We have a fundamental need to understand who we are and the world we live in. Reason takes us a long way, but mystery remains. When our minds and senses are baffled, faith can seem justified--but faith is not knowledge. In Ultimate Questions, acclaimed philosopher Bryan Magee provocatively argues that we have no way of fathoming our own natures or finding definitive answers to the big questions we all face.With eloquence and grace, Magee urges us to be the mapmakers of what is intelligible, and to identify the boundaries of meaningfulness. He traces this tradition of thought to his chief philosophical mentors--Locke, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer--and shows why this approach to the enigma of existence can enrich our lives and transform our understanding of the human predicament. As Magee puts it, There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark.The crowning achievement to a distinguished philosophical career, Ultimate Questions is a deeply personal meditation on the meaning of life and the ways we should live and face death.

    Starting from the premise that ‘everything has meaning’, the films’ ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into ‘serious’ Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies.

    The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader's understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader's understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy.The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.

    Mackie, formerly of University College, Oxford

     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.

    Casti contemplates an imaginary evening of intellectual inquiry—a sort of “My Dinner with” not Andre, but five of the most brilliant thinkers of the twentieth century.Imagine, if you will, one stormy summer evening in 1949, as novelist and scientist C. P. Snow, Britain’s distinguished wartime science advisor and author of The Two Cultures, invites four singular guests to a sumptuous seven-course dinner at his alma mater, Christ’s College, Cambridge, to discuss one of the emerging scientific issues of the day: Can we build a machine that could duplicate human cognitive processes? The distinguished guest list for Snow’s dinner consists of physicist Erwin Schrodinger, inventor of wave mechanics; Ludwig Wittgenstein, the famous twentieth-century philosopher of language, who posited two completely contradictory theories of human thought in his lifetime; population geneticist/science popularizer J.B.S. Haldane; and Alan Turing, the mathematician/codebreaker who formulated the computing scheme that foreshadowed the logical structure of all modern computers. Capturing not only their unique personalities but also their particular stands on this fascinating issue, Casti dramatically shows what each of these great men might have argued about artificial intelligence, had they actually gathered for dinner that midsummer evening.With Snow acting as referee, a lively intellectual debate unfolds. Philosopher Wittgenstein argues that in order to become conscious, a machine would have to have life experiences similar to those of human beings—such as pain, joy, grief, or pleasure. Biologist Haldane offers the idea that mind is a separate entity from matter, so that regardless of how sophisticated the machine, only flesh can bond with that mysterious force called intelligence. Both physicist Schrodinger and, of course, computer pioneer Turing maintain that it is not the substance, but rather the organization of that substance, that makes a mind conscious.With great verve and skill, Casti recreates a unique and thrilling moment of time in the grand history of scientific ideas. Even readers who have already formed an opinion on artificial intelligence will be forced to reopen their minds on the subject upon reading this absorbing narrative. After almost four decades, the solutions to the epic scientific and philosophical problems posed over this meal in C. P. Snow’s old rooms at Christ’s College remains tantalizingly just out of reach, making this adventure into scientific speculation as valid today as it was in 1949.

    Now a world-famous theoretical physicist with hundreds of scientific articles and several books of popular science to his credit, he felt it was time to connect with nature in less theoretical ways. After seeing a fly-fishing class on the Dartmouth College green, he decided to learn to fly-fish, a hobby, he says, that teaches humility. In The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, Gleiser travels the world to scientific conferences, fishing wherever he goes. At each stop, he ponders how in the myriad ways physics informs the act of fishing; how, in its turn, fishing serves as a lens into nature’s inner workings; and how science engages with questions of meaning and spirituality, inspiring a sense of mystery and awe of the not yet known. Personal and engaging, The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected is a scientist’s tribute to nature, an affirmation of humanity’s deep connection with and debt to Earth, and an exploration of the meaning of existence, from atom to trout to cosmos.

    This discussion paves the way for an outline of epistemological methods in which the rationalism of thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz and Kant is compared to the empiricism of Locke and Hume.Over the course of the book, in a manner that is careful and methodic but never dull, Jeans marshals the evidence for his startling conclusion: recent discoveries in astronomy, mathematics, sub-atomic physics and other disciplines have washed away the scientific basis of many older philosophic discussions. Such long-standing problems as causality, free will and determinism, the nature of space and time, materialism and mentalism must be considered anew int he light of new knowledge and information attained by 20th-century physical science. Even then, however, Jeans cautions against drawing any positive conclusions, pointing out that both physics and philosophy are both relatively young and that we are still, in Newton's words, like children playing with pebbles on the sea-shore, while the great ocean of truth rolls, unexplored, beyond our reach.Although first published nearly 40 years ago, nothing in physics has happened to affect Jean's account in this book; it remains remarkably fresh and undated, a classic exposition of the philosophical implications of scientific knowledge.

    Taking examples from sources as diverse as Plato and Steven Spielberg, author Julian Baggini presents abstract philosophical issues in concrete terms, suggesting possible solutions while encouraging readers to draw their own conclusions: Lively, clever, and thought-provoking, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten is a portable feast for the mind that is sure to satisfy any intellectual appetite.

    Pye, American Political Science Review“In this magisterial work [Dahl]… describe[s] what democracy means…; why our own democracy is still deeply flawed; and how we could reform it…. A work of extraordinary intelligence and, what is even rarer, a work of extraordinary wisdom.”—Robert N. Bellah, New York Times Book ReviewRobert A. Dahl, Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale Universtiy, is also the author of Who Governs?, After the Revolution?, Polyarchy, and Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, all available from Yale University Press.

    In this hilarious essay, originally published in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, he ventures to the Illinois State Fair, where he examines butter sculptures, munches on corndogs, and swaps stories with local exhibitors. As he wanders through this endlessly fascinating world, Wallace's one-of-a-kind blend of humor and insight is on full display. "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" is an uproarious and ultimately unforgettable foray into a classic part of American life and culture.

    Experiencing is seamless and intimate, made of “knowing” or awareness alone. This intimacy, in which there is no room for selves, objects, or others, is love itself. It lies at the heart of all experience, completely available under all circumstances.

    Part 1, on propositional logic, is the old Introduction, but contains much new material. Part 2 is entirely new, and covers quantification and identity for all the logics in Part 1. The material is unified by the underlying theme of world semantics. All of the topics are explained clearly using devices such as tableau proofs, and their relation to current philosophical issues and debates are discussed. Students with a basic understanding of classical logic will find this book an invaluable introduction to an area that has become of central importance in both logic and philosophy. It will also interest people working in mathematics and computer science who wish to know about the area.

    Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality"--"its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such a conception, the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on the wills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property.As the New Statesman declared: "It is rare for a book to change the intellectual landscape. It is even more unusual for this to happen when the subject is one that has been thoroughly investigated by generations of historians. . . Until the appearance of Professor Macpherson's book, it seemed unlikely that anything radically new could be said about so well-worn a topic. The unexpected has happened, and the shock waves are still being absorbed."A new introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century context.

    A growing awareness of this situation in the last decades of the twentieth century brought a monumental change in perspecive on the very nature of reality. It forced us to recognise the possibility that reality inheres not in things themselves, but in the relationships we perceive between things; not in items but in structures. In exploring and seeking to further these ideas, critics turned to the methods of analysis loosely termed 'structuralism' and 'semiotics'. Their work gave rise to a revolution in critical theory. This classic guide discusses the nature and development of structuralism and semiotics, calling for a new critical awareness of the ways in which we communicate and drawing attention to their implications for our society. Published in 1977 as the first volume in the new Accents series, Structuralism and Semiotics made crucial debates in critical theory accessible to those with no prior knowledge of the field, tus enhancing its own small revolution. Since then a generation of readers has used the book as an entry not only into structuralism and semiotics, but into the wide range of cultural and critical theories