of all philosophical friendships. The Infidel and the Professor tells the fascinating story of the close relationship between these towering Enlightenment thinkers "and how it influenced their world-changing ideas. It shows that Hume contributed more to economics "and Smith contributed more to philosophy "than is generally recognized. The result is a compelling account of a great friendship that had great consequences for modern thought.

Some people have something to say in any conversation and can spot the hidden angles of completely unrelated problems; but how do they do it? So many books, apps, courses, and schools compete for our attention that the problem isn't a lack of opportunity to sharpen our minds, it's having to choose between so many options. And yet, more than two thousand years ago, the greatest thinker of Ancient Greece, Aristotle, had already discovered the blueprint of the human mind. Despite the fact that the latest cognitive science shows his blueprint to be exactly what sharpens our reasoning, subtlety of thought, and ability to think in different ways and for ourselves, we have meanwhile replaced it with a simplistic and seductive view of intelligence, education and the mind. Condensing that blueprint to six 'secrets', Craig Adams uncovers the underlying patterns of every discussion and debate we've ever had, and shows us how to be both harder to manipulate and more skilful in any conversation or debate - no matter the topic.

In our brave new world of Big Tech, work is automated and money melts into air. What comes next as the global capitalist edifice crumbles? Slavoj Zizek shows how the answer is already stealing into sight, like a thief in broad daylight. What we must do is wake up and see it. 'In a world determined to crush hope of radical change, where moral corruption poses as pragmatism and systemic oppression as the new freedom, Slavoj Zizek's excellent new book serves humanity in a way that only authentic philosophy can' Yanis Varoufakis 'The Elvis of cultural theory' New Statesman 'Master of the counterintuitive observation' New Yorker

The revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was a foundational figure in postcolonial and decolonial thought and practice, yet his psychiatric work still has only been studied peripherally. That is in part because most of his psychiatric writings have remained untranslated. With a focus on Fanon's key psychiatry texts, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics considers Fanon's psychiatric writings as materials anticipating as well as accompanying Fanon's better known works, written between 1952 and 1961 (Black Skin, White Masks; A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, The Wretched of the Earth). Both clinical and political, they draw on another notion of psychiatry that intersects history, ethnology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The authors argue that Fanon's work inaugurates a critical ethnopsychiatry based on a new concept of culture (anchored to historical events, particular situations, and lived experience) and on the relationship between the psychological and the cultural. Thus, Gibson and Beneduce contend that Fanon's psychiatric writings also express Fanon's wish, as he puts it in The Wretched of the Earth, to "develop a new way of thinking, not only for us but for humanity."

Demystifying the key ideas of the world's greatest philosophers, and exploring all of the most important branches of thought including philosophy of science, philosophy of religion and feminist philosophy in a uniquely visual way, this book is the perfect introduction to the history of philosophy. A clear and accessible guide to philosophy, How Philosophy Works combines bold infographics and jargon-free text to demystify fundamental concepts. Covering everything from ethics to epistemology and phenomenology, the book presents the ideas and theories of key philosophical traditions and philosophers - from Plato and Socrates to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein via Kant - in a novel, easy-to-understand way. Its infographics will help you to understand the elements of philosophy on a conceptual level and, by tackling life's "big questions", it will help you to look at the world in an entirely new way. With its unique graphic approach and clear, authoritative text, How Philosophy Works is the perfect introduction to philosophy, and the ideal companion to DK's The Philosophy Book in the "Big Ideas" series.

In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves-it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing-from petty thefts to the multibilliondollar scams of toobigtofail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war-they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen. To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled. The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.

`We're doing philosophy now, and that means following the argument wherever it leads, like that time you chased a rabbit and ended up with your head stuck in a hole.' Monty was just like any other dog. A scruffy and irascible Maltese terrier, he enjoyed barking at pugs and sniffing at trees. But after yet another dramatic confrontation with the local Rottweiler, Anthony McGowan realises it's high time he and Monty had a chat about what makes him a good or a bad dog. Taking his lead from Monty's canine antics, McGowan takes us on a hilarious and enlightening jaunt through the major debates of philosophy. Will Kant convince Monty to stop stealing cheesecake? How long will they put up with Socrates poking holes in every argument? In this uniquely entertaining take on morality and ethics, the dutiful duo set out to uncover who - if anyone - has the right end of the ethical stick and can tell us how best to live one's life.

Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease. The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more "attractive" body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.

In this witty and mischievous book, philosopher Peter Cave dissects the most controversial disputes today and uses philosophical argument to reveal that many issues are less straightforward than we'd like to believe. Leaving no sacred cow standing, Cave uses ingenious stories and examples to challenge our most strongly held assumptions. Is democracy inherently a good thing? What is the basis of so-called human rights? Is discrimination always bad? Are we morally obliged to accept refugees? In an age of identity politics and so-called 'fake news', this book is an essential resource for reinvigorating genuine public debate - and an entertaining challenge to accepted wisdom.

In our increasingly secular world, holy texts are at best seen as irrelevant, and at worst as an excuse to incite violence, hatred and division. So what value, if any, can scripture hold for us today? And if our world no longer seems compatible with scripture, is it perhaps because its original purpose has become lost? Today we see the Quran being used by some to justify war and terrorism, the Torah to deny Palestinians the right to live in the Land of Israel, and the Bible to condemn homosexuality and contraception. The holy texts at the centre of all religious traditions are often employed selectively to underwrite arbitrary and subjective views. They are believed to be divinely ordained; they are claimed to contain eternal truths. But as Karen Armstrong, a world authority on religious affairs, shows in this fascinating journey through millennia of history, this narrow reading of scripture is a relatively recent phenomenon. For hundreds of years these texts were instead viewed as spiritual tools: scripture was a means for the individual to connect with the divine, to transcend their physical existence, and to experience a higher level of consciousness. Holy texts were seen as fluid and adaptable, rather than a set of binding archaic rules or a `truth' that has to be `believed'. Armstrong argues that only by rediscovering an open engagement with their holy texts will the world's religions be able to curtail arrogance, intolerance and violence. And if scripture is used to engage with the world in more meaningful and compassionate ways, we will find that it still has a great deal to teach us.

Target success in AQA A-level Philosophy with this proven formula for effective, structured revision; key content coverage is combined with exam-style tasks and practical tips to create a revision guide that you can rely on to review, strengthen and test students' knowledge. With My Revision Notes, every student can: - Plan and manage a successful revision programme using the topic-by-topic planner - Consolidate subject knowledge by working through clear and focused content coverage - Test understanding and identify areas for improvement with regular 'Now Test Yourself' tasks and answers - Improve exam technique through practice questions, expert tips and examples of typical mistakes to avoid

A groundbreaking examination of human perception, reality and the evolutionary schism between the two Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no? we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops: while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros - too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Yet now these illusions can be manipulated by advertising and design. Drawing on thirty years of Hoffman's own influential research, as well as evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, and philosophy, The Case Against Reality makes the mind-bending yet utterly convincing case that the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes.