Meditations on Quixote
José Ortega y Gasset - 1914
Through a series of "essays in intellectual love," Ortega explores the aim of philosophy: to carry a given fact (a person, a book, a landscape, an error, a sorrow) by the shortest route to its fullest significance. He then considers how literature, specifically Cervantes, contributes to realizing this aim.
The Future of Nostalgia
Svetlana Boym - 2001
She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities--St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague--and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.
Positive Mental Attitude: The Science of Success by Napoleon Hill
Napoleon Hill - 2013
It contains the material from “Think and Grow Rich,” “The Law of Success” and others. Anyone who uses even a few of the 17 Principles of Success will be successful. Highlight what works for you, review your notes, and launch your career.The book has a linked table of contents for easy reference.Napoleon Hill's work has touched the lives of countless thousands through his lectures, teachings, and prolific writings. His internationally known books Think and Grow Rich and The Law of Success have become the standards of motivational literature against which all others are measured. To make available in perpetuity the success principles he spent a lifetime identifying and sharing with others, on August 21, 1962, Dr. Hill and his wife, Annie Lou, founded the Napoleon Hill Foundation. A not-for-profit corporation, the Foundation's sole purpose is to continue to spread his philosophy of success through the co-operation and support of others, rather than at their expense. The 17 principles of success he quantified in his writings and lectures aid not only the individual who practices them, but all those with whom he comes in contact, as well. Those principles along with his lifelong published works and yet unpublished manuscripts, recordings, and courses comprise the legacy Dr. Hill endowed in the Foundation. Dr. Hill enjoyed close friendships with many of the turn-of-the-century business leaders who played a significant role in shaping the destiny of America and the world. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alexander Graham Bell were but a few who freely shared the secrets of how they attained their success with Dr. Hill.Andrew Carnegie so strongly believed in the universal principles of success that he sponsored the research and writing that became the first authoritative treatise on the subject, the Personal Success Philosophy of Achievement by Napoleon Hill. This practical self-study program will help you thoroughly understand and apply the 17 principles of success in your own life, to achieve any goal — however ambitious.
Writings on Art and Literature
Sigmund Freud - 1975
These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects, in chronological order beginning with his first published analysis of a work of literature, the 1907 "Delusion and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" and concluding with the 1940 posthumous publication of "Medusa's Head." Many of the essays included in this collection have been crucial in contemporary literary and art criticism and theory.Among the subjects Freud engages are Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth, Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Michelangelo's Moses, E. T. A. Hoffman's "The Sand Man," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, fairy tales, the effect of and the meaning of beauty, mythology, and the games of aestheticization. All texts are drawn from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. The volume includes the notes prepared for that edition by the editor.In addition to the writings on Jensen's Gradiva and Medusa, the essays are: "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," "The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales," "The Theme of the Three Caskets," "The Moses of Michelangelo," "Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work," "On Transience," "A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession," "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit," "The Uncanny," "Dostoevsky and Parricide," and "The Goethe Prize."
The Art of War and other Laws of Power
Sun Tzu
In this newest translation of The Art of War readers will benefit from the interpretations from other translators and strategist, as well as the 50 strategic rules, including: -- How to look for strategic turns to meet the competition-- How to attain strategic superiority and crush the competition-- How to plan surprise and stay ahead of the game-- And more timeless wisdom that will allow you to compete and win in the dynamic business environment!Business managers around the world have tapped into this ancient wisdom; it is time to master The Art of War for Manager for the existence and growth of your business!
Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction
Rowan Williams - 2008
Rowan Williams explores the beauty and intricacies of speech, fiction, metaphor, and iconography in the works of Dostoevsky, one of literature's most complex, and most misunderstood, authors.
