Leonard Peikoff, Understanding Objectivism offers a deeper and more profound study of Ayn Rand's philosophy, and outlines a methodology of how to approach the study of Objectivism and apply its principles to one's life.For the legions of readers who treasure Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and who savor cogent analysis and provocative discussion of Ayn Rand's thoughts and beliefs, Understanding Objectivism takes the stimulating study of Rand's philosophy to the next level.

    Originally paired with a major PBS miniseries, this book presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English—from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to the present day, when English is the dominant language of commerce and culture with more than one billion English speakers around the world. From Cockney, Scouse, and Scots to Gulla, Singlish, Franglais, and the latest African American slang, this sweeping history of the English language is the essential introduction for anyone who wants to know more about our common tongue.

    The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing: here the reader will find Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, The Hedgehog and the Fox; his penetrating portraits of contemporaries from Pasternak and Akhmatova to Churchill and Roosevelt; his essays on liberty and his exposition of pluralism; his defense of philosophy and history against assimilation to scientific method; and his brilliant studies of such intellectual originals as Machiavelli, Vico, and Herder.

    But how did it evolve? How did a language spoken originally by a few thousand Anglo-Saxons become one used by more than 1,500 million? What developments can be seen as we move from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day? A host of fascinating questions are answered in The Stories of English, a groundbreaking history of the language by David Crystal.

    In this book he delivers a sustained indictment of systematic moral theory from Kant onward and offers a persuasive alternative.Kant's ideas involved a view of the self we can no longer accept. Modern theories such as utilitarianism and contractualism usually offer criteria that lie outside the self altogether, and this, together with an emphasis on system, has weakened ethical thought. Why should a set of ideas have any special authority over our sentiments just because it has the structure of a theory? How could abstract theory help the individual answer the Socratic question "How should I live?"Williams's goal is nothing less than to reorient ethics toward the individual. He accuses modern moral philosophers of retreating to system and deserting individuals in their current social context. He believes that the ethical work of Plato and Aristotle is nearer to the truth of what ethical life is, but at the same time recognizes that the modern world makes unparalleled demands on ethical thought. He deals with the most thorny questions in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about issues such as relativism, objectivity, and the possibility of ethical knowledge. Williams has written an imaginative, ingenious book that calls for philosophers to transcend their self-imposed limits and to give full attention to the complexities of the ethical life.

    A raucous eruption of language and a showcase for the best essayists of our time, The Outlaw Bible of American Essays chronicles American history and measures the boundlessness of dissident thought.

    "An intellectually dazzling view of our past and future."--Time magazineContents1. How humans have repeatedly lost hope, and how new encounters, and a new pair of spectacles, revive them2. How men and women have slowly learned to have interesting conversations3. How people searching for their roots are only beginning to look far and deep enough4. How some people have acquired an immunity to loneliness5. How new forms of love have been invented6. Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex7. How the desire that men feel for women, and for other men, has altered through the centuries8. How respect has become more desirable than power9. How those who want neither to give orders nor to receive them can become intermediaries10. How people have freed themselves from fear by finding new fears11. How curiosity has become the key to freedom12. Why it has become increasingly difficult to destroy one’s enemies13. How the art of escaping from one’s troubles has developed, but not the art of knowing where to escape to14. Why compassion has flowered even in stony ground15. Why toleration has never been enough16. Why even the privileged are often somewhat gloomy about life, even when they can have anything the consumer society offers, and even after sexual liberation17. How travellers are becoming the largest nation in the world, and how they have learned not to see only what they are looking for18. Why friendship between men and women has been so fragile19. How even astrologers resist their destiny20. Why people have not been able to find the time to lead several lives21. Why fathers and their children are changing their minds about what they want from each other22. Why the crisis in the family is only one stage in the evolution of generosity23. How people choose a way of life, and how it does not wholly satisfy them24. How humans become hospitable to each other25. What becomes possible when soul-mates meet

    McGinn presents a contemporary academic take on the great philosophical figures of the twentieth century, including Bertrand Russell, Jean–Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky, alongside stories of the teachers who informed his ideas and often became friends and mentors, especially the colorful A.J. Ayer at Oxford. McGinn's prose is always elegant and probing; students of contemporary philosophy and the general reader alike will absorb every page.

    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)

    It could not anticipate what was to come after, neither could it grasp what had happened in literary theory in the light of where it was to lead.

    But what did Wittgenstein really say?

    Clear and friendly, this in-depth practice manual builds on the nine-stage model of meditation originally articulated by the ancient Indian sage Asanga, crystallizing the entire meditative journey into 10 clearly-defined stages. The book also introduces a new and fascinating model of how the mind works, and uses illustrations and charts to help the reader work through each stage. This manual is an essential read for the beginner to the seasoned veteran of meditation and can be read from front to back, or used as a reference guide, choosing chapters as needed based on the current state of the reader’s practice.

