Best of
Philosophy

1966

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities


Jean Améry - 1966
    In its every turn and crease, it bears the marks of the true." --Irving Howe, New Republic"This remarkable memoir...is the autobiography of an extraordinarily acute conscience. With the ear of a poet and the eye of a novelist, Amery vividly communicates the wonder of a philosopher--a wonder here aroused by the 'dark riddle' of the Nazi regime and its systematic sadism." --Jim Miller, Newsweek"Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him." --Jean AmeryAt the Mind's Limits is the story of one man's incredible struggle to understand the reality of horror. In five autobiographical essays, Amery describes his survival--mental, moral, and physical--through the enormity of the Holocaust. Above all, this masterful record of introspection tells of a young Viennese intellectual's fervent vision of human nature and the betrayal of that vision.

Against Interpretation and Other Essays


Susan Sontag - 1966
    Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

The Way of the White Clouds


Anagarika Govinda - 1966
    Govinda's luminous and candid account is a spectacular and gloriously poetic story of exploration and discovery, and a sensitive and lucid interpretation of Tibetan traditions. Comprised of elements from several genres - spiritual journals, adventure narratives, anthropological field reports, and philosophical commentaries, The Way of the White Clouds is one of the twentieth century's classic spiritual autobiographies and an invaluable document about a place and a way of thinking that are virtually defined by their mysteries." Robert Thurman's perceptive new introduction to the volume places Govinda's writings in historical context and expands understanding of Tibet, Buddhism, and the life of a remarkable man.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences


Michel Foucault - 1966
    The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that “man”—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.

The Art of Memory


Frances A. Yates - 1966
    Yates traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century. This book, the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole, was revolutionary when it first appeared and continues to mesmerize readers with its lucid and revelatory insights.

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge


Peter L. Berger - 1966
    In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdicipline that, since Max Scheler, has been known as the sociology of knowledge.

Negative Dialectics


Theodor W. Adorno - 1966
    Negative Dialectics is a critique of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, and a visionary elaboration of the author's own vision of dialectics.

Bergsonism


Gilles Deleuze - 1966
    In Bergsonism, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital.A perfect companion book to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Bergsonism is also of particular interest to students of Deleuze’s own work, influenced as it is by Bergson. Given his texts on Nietzsche, Kafka, and cinema, this book by Deleuze is essential to his English-reading audience. The paperback contains a new afterword prepared by the author especially for this English-language edition.

Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour


Helmut Schoeck - 1966
    Perhaps most important, he demonstrates that not only the impetus toward a totalitarian regime but also the egalitarian impulse in democratic societies are alike in being rooted in envy.

The Enlightenment, Volume 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism


Peter Gay - 1966
    In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and a more intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.

The Teaching of Buddha


Society for the Promotion of Buddhism - 1966
    First published in 1925, the book was originally edited by Japanese scholars of Buddhism before WWII and distributed widely throughout Japan. The first English edition was published in 1934. The Reverend Dr. Yehan Numata brought out another English edition in 1962, and in 1966, after the establishment of the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (BDK) (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism), Dr. Numata assembled a committee of Buddhist scholars to substantially revise and edit a new English-Japanese edition. The Teaching of Buddha has undergone minor revisions and numerous reprintings since. It is now available in more than forty-two languages and over 8 million copies have been distributed and placed in hotel rooms in over fifty countries throughout the world.The Teaching of Buddha is a collection of writings on the essence of Buddhism, selected and edited from the vast Buddhist canon, presented in a concise, easy-to-read, and nonsectarian format. It also includes a brief history of Buddhism, a listing of the source texts, a glossary of Sanskrit terms, and an index.

Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method


Kenneth Burke - 1966
    And much of the material presented here was used in that course. The title should serve well to convey the gist of these various pieces. For all of them are explicitly concerned with the attempt to define and track down the implications of the term "symbolic action," and to show how the marvels of literature and language look when considered form that point of view.

Love's Body


Norman O. Brown - 1966
    Brown's meditation on the condition of humanity and its long fall from the grace of a natural, instinctual innocence is available once more for a new generation of readers. Love's Body is a continuation of the explorations begun in Brown's famous Life Against Death. Rounding out the trilogy is Brown's brilliant Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.

Principia: Vol. I: The Motion of Bodies


Isaac Newton - 1966
    As Entitled

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems


James J. Gibson - 1966
    

The Normal and the Pathological


Georges Canguilhem - 1966
    It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the nineteenth century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early nineteenth century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, among others, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought.

The Politics of God and the Politics of Man


Jacques Ellul - 1966
    Ellul's answer to that question, though based on events recorded in the Second Book of Kings, is immediately relevant to contemporary issues and to the church today. Emerging from these reflections is an eloquent testimony to the immense love of God -which not only creates and saves, but which also in its incomprehensible humility wants to associate man with its work.

The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology


Hans Jonas - 1966
    A classic of phenomenology and existentialism and arguably Jonas's greatest work, The Phenomenon of Life sets forth a systematic and comprehensive philosophy -- an existential interpretation of biological facts laid out in support of Jonas's claim that mind is prefigured throughout organic existence.At the center of this philosophy is an attack on the fundamental assumptions underlying modern philosophy since Descartes, primarily dualism. Dissenting from the dualistic view of value as a human projection onto nature, Jonas's critique affirms the classical view that being harbors the good. In a brilliant synthesis of the ancient and modern, Jonas draws upon existential philosophy to justify core insights of the classical tradition. This critique transcends the historical limits of its phenomenological methodology and existential ethical stance to take its place among the most scientifically nuanced contemporary accounts of moral nature. It lays the foundation for an ethic of responsibility grounded in an assignment by Being to protect the natural environment that has allowed us to spring from it.

The Tacit Dimension


Michael Polanyi - 1966
    Polanyi aims to show that science must be understood as a community of inquirers held together by a common faith; science, he argues, is not the use of 'scientific methods' but rather consists in a discipline imposed by scientists on themselves in the interest of discovering an objective, impersonal truth.

Enneads II


Plotinus - 1966
    His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master's death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Moslems, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience. In his acclaimed edition of Plotinus, Armstrong provides excellent introductions to each treatise. His invaluable notes explain obscure passages and give reference to parallels in Plotinus and others.

A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality


Donald W. Sherburne - 1966
    It is the only work in which his metaphysical ideas are stated systematically and completely, and his metaphysics are the heart of his philosophical system as a whole. Sherburne has rearranged the text in a way designed to lead the student logically and coherently through the intricacies of the system without losing the vigor of Whitehead's often brilliant prose. "The Key renders Process and Reality pedagogically accessible for the first time."—Journal of Religion

Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic


Edmund Husserl - 1966
    These lectures are the first extensive application of Husserl's newly developed genetic phenomenology to perceptual experience and to the way in which it is connected to judgments and cognition. They include an historical reflection on the crisis of contemporary thought and human spirit, provide an archaeology of experience by questioning back into sedimented layers of meaning, and sketch the genealogy of judgment in `active synthesis'. Drawing upon everyday events and personal experiences, the Analyses are marked by a patient attention to the subtle emergence of sense in our lives. By advancing a phenomenology of association that treats such phenomena as bodily kinaesthesis, temporal genesis, habit, affection, attention, motivation, and the unconscious, Husserl explores the cognitive dimensions of the body in its affectively significant surroundings. An elaboration of these diverse modes of evidence and their modalizations (transcendental aesthetic), allows Husserl to trace the origin of truth up to judicative achievements (transcendental logic). Joined by several of Husserl's essays on static and genetic method, the Analyses afford a richness of description unequalled by the majority of Husserl's works available to English readers. Students of phenomenology and of Husserl's thought will find this an indispensable work.

Some Lessons in Metaphysics


José Ortega y Gasset - 1966
    He wrote on varied subjects: love, bullfighting, hunting, education, and Don Quixote. His incessant search for knowledge led him into political theory and practice and metaphysics as well.This present book represents Ortega's incursions into a field of thought along which anyone curious enough to travel will find leads him into a succession of ideas that extend his vision and his understanding of himself. If generations of men have puzzled over man's role in the universe and have tried to put it into words, Ortega's phrase "I am myself and my circumstances" is so simply and appealingly true that it may come as a great surprise to find it hailed as an important philosophic contribution. In this day of alienation, when the young have difficulty finding out who they are, Ortega's venture into metaphysics is a lit lamp in the first chapter, of the student's role will shed light on the reason for present student disorders.