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag
Janusz Bardach - 1998
The NKVD officer carefully designed it. He measured my size with a stick, made lines on the forest floor, and told me to dig. He wanted to make sure I'd fit well inside."In 1941 Janusz Bardach's death sentence was commuted to ten years' hard labor and he was sent to Kolyma—the harshest, coldest, and most deadly prison in Joseph Stalin's labor camp system—the Siberia of Siberias. The only English-language memoir since the fall of communism to chronicle the atrocities committed during the Stalinist regime, Bardach's gripping testimony explores the darkest corners of the human condition at the same time that it documents the tyranny of Stalin's reign, equal only to that of Hitler. With breathtaking immediacy, a riveting eye for detail, and a humanity that permeates the events and landscapes he describes, Bardach recounts the extraordinary story of this nearly inconceivable world.The story begins with the Nazi occupation when Bardach, a young Polish Jew inspired by Soviet Communism, crosses the border of Poland to join the ranks of the Red Army. His ideals are quickly shattered when he is arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to death. How Bardach survives an endless barrage of brutality—from a near-fatal beating to the harsh conditions and slow starvation of the gulag existence—is a testament to human endurance under the most oppressive circumstances. Besides being of great historical significance, Bardach's narrative is a celebration of life and a vital affirmation of what it means to be human.
The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture
Gianni Vattimo - 1986
Exploring the links between concepts of nihilism and destiny in nineteenth-century humanism, Vattimo follows these trends in aesthetic and scientific theory from Benjamin to Bloch, Ricoeur, and Kuhn.
The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Elif Batuman - 2010
“Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.
The Ideology of the Aesthetic
Terry Eagleton - 1990
As such, this is a critical survey of modern Western philosophy, focusing in particular on the complex relations between aesthetics, ethics & politics. Eagleton provides a brilliant & challenging introduction to these concerns, as characterized in the work of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lukacs, Adorno, Habermas & others. Wide in span, as well as morally & politically committed, this is his major work to date. It forms both an original enquiry & an exemplary introduction.
The Rasputin File
Edvard Radzinsky - 2000
For almost a century, historians have speculated about the role this improbable holy man played in the start of the Russian Revolution and the demise of the Romanov dynasty. But in 1995, a lost file from the State Archives of Russia mysteriously turned up, a file containing the extensive and often explicit testimony of both Rasputin's inner circle and those who kept him under police surveillance.The first to draw on this substantial amplification of the record as well as numerous archival sources, Edvard Radzinsky, author of the bestselling STALIN and THE LAST TSAR, masterfully reconstructs the life of this remarkable man who rose to prominence in the twentieth-century Russia. From the complexities of Rasputin's religious calling to controversial nature of his relationship with the tsarina and his coterie of female followers, from the extent of his influence at court to the spellbinding details of his brutal death, THE RASPUTIN FILE dispels the contradictory myths in an utterly convincing, definitive portrait that is every bit as mesmerizing as the legend.
Moscow Diary
Walter Benjamin - 1980
Benjamin's intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco-Spanish border, pursued by the Nazis, but long before he had traveled to the Soviet Union. His stunning account of that journey is unique among Benjamin's writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and conscience.Perhaps the primary reason for his trip was his affection for Asja Lācis, a Latvian Bolshevik whom he had first met in Capri in 1924 and who would remain an important intellectual and erotic influence on him throughout the twenties and thirties. Asja Lācis resided in Moscow, eking out a living as a journalist, and Benjamin's diary is, on one level, the account of his masochistic love affair with this elusive--and rather unsympathetic--object of desire. On another level, it is the story of a failed romance with the Russian Revolution; for Benjamin had journeyed to Russia not only to inform himself firsthand about Soviet society, but also to arrive at an eventual decision about joining the Communist Party. Benjamin's diary paints the dilemma of a writer seduced by the promises of the Revolution yet unwilling to blinker himself to its human and institutional failings.Moscow Diary is more than a record of ideological ambivalence; its literary value is considerable. Benjamin is one of the great twentieth-century physiognomists of the city, and his portrait of hibernal Moscow stands beside his brilliant evocations of Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, and Paris. Students of this particularly interesting period will find Benjamin's eyewitness account of Moscow extraordinarily illuminating.
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.
On the Suffering of the World
Arthur Schopenhauer - 1850
Schopenhauer's perception of the importance of art, morality and self awareness in a blind struggle against a Godless, meaningless world radically transformed our understanding of the individual and remains a searing vision of the human condition.
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
David Remnick - 1993
"A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all." —Wall Street Journal.