    It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

    Written toward the end of his life in order to support a metaphysics of simple substances, it's thus about formal atoms which aren't physical but metaphysical. The Monadology is written in 90 logical paragraphs, each generally following from the previous. Its name is due to the fact that Leibniz, imitating Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno & Viscountess Anne Conway, wanted to keep together the meanings of monas (Greek, unity) & logos (treatise/science/word/reason). Therefore, the Monadology came to be the science of the unity. The text is dialectically reasoned, facing questions & problems helping readers to advance. For instance, it can be accepted that composed bodies are something derived, extended, phenomenal or repeated according to simple substances (later expressed by Kant's phenomena-noumena dichotomy). Is the soul a monad? If affirmative, then the soul is a simple substance. If it's an aggregate of matter, then it cannot be a monad. Leibniz, 1st using the term in 1696, ties almost all ancient & early modern meanings of "monad" together in his metaphysical hypothesis of infinitely many simple substances. Monads are everywhere in matter & are either noticeably active (awake), when they form the central or governing monad, which is the center of activity & of perception within an organism, or they are only weakly active (asleep), when they belong to the countless subordinate monads w/in or outside of an organic body. Monads are the sources of any spontaneous action unexplainable in mechanical terms. They constitute the unity of any individual. All monads are living mirrors representing the whole universe, because of the lack of any vacuum they have an irrecognizably obscure recognition of every body in the world; & they appetite, which means they strive from one perception to the next. Nevertheless all monads differ in the degree of clarity & distinction with which they perceive the surrounding world according to the organic body in which they're incorporated. The most fundamental level in the hierarchy of monads are the entelechies, which are genuine centers of a non-physical force, namely a spontaneous activity in organisms. If these centers are capable of sentiment & memory, as in animals, they're called souls. The highest level of monads are souls endowed with reason, or spirits, reflectively self-conscious. Leibniz characterizes monads as metaphysical points, animate points or metaphysical atoms. In contrast to those physical atoms postulated by classic atomism they aren't extended & thus aren't bodies. As he explains in letters to Burchard de Volder & Bartholomew des Bosses, this doesn't imply that monads are immaterial. They rather consist of two inseparable principles constituting together a complete substance or monad: the innermost center of a monad, i.e. the mathematical point, where the entelechy, soul or spirit is located, is the monad's inner form. This form has no existence in itself, but is incarnated in a physical point or an infinitesimally small sphere, the "vehicle of the soul". This hull consists of a special matter, called primary matter (materia prima-matière primitive). The problem that monads are supposed to have some kind of matter on the one hand, but to have neither any parts nor extension on the other, may be explained by the dynamic nature of primary matter. Leibniz conceives primary matter in contrast to the 2nd matter (materia secunda), i.e. extended & purely phenomenal bodies. Primary matter is a very fine, fluid & elastic matter, which he identifies in his early "Hypothesis physica nova" (1671) with aether, spiritus or matter of light, flowing anywhere thru every body. Strictly taken, this primary matter or matter of light doesn't consist in "extension, but in the desire to extension": "The nature of light strives to extend itself". The animate centre of a monad cannot exist w/out the encasing coating fluid of light, because 1stly monads w/out this passive principle couldn't perceive any impressions from the exterior world, & because 2ndly they'd have no limitation of power. "It follows that God can never strip any created substance bare of its primary matter, even tho by his absolute power he can take off her 2ndary matter; otherwise he would make it become pure activity, which can only be himself." Only God is free from any matter, he's the creating 1st monad, out of which all created monads derive by continuous effulgurations. The punch-line of the monad or metaphysical point is its dynamical unity of the mathematical centre & the encasing physical point: The fluid ethereal sphere of the monad is extended, has parts & can be destroyed, but in every deformation or division of the sphere the mathematical point in which the soul is incarnated shall outlive within the smallest remaining fluid. Indestructible therefore isn't the whole sphere consisting in matter of light, but only the dynamic point within the monad. Leibniz understands monads as the intellectual answer to the mind-body problem, radically exposed by Descartes. Because he conceives soul (not the monad) as an immaterial centre, he denies any direct interaction or physical influence (influxus physicus) between body & soul. He allocates the causal connection between both w/in the monad, because its fluid ethereal matter is the substantial bond (vinculum substantiale) between body & mind. The circulation of the aether or matter of light thru visible worldly bodies is the preestablished divine artifice, which constitutes the exact correspondence & harmony between the perceptions of the soul & the bodies' movements. Preestablished harmony doesn't only govern the relation between body & soul, but also between monads. According to Leibniz’ slogan, monads have "no windows" or portals, thru which something could enter from the outside or could escape from the inside since the monad's center in which the soul is incarnated is always encased by its own primary matter. Despite that, the monad represents in a spontaneous act the surrounding world with an individual perspective, constituted by its punctual structure of centre, radius & circumference. The Monadology tried to put an end from a monist point of view to the main question of what is reality & particularly to the problem of communication of substances, both studied by Descartes. Leibniz offered a new solution to mind/matter interaction by means of a preestablished harmony expressed as the Best of all possible worlds form of optimism; in other words, he drew the relationship between “the kingdom of final causes”, or teleological ones, & “the kingdom of efficient causes”, or mechanical ones, which wasn't causal, but synchronous. Monads & matter are only apparently linked. There isn't even any communication between different monads, as far as they act according to their degree of distinction only, as they were influenced by bodies & vice versa. Leibniz fought against Cartesian dualism in his Monadology & tried to surpass it thru a metaphysical system considered at the same time monist (since only the unextended is substantial) & pluralist (as substances are disseminated in the world in infinite number). For that reason the monad is an irreducible force, which makes it possible for the bodies to have the characteristics of inertia & impenetrability, & which contains in itself the source of all its actions. Monads are the 1st elements of every composed thing.

    Saul explains how our different qualities give us the intelligence, self-confidence and ability to think and act as responsible individuals.Saul argues that when human qualities are worshipped in isolation they become weaknesses, even forces of destruction or self-destruction. In short, they become ideologies. But as he explores the qualities he has identified as being necessary to integrated human behaviour, he shows us that the key is to use these qualities in combination. How can we use these qualities as positive forces in our own lives and in society? How can we use them to reinforce us as humans?On Equilibrium is an intelligent, persuasive and controversial exploration of the essential qualities of humanity and how to use them to achieve equilibrium for the self and for an ethical society. It is a logical, compelling and humane successor to his bestselling trilogy.