Hindu Scriptures


R.C. Zaehner - 1966
    Taken together they represent 3,500 years of a continuous religious tradition that is multifarious, inclusive, and, at the same time, wedded to a central spiritual vision.This edition features the translations and annotations of R. C. Zaehner, a pioneering scholar whose selections in this volume, first published by Everyman’s Library in 1966, have never been bettered as an introduction for the general reader to the Vedic tradition. Zaehner has chosen the most interesting and important verses, rendered in English that is accessible and vivid, and his introduction provides an excellent guide to the historical context, the philosophical significance, and the literary power of these beautiful and ancient texts.Introduction by R.C. Zaehner(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud


Philip Rieff - 1966
    This special fortieth-anniversary edition of Philip Rieff’s masterpiece, the first volume in ISI Books’ new Background series, includes an introduction by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and essays on the text by historians Eugene McCarraher and Wilfred McClay and philosopher Stephen Gardner.

Srimad Bhagavadgita Tatparya (Jeevana Dharma Yoga)


D.V.G. - 1966
    Hence he calls it Jeevana Dharma Yoga. This is intended to be a commentary on the Gita by a common man for a common man.

The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays


Willard Van Orman Quine - 1966
    V. Quine's most important and influential, such as "Truth by Convention," "Carnap and Logical Truth," "On Carnap's Views on Ontology," "The Scope and Language of Science," and "Posits and Reality." Many of these essays deal with unresolved issues of central interest to philosophers today. About half of them are addressed to "a wider public than philosophers." The remainder are somewhat more professional and technical. This new edition of The Ways of Paradox contains eight essays that appeared after publication of the first edition, and it retains the seminal essays that must be read by anyone who seeks to master Quine's philosophy.Quine has been characterized, in The New York Review of Books, as "the most distinguished American recruit to logical empiricism, probably the contemporary American philosopher most admired in the profession, and an original philosophical thinker of the first rank." His "philosophical innovations add up to a coherent theory of knowledge which he has for the most part constructed single-handed." In The Ways of Paradox new generations of readers will gain access to this philosophy.

The Collected Stories of Jack Schaefer


Jack Schaefer - 1966
    

A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Pelican)


John Arthur Passmore - 1966
    He considers the crucial new insights that were generated into probability, propositions and private languages, meaning, minds and bodies and the limits of science. Accounts explore the main schools and individual contributions of philosophers ranging from Ayer to Bradley, from Heidegger to Popper, from Moore to Merleau-Ponty and from Russell to Ryle.

The Wisdom of Gibran: Aphorisms and Maxims


Kahlil Gibran - 1966
    This selection of quotes, maxims, and aphorisms is drawn from such poems as “Secrets of the Heart,” “Spirits Rebellious,” and “Broken Wings,” as well as from his autobiography and essays. Gibran’s words express a strong spirituality and mysticism and his voice offers a direct and at times optimistic view of the brotherhood of man. Addressing everything from love and death to Jesus, motherhood, and nature, Gibran’s wisdom remains thought provoking and inspirational.

H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, Volume XII 1889-1890


Helena Petrovna Blavatsky - 1966
    Volume 12 is from 1889 and 1890, and includes articles such as#58; Genius; The Fall of Ideals; Science and the Secret Doctrine; Progress and Culture; The Dual Aspect of Wisdom; Psychic and Noetic Action.

The Winter Beach


Charlton Ogburn Jr. - 1966
    

Aquinas on Being and Essence: A Translation and Interpretation


Joseph Bobik - 1966
    Thomas Aquinas in his treatise On Being and Essence. It considers uses of the words 'being' and 'essence,' it investigates the essence of natural substances, the immateriality of the human soul, and the existence and the essence of God." —Catholic Book Review

Recent Philosophy, 2 Volumes: Hegel to the Present


Étienne Gilson - 1966
    

The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time


Jacques Maritain - 1966
    

Gone Tomorrow: Zen Inspired Poetry


Ken Noyle - 1966
    

The Duality of Human Existence: Isolation & Communion in Western Man


David Bakan - 1966
    Here are 5 great articles on "isolation" and "communion"1. Science, psychology, and religion; toward a psycho-theological view; projection of agency on the figure of satan; agency and communion in human sexuality, and unmitigated agency and freud's death instinct.

Four Stages of Greek Thought


John H. Finley Jr. - 1966
    

What Is Science?


