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The Dhammapada: The way of the Buddha
Osho - 1981
Entering into The Dhammapada with Osho is to enter into a deep friendship of enlightened masters. These sutras were compiled by Buddha's disciples to contain the essence of all his teachings.This was the last turning of the Wheel of Dharma, 2,500 years ago. Osho's commentaries on these sutras set the Wheel of Dharma in motion again.Osho also answers questions from disciples and other seekers in alternate discourses all generously sprinkled with stories, personal anecdotes and, of course, a multitude of jokes. Visually this boxed set is stunning, without doubt a collector's piece and twelve volumes to dive into for years to come."Now that religion has become just a formality, and the burning messages of the buddhas who have been on earth degraded to mere formal faith, the message of Osho who has reached to such dazzling heights of human consciousness through his own experience, is incomparable in its strength to pierce the beauty within our hearts."Talks given from 21/06/79 am to 30/04/80 am
Aesthetics and Politics
Theodor W. Adorno - 1977
In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.Discussing expressionism / Ernst BlochRealism in the balance / Georg LukacsAgainst Georg Luckacs / Bertolt BrechtConversations with Brecht / Walter BenjaminLetters to Walter Benjamin / Theodor AdornoReply / Walter BenjaminReconciliation under duress ; Commitment / Theodor AdornoReflections in conclusion / Fredric Jameson
The Book of the Courtier
Baldassare Castiglione
Set in 1507, when the author himself was an attaché to the Duke of Urbino, the book consists of a series of fictional conversations between members of the Duke's retinue. All aspects of leadership come under discussion, but the primary focus rests upon the relationship between advisors and those whom they counsel. Ever-relevant subjects include the decision-making process, maintaining an ethical stance, and the best ways of interacting with authority figures. Frequently assigned in university courses on literature, history, and Renaissance studies, the Dover edition of this classic work will be the lowest-priced edition available.
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
Raj Patel - 2017
In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
The Age of Reason
Thomas Paine - 1794
The Age of Reason represents the results of years of study and reflection by Thomas Paine on the place of religion in society.Paine wrote: "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity."The cool rationale of Paine's The Age of Reason influenced religious thinking throughout the world; and its pervasieve influence continues to the present day.
History of Political Philosophy
Leo Strauss - 1963
Written by specialists on the various philosophers, this third edition has been expanded significantly to include both new and revised essays.
Music: What Happened?
Scott Miller - 2010
In this book, Miller writes about each of the past 53 years in popular music-1957-2009- via countdown song lists, blending the perspectives of a serious musician, a thoughtful critic, and an all-devouring music fan. Miller not only tells you why he loves particular songs, but also what was going on in the musical world in which they competed to be heard.
The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity
Richard Todd - 2008
In The Thing Itself, Todd attempts to discover for himself a new way of thinking by asking the simple question: What is true in ourselves and the world around us? With an exquisite eye for detail and an inquisitive spirit, Todd launches into an involving and elegantly crafted investigation of what makes an authentically lived life. As he focuses on an array of exchanges with people, objects, places, and ideas?from the banal to the emotionally poignant?Todd shows us that there?s a great distance between what we can touch, feel, and see, and what interactions mean in our lives. Mining a rich and multifaceted store of modern philosophy and personal experiences, he inches closer to seeing himself and the world through a clearer set of eyes. Engaging and readable, The Thing Itself offers unexpected insights into the very human search for meaning in our lives.
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Amy Scholder - 2014
In these daring essays, some of the most provocative writers of our time offer a private view on a public figure. In the process, they reveal themselves in beautiful and unexpected ways, blurring the line between biography and memoir. Original essays include Introduction by Amy Scholder, Mary Gaitskill on Linda Lovelace, Rick Moody on Karen Dalton, Johanna Fateman on Andrea Dworkin, Danielle Henderson on bell hooks, Hanne Blank on MFK Fisher, Kate Zambreno on Kathy Acker, Justin Vivian Bond on Karen Graham, Jill Nelson on Aretha Franklin, and Zoe Pilger on Mary Gaitskill “A smart plunge into fandom’s sober fringe.” —Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s and Other Essays
Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness
Joe Kennedy - 2018
So-called illiberal democracy and authoritarian populism are in the political ascendant; the shelves of our bookshops groan with the work of attention-grabbing thinkers insisting that permissiveness, multiculturalism and 'identity politics' have failed us and that we must now fall back on some notion of tradition. We have had our fun, and now it's time to get serious, to shore our fragments against the ruin of postmodernist meaninglessness. It's not only the usual, conservative suspects who have got on board with this argument. Authentocrats critiques the manner in which post-liberal ideas have been mobilised underhandedly by centrist politicians who, at least notionally, are hostile to the likes of Donald Trump and UKIP. It examines the forms this populism of the centre has taken in the United Kingdom and situates the moderate withdrawal from liberalism within a story which begins in the early 1990s. Blairism promised socially liberal politics as the pay-off for relinquishing commitments to public ownership and redistributive policies: many current centrists insist New Labour's error was not its capitulation to the market, but its unwillingness to heed the allegedly natural conservatism of England's provincial working classes. In this book, we see how this spurious concern for 'real people' is part of a broader turn within British culture by which the mainstream withdraws from the openness of the Nineties under the bad-faith supposition that there's nowhere to go but backwards. The self-anointing political realism which declares that the left can save itself only by becoming less liberal is matched culturally by an interest in time-worn traditional identities: the brute masculinity of Daniel Craig's James Bond, the allegedly 'progressive' patriotism of nature writing, a televisual obsession with the World Wars. Authentocrats charges liberals themselves with fuelling the post-liberal turn, and asks where the space might be found for an alternative.
Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right
Elizabeth Sandifer - 2016
They are called “neoreactionaries” or, more fancifully, the “Dark Enlightenment,” a term coined by Nick Land, an expatriate British exacademic philosopher cyberpunk horror writer whose unexpected turn towards far-right politics electrified a bunch of people on Reddit. He was inspired by the works of Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonymous blogger famed for calling for Steve Jobs to be made king of California and tasked with maximizing profit for the state, and also for claiming that black people make good slaves. Moldbug is more usually known as Curtis Yarvin, a Bay Area software engineer who got his start as a writer in the comment section of Overcoming Bias, a transhumanist blog featuring, among others, the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a crank AI scholar who thinks preventing his ideas for sci-fi novels from becoming reality is more important than preventing malaria, and who freaked out once when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him. The confluence of these facts may or may not be the doom of humanity. And just wait til we work in Thomas Ligotti, Alan Turing, William Blake, Frantz Fanon, China Miéville, and Hannibal Lecter.Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.
Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
Simon Blackburn - 1999
Written expressly for "anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them," Think provides a sound framework for exploring the most basic themes of philosophy, and for understanding how major philosophers have tackled the questions that have pressed themselves most forcefully on human consciousness.
Millennium
Peter Lamborn Wilson - 1996
In MILLENNIUM, Hakim Bey both sustains and expands the ideas of his groundbreaking work, THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE. Here, Bey suggests that mere detachment from (or even outright rejection of) the monolith of global capital is not enough; that either we accept ourselves as the 'last humans,' or else we accept ourselves as the opposition. The book also contains an illuminating interview with Bey, in which he discusses his body of work and assesses our collective position at the turn of the millennium.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Jenny Odell - 2019
Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Max Weber - 1904
In this brilliant study (his best-known and most controversial), he opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through "the struggle of opposites." Instead, he relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic study has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms.