16 years later, the French Ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthed Descartes' bones & transported them to France. Why would this devoutly Catholic official care so much about the remains of a philosopher who was hounded from country to country on charges of atheism? Why would Descartes' bones take such a strange, serpentine path over the next 350 years—a path intersecting some of the grandest events imaginable: the birth of science, the rise of democracy, the mind-body problem, the conflict between faith & reason? Their story involves people from all walks of life—Louis XIV, a Swedish casino operator, poets & playwrights, philosophers & physicists, as these people used the bones in scientific studies, stole them, sold them, revered them as relics, fought over them, passed them surreptitiously from hand to hand. The answer lies in Descartes’ famous phrase: Cogito ergo sum—"I think, therefore I am." In his deceptively simple 78-page essay, Discourse on the Method, this small, vain, vindictive, peripatetic, ambitious Frenchman destroyed 2000 years of received wisdom & laid the foundations of the modern world. At the root of Descartes’ method was skepticism: "What can I know for certain?" Like-minded thinkers around Europe passionately embraced the book--the method was applied to medicine, nature, politics & society. The notion that one could find truth in facts that could be proved, & not in reliance on tradition & the Church's teachings, would become a turning point in human history. In an age of faith, what Descartes was proposing seemed like heresy. Yet Descartes himself was a good Catholic, who was spurred to write his incendiary book for the most personal of reasons: He'd devoted himself to medicine & the study of nature, but when his beloved daughter died aged 5, he took his ideas deeper. To understand the natural world one needed to question everything. Thus the scientific method was created & religion overthrown. If the natural world could be understood, knowledge could be advanced, & others might not suffer as his child did. The great controversy Descartes ignited continues to our era: where Islamic terrorists spurn the modern world & pine for a culture based on unquestioning faith; where scientists write bestsellers that passionately make the case for atheism; where others struggle to find a balance between faith & reason. Descartes’ Bonesis a historical detective story about the creation of the modern mind, with twists & turns leading up to the present day—to the science museum in Paris where the philosopher’s skull now resides & to the church a few kilometers away where, not long ago, a philosopher-priest said a mass for his bones.

    Dennett's exposition is nothing short of brilliant." --George Johnson, New York Times Book ReviewConsciousness Explained is a a full-scale exploration of human consciousness. In this landmark book, Daniel Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Our current theories about conscious life-of people, animal, even robots--are transformed by the new perspectives found in this book.

    Fully revised and featuring lots of new material, this fourth edition provides an unparalleled introduction to 2,000 years of Christian thought. A fully revised new edition of the bestselling introductory textbook in Christian theologyFeatures new sections on monastic schools of theology, the English Reformation, and Radical OrthodoxyIncludes increased discussion of women in the early Church, feminist theology, Eastern Orthodox theology and history, and Catholic teachings on the Doctrine of the ChurchIncorporates user-friendly key terms sections, and study questionsSupported by a website at www.blackwellpublishing.com/mcgrath, containing additional lecturer resources.

    Both a comical read, as well as an indispensable resource for observing the Feast Days of the Saints, The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living is for anyone who is interested in celebrating the history and humor behind the Catholic faith.

    Art

    Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

    This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French and edited with an introduction and notes by M.A. Screech.In 1572 Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'assays', inspired by the ideas he found in books contained in his library and from his own experience. He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. But, above all, Montaigne studied himself as a way of drawing out his own inner nature and that of men and women in general. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature and provide an engaging insight into a wise Renaissance mind, continuing to give pleasure and enlightenment to modern readers.With its extensive introduction and notes, M.A. Screech's edition of Montaigne is widely regarded as the most distinguished of recent times.Michel de Montaigne (1533-1586) studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection.If you enjoyed The Complete Essays, you might like Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, also available in Penguin Classics.'Screech's fine version ... must surely serve as the definitive English Montaigne'A.C. Grayling, Financial Times'A superb edition'Nicholas Wollaston, Observer

    It is the central work in the literature of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. This volume of selected passages from the Zohar, culled by the greatest authority on Jewish mysticism, offers a sampling of its unique vision of the esoteric wonders of creation; the life and destiny of the soul; the confluence of physical and divine love; suffering and death; exile and redemption.

    It teaches how they came about, how to avoid them, and how to counter their negative effects.

    Here is the Creator who nearly destroys his chief creation; the bloodthirsty warrior and the protector of the downtrodden; the lawless law-giver; the scourge and the penitent. Profoundly learned, stylishly written, the resulting work illuminates God and man alike and returns us to the Bible with a sense of discovery and wonder.

    The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one. The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.

    The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition - justice as fairness - and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

    This led him to recast, by cutting and pasting from the gospels, a new narrative of the life and teachings of Jesus, where, according to Jefferson, there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.

    This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning,This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.

    Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.This completely new translation, the first in 270 years, is based on the third (1726) edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system.The illuminating Guide to the Principia by I. Bernard Cohen, along with his and Anne Whitman's translation, will make this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.