Major philosophers and movements are discussed along with less well-known but interesting figures. The authors examine the early Greek, Indic, and Chinese philosophers and the mythological traditions that preceded them, as well as the great religious philosophies, including Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Taoism. Easily understandable to students without specialized knowledge of philosophy, A Short History of Philosophy demonstrates the relevance of philosophy to our times, illuminating the impact of the revolutions wrought by science, industry, colonialism, and sectarian warfare; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the responses of philosophy in the schools of existentialism, postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism. In addition, the authors provide their own twists and interpretations of events, resulting in a broad view of the nature of philosophy as an intellectual discipline and its sometimes odd and dramatic consequences.

    The principal text included is 'The Relevance of the Beautiful', Gadamer's most sustained treatment of philosophical aesthetics. The eleven other essays focus particularly on the challenge issued by modern painting and literature to our customary ideas of art, and in turn revitalize our understanding of it. Gadamer demonstrates the continuing importance of such concepts as imitation, truth, symbol, and play for our appreciation of contemporary art, and thereby establishes its continuity with the Western tradition. The essays here are not technical and are readily accessible to the beginning student and the general reader. The collection as a whole serves to illustrate the practice of hermeneutics and to introduce Gadamer's thought. Robert Bernasconi provides an introduction clarifying the central aims of the essays and their relations to Gadamer's major work, Truth and Method, and to the philosophy of art since Kant. A bibliography of Gadamer's writings available in English is also included.

    Ballard has revealed hidden truths about the modern world. The essays, reviews, and ruminations gathered here—spanning the breadth of this long career—approach reality with the same sharp prose and sharper vision that distinguish his fiction. Ballard's fascination for and fixation upon this century take him from Mickey Mouse to Salvador Dali, from Los Angeles to Shanghai, from William Burroughs to Winnie the Pooh, from the future to today.

    This introductory sampler, designed to acquaint newcomers with his work, contains brief passages from his most popular books, ranging over a variety of topics, including levels of consciousness, mystical experience, meditation practice, death, the perennial philosophy, and Wilber's integral approach to reality, integrating matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit. Here is Wilber's writing at its most reader-friendly, discussing essential ideas of the world's great psychological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions in language that is lucid, engaging, and inspirational.

    It is a response of the life force to the longing for Truth, Liberation, Self-realization or God. Kundalini may awaken following spiritual or energy practices, trauma or near-death experience, a transmission by an awakened person, deep devotion, or even within a dream. It can arise spontaneously like a sudden explosive blessing, or gradually over many months. This guidebook, based on 30 years of research and dialogues with over 2000 people, describes the energetic, emotional and transpersonal phenomena that are triggered when kundalini arises, and provides direction that will help you understand this process, and live this life-altering journey more comfortably and joyously. The author is a non-dual teacher and a transpersonal psychologist, who previously published "Energies of Transformation: A Guide to the Kundalini Process", and has specialized for many years in consultations with people going through a spiritual awakening. She was a founder of the Kundalini Research Network and has taught therapists internationally to effectively help people in the kundalini process. This is the first of two companion volumes dedicated to the shifts in energy and consciousness that facilitate awakening and the embodiment of self-realization.

    

    "Living Religions" delves the traditional as well as the new religious movements. Looks at historical and contemporary beliefs, allowing the reader to see how different religions have unfolded throughout time. Contains expanded coverage of women in addition to religious background boxes on such people as Winona LaDuke, Dr. Karan Singh, Dalai Lama, Janice Perlman, Desmond Tutu, Farid Esack, and Baba Virsa Singh. For those with an interest in World Religions, or Comparative Religions, or for those seeking an introduction to religion.

    Can a computer think? Why is your consciousness like Bitcoin? Will there be an artificial intelligence apocalypse?

    Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

    

    The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.

    The book was a formative text of the new discipline of sociology and has gone on to become a classic in the social sciences.

    Introductions and interpretive commentaries are provided.

    Product DescriptionPublishers Description:A Prohibition-era novel centering around the occurrence of a dust storm in southern Minnesota, Orchard of Dust follows the lives of a boy and his father as their town is invaded by a speakeasy.From the Back Cover:In the quiet born to the soil, the coming of a fresh generation quaked and rumbled as a people, displaced from their land, dreamed of once and tomorrow; they followed promised whispers of abundance through a desolation where men ripped at the land, wrenching what harvest the fields could spit until a protestation came against man, strangling the fields in dust; and this people broke their homes, shattering hearthstones against the collapsed shelter of forgotten desires that had turned to dead leaves.

    Hacker leads us into a world of philosophical investigation in which to smell a rat is ever so much easier than to trap it. Wittgenstein defined humans as language-using creatures. The role of philosophy is to ask questions which reveal the limits and nature of language. Taking the expression, description and observation of pain as examples, Hacker explores the ingenuity with which Wittgenstein identified the rules and set the limits of language. (less)