Richard P. Feynman - 1966
    

The New Existentialism


Colin Wilson - 1966
    

God is Not Dead


Austin Farrer - 1966
    Here, he counters the argument that scientific discoveries - for example, those associated with the theory of evolution - make belief in God impossible. Rather than seeing science as sweeping God off the stage of world affairs into the wings, where he no longer has any part to play in the great drama of life, Farrer sees God as a playwright who places the characters on stage and then develops the plot by letting them be themselves.

Helping Yourself with ESP: Tap the Power of Extra-Sensory Perception and Make it Work for You


Al G. Manning - 1966
    For forty years, Dr. Al G. Manning, a noted expert in the field of parapsychology, has been helping even the most skeptical people recognize their ESP, clear away blocks to extrasensory development, and use their psychic abilities to enrich every aspect of their lives.Dr. Manning's Helping Yourself with ESP gives you simple exercises and practical, down-to-earth advice that will show you how to: - Improve your health through spiritual healing- Set up a spiritual current that draws wealth to you- Create a dynamic, magnetic personality that attracts people to you- Sharpen your clairvoyant sight and hearing- Reach out to helpful "spirit guides" and "personal protectors"- Attain success and solve problems through concentration and meditation- Forge the psychic strength to face any crisis with confidence- Discover your true purpose in lifeFilled with inspiring stories of ordinary people changed forever by the positive force of their own psychic powers, Helping Yourself with ESP is your spiritual guide to finding within yourself the key to happiness, prosperity, and peace of mind.

Reason And Goodness


Brand Blanshard - 1966
    

The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age


Leslie Dewart - 1966
    

History of Ancient Philosophy


Wilhelm Windelband - 1966
    It combines rigorously exact scholarship, insight into the difficulties of the student, a genius for easily followed presentation with a remarkably complete coverage of persons, movements, and ideas.After an introduction discussing ancient philosophy in general and the intellectual life of Greece in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C., the author discusses the Ionian speculators and Pythagoras. He then analyzes the Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes), Heraclitus, the Eleatics, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, the Pythagoreans, the Sophists, Socrates, and other early schools and personalities. 20 pages are then devoted to an analysis of Democritus, 50 pages to Plato, and 70 pages to Aristotle.The remainder of the book discusses later classical philosophy. The Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans are covered in detail, as are the Skeptics and the Middle Platonists. Neoplatonism is described in terms of Plotinus, Jamblichus and Proclus, while a special chapter gives a brief discussion of those Christian Apologists who used philosophic techniques, the more important Gnostics, and Origen.Background information is supplied for each philosopher and his thought, while an evaluated bibliography of thousands of entries is given in separate sections within the text. It covers all the basic work in the historiography of philosophy up to 1900.Translated by H. E. Cushman, from 2nd German edition, xv

The Meaning of Stoicism


Ludwig Edelstein - 1966
    

On Jewish Learning


Franz Rosenzweig - 1966
    On Jewish Learning collects essays, speeches, and letters that express Rosenzweig’s desire to reconnect the profound truths of Judaism with the lives of ordinary people. An assimilated Jew and scholar of German philosophy, Rosenzweig was on the point of conversion to Christianity when the experience of a Yom Kippur service in 1913 brought him back to Judaism, and he began to study with philosopher Hermann Cohen. Seeking how to be an observant Jew in the modern world, Rosenzweig refused to characterize the traditions of Jewish law as mere rituals, customs, and folkways. His aim for himself and for others was to find Judaism by living it, and to live it by knowing it more deeply.The Wisconsin edition is not for sale in the British Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, or South Africa.

Divine Flame: An Essay Towards a Natural History of Religion


Alister Hardy - 1966
    Introduction2. The biological background3. Evidence from social anthropology4. Naturalists of religious experience5. The numinous, the love of nature and the inspiration of art6. Psychology and religion7. Roots in animal behaviour8. The importance of physical research9. A plea for theology to be more natural10. A science of theology and an experimental faith.

Catholics and the Left


Adrian Cunningham - 1966
    

He Who Is


Eric Lionel Mascall - 1966
    

Genesis and Structure of Society


Giovanni Gentile - 1966
    

Metaphysics of Natural Complexes


Justus Buchler - 1966
    This new and expanded edition acknowledges this influence and brings together much material. Included are the previously published articles "On the Concept of 'the World, '" and "Probing the Idea of Nature," which Buchler wrote subsequent to Metaphysics of Natural Complexes as extensions and completions of the system. Previously unpublished work on the key concept of contour has also been added. In addition there are excerpts from Buchler's replies to his critics, a set of editors' notes to facilitate cross-referencing, and an updated index.This work presents a bold and forceful metaphysics and general ontology. It provides a systematic framework for understanding the broadest features of the world and nature, and for locating our understanding of human nature, selfhood, and society as complexes in and of nature. Buchler's detailed analysis of identity, ordinality, nature, world, and validation advance our understanding of the basic categories to be used in defining and exploring whatever is. Unlike other contemporary philosophers that confine themselves to narrowly defined problems in hermeneutics or theory of knowledge, Buchler is unrelenting in his drive toward a more encompassing perspective, simultaneously combining interpretive precision with sheer breadth of vision.

Pascal for Our Time


Romano Guardini - 1966
    Guardini discusses the central crisis of Pascal's life - the "Mémorial" experience - his image of man, his place in the evolution of intellectual history, his conception of society, culture, and education, his theology, his theory of knowledge, his "argument of the wager," and finally, in the culminating chapter of the book, Pascal's personality and its impact on contemporary sensibility.In "Pascal for Our Time" a master of modern Christian thought, Romano Guardini, scrutinizes judiciously and reverently one of his own great predecessors.

Simone Weil: A Sketch for a Portrait


Richard Rees - 1966
    Her short life (1909–43) spanned two world wars, al­though she did not live to see the end of the second one. The reac­tions of this French Jewish woman to some of the facets of these conflicts may seem surprising; her sympathies and affirmations were perhaps too extreme, but she did think for herself in an un­orthodox and challenging way and had a passionate sense of justice. Mr. Rees believes that this book may contain more illumina­tion for the present world’s spiritual needs than any other twentieth-­century commentary. Some of Simone Weil’s proposals concerning patriotism, obligations, freedom of expression, and the needs of the soul may seem Utopian, but they would not be unreasonable in a society adopting her moral code. Simone Weil was an intellectual with an essentially tragic view of life, but she was not removed from the everyday life. Her thought was unique and cannot be classified. She was neither a re­actionary nor a progressive but a great soul and a brilliant mind, as T. S. Eliot expressed it, “with a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” Since she explored problems which confront modern man, the reader will find thoughtful stimulation in her work. In a previ­ous book, Brave Men, the author likened her to D. H. Lawrence—both lonely visionaries suffering from a devouring spiritual hunger. This book gives a condensed but penetrating account of Miss Weil’s interests. Since her writings cover more than philosophy and religion, the reader will feel compelled to become more familiar with her work.

The True and the Evident


Franz Brentano - 1966
    The book includes Brentano’s influential lecture "On the Concept of Truth", read before the Vienna Philosophical Society, a variety of essays, drawn from the immense wealth of Brentano’s unpublished material, and letters written by him to Marty, Kraus Hillebrand, and Husserl. Brentano rejects the familiar versions of the "correspondence theory of truth" and proposes to define the true in terms of the evident. In criticising the metaphysical assumptions presupposed by the correspondence theory, he sets forth a conception of language and reality that has subsequently become known as "reism".

Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists


George Hochfield - 1966
    Its partisans argued for the rights of women, the abolition of slavery, and, in some cases, the socialization of labor and equal distribution of profits. They were America’s first avant-garde.This volume presents substantial selections from the writings of key American Transcendentalists, such as George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, and Bronson Alcott. Included are sermons and diary entries, essays on labor, religion, education, and literature, on German metaphysics and Coleridge’s philosophy of mind. Many are expressive of the movement’s over-arching project: to define the innermost meanings of democracy—the nature of man, his place in the world, and his relation to the divine. First published in 1966, the book has been updated and expanded for this edition.

The Alienation Of Reason: A History Of Positivist Thought


Leszek Kołakowski - 1966
    This succinct account of positivism from Hume to the Vienna Circle, by contemporary Poland's most brilliant and provocative philosopher, is a complete survey of "positive philosophy", the term coined by Auguste Comte, which has persisted down to the present in the shorter form of "positivism".

The Problem of Will and Intentionality in Psychoanalysis


Rollo May - 1966
    The Problem of Will and Intentionality in PsychoanalysisPresidential address to the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society, May 20, 1966