These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it.In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times.Warburton not only makes philosophy accessible, he offers inspiration to think, argue, reason, and ask in the tradition of Socrates. A Little History of Philosophy presents the grand sweep of humanity's search for philosophical understanding and invites all to join in the discussion.

    John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography, "The Lost Art of Finding Our Way" puts us in the shoes, ships, and sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fogbank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, and Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, and Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and read waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents, weather and atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way.Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, and part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view."

    Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other.This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.

    This volume provides basic writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Ortega, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, including some not previously translated, along with an invaluable introductory essay by Walter Kaufmann.

    Games are part art and part appliance, part tableau and part toaster. In How to Talk about Videogames, leading critic Ian Bogost explores this paradox more thoroughly than any other author to date.Delving into popular, familiar games like Flappy Bird, Mirror’s Edge, Mario Kart, Scribblenauts, Ms. Pac-Man, FarmVille, Candy Crush Saga, Bully, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, and more, Bogost posits that videogames are as much like appliances as they are like art and media. We don’t watch or read games like we do films and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or play football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Games are devices we operate, so game critique is both serious cultural currency and self-parody. It is about figuring out what it means that a game works the way it does and then treating the way it works as if it were reasonable, when we know it isn’t.Noting that the term games criticism once struck him as preposterous, Bogost observes that the idea, taken too seriously, risks balkanizing games writing from the rest of culture, severing it from the “rivers and fields” that sustain it. As essential as it is, he calls for its pursuit to unfold in this spirit: “God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.”

    His addresses at Gettysburg and at his inaugurals, his presidential messages and public lectures, are an essential record of the war and have forever shaped the nation’s memories of it. This Library of America volume collects writings from 1859 to 1865 and contains 555 speeches, messages, proclamations, letters, memoranda, and fragments. They record the words and deeds—the order to resupply Fort Sumter, the emancipation of the slaves held in the Confederacy, and proposals to offer the South generous terms of reconstruction—by which he hoped to defend and preserve the Union.The speeches and letters Lincoln wrote in 1859 and 1860 show his unyielding opposition to the spread of slavery and his canny appraisals of the upcoming election in which he was to win the presidency. His victory triggered the secession that he would oppose in his First Inaugural, with its appeal to logic, history, and “the better angels of our nature.”Lincoln’s wartime writings record the nearly overwhelming burdens of office during a fratricidal war, and the added burden of self-seeking Cabinet members, military cliques, and a bitter political opposition. He was savagely criticized both for being too harsh and for being too mild. He ordered the blockade of ports, suspended habeas corpus, jailed dissenters, and applauded Sherman’s devastating march to the sea; at the same time he granted clemency to individual Union deserters and releases to Confederate prisoners. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful,” he declared, and toward that end he was prepared, not without his characteristic drolleries, to suffer the paradoxes of leadership in a nation at war with itself. His writings here include pleas to his own party to spare him their patronage feuds and to generals that they act more resolutely in the field. The struggles that taxed his physical endurance also tempered his prose style, as evidenced in the nobility of his state papers, his sparse words at Gettysburg, and his poignant letter to Mrs. Bixby, consoling her for the deaths of her sons in battle.In a message to Congress in December 1862, Lincoln wrote of the fiery trial through which the nation was passing: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” By 1865, he was ready to offer the nation his view of the Almighty’s purposes and did so in his Second Inaugural Address with a beauty, clarity, and severity unsurpassed in American letters. Soon after, he fell to an assassin’s bullet, joining six hundred thousand of his countrymen killed in the war. He became part of what he called “the cherished memory of the loved and lost,” all those who had died that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

    Cahn's advice on the professorial life covers an extensive range of critical issues: how to plan, complete, and defend a dissertation; how to navigate a job interview; how to improve teaching performance; how to prepare and publish research; how to develop a professional network; and how to garner support for tenure. He deals with such hurdles as a difficult dissertation advisor, problematic colleagues, and the pressures of the tenure clock. Whether you are beginning graduate study, hoping to secure an academic position, or striving to build a professorial career, Cahn's insights are invaluable to traversing the thickets of academia.

    The first book to capture the flavor and spirit of the Talmud as a human document and to summarize its main principles as an expression of divine law.

    For this new edition, the book has been thoroughly revised and updated and includes an entirely new chapter on environmental history.Peter Burke is joined here by a distinguished group of internationally renowned historians, including Robert Darnton, Ivan Gaskell, Richard Grove, Giovanni Levi, Roy Porter, Gwyn Prins, Joan Scott, Jim Sharpe, Richard Tuck, and Henk Wesseling. The contributions examine a wide range of interdisciplinary areas of historical research, including women's history, history from below, the history of reading, oral history, the history of the body, microhistory, the history of events, the history of images, and political history.

    Although translations of the essays have appeared individually in a variety of places, this is the first English translation to bring them together as Heidegger intended. It is an invaluable resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they study philosophy, literary theory, religious studies, or intellectual history.

     Written by Wayne Booth, author of the seminal book, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Explores the consequences of bad rhetoric in education, in politics, and in the media. Investigates the possibility of reducing harmful conflict by practising a rhetoric that depends on deep listening by both sides.

    Originating in Voltaire's campaign to exonerate Jean Calas, they are works of polemical brilliance, informed by his deism and humanism and by Enlightenment values and ideals more generally. The issues that they raise, concerning questions of tolerance and human dignity, are still highly relevant to our own times.

    Matthew Arnold called Emerson’s essays “the most important work done in prose.”   INCLUDES A MODERN LIBRARY READING GROUP GUIDE

    Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language--"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy"--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched talent for story-telling to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries. In this fast-paced narrative, the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half-century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making--how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated--and how bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of books long after the B-volume had gone to press. We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium--the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it--and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W.C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project--a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivalled uber-dictionary.

    Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. The William James Lectures presented Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. These talks became the classic How to Do Things with Words.For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary. Students will find the new text clearer, and, at the same time, more faithful to the actual lectures. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin's work.