Influenced by works such as Don Juan, and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in an absurd universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Camus posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.

    Learn how recognizing your biggest weakness can unleash your greatest strength in 'The Flip Side', a book by educator, business coach, and growth guru Flip Flippen.

    Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

    In his quest for the means to liberate his boat, he takes any work he can get.

    M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other. According to his contractualist view, thinking about right and wrong is thinking about what we do in terms that could be justified to others and that they could not reasonably reject. He shows how the special authority of conclusions about right and wrong arises from the value of being related to others in this way, and he shows how familiar moral ideas such as fairness and responsibility can be understood through their role in this process of mutual justification and criticism.Scanlon bases his contractualism on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges standard views about these crucial notions. He argues that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs are not the primary bearers of value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as it is commonly held to be. Scanlon is a pluralist about both moral and non-moral values. He argues that, taking this plurality of values into account, contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements that relativists have claimed, while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong.

    Both success and failure have a limited lifespan. Successis neither a miracle nor a mystery. It does not depend upon special skills, formaleducation or superior intelligence. It is the natural outcome of consistently applyingcertain principles on an ongoing basis. The ultimate goal is to sustain success andeliminate failure. Acquiring facts is knowledge, understanding facts is comprehension, and the properapplication of facts is wisdom. The principles in this book can help you to: 1. Live by design, not by default2. Gain confidence and optimize your potential3. Become proactive and develop a winning attitude4. Balance your health, wealth and relationships5. Overcome day-to-day problems and make better decisions6. Make positive choices and avoid pitfalls The secret to a meaningful life is in your hands. Through inspiring ideasand basic values, this book will help empower you to Achieve More andbecome unstoppable.

    Private corner offices and management by decree are out, as is unquestioned trust in the government and media. These former pillars of traditional power have been replaced by networks of informed citizens who collectively wield more power over their personal lives, employers, and worlds than ever before. So how do you navigate this new landscape and come out on top? Adam Grant, Wharton organizational psychologist and New York Times best-selling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B, went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the epicenter of power, and sat down with thought leaders from around the world, to find out.In interviews with two dozen leaders and thinkers - from top executives at Google, GM, Slack, and Goldman Sachs, to the CEO of the Gates Foundation and NASA's former chief scientist - Grant shares hard-earned insight on how to succeed in this new era of hyper-linked power. He also explores how it's reshaping everything from how employees work to how employers manage their workers, from how women rise in the office to how scientists influence policy.The combination of captivating interviews, compelling data, and Grant's unmistakably incisive and actionable analysis results in an inspiring crash course from the frontlines on the changing nature of power today.

    Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's vision of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denominator and drifting toward chaos brought its author international fame and has remained one of the influential books of the 20th century.

    The New Mind Readers provides a compelling look at the origins, development, and future of these extraordinary tools, revealing how they are increasingly being used to decode our thoughts and experiences--and how this raises sometimes troubling questions about their application in domains such as marketing, politics, and the law.Russell Poldrack takes readers on a journey of scientific discovery, telling the stories of the visionaries behind these breakthroughs. Along the way, he gives an insider's perspective on what is perhaps the single most important technology in cognitive neuroscience today--functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which is providing astonishing new insights into the contents and workings of the mind. He highlights both the amazing power and major limitations of these techniques and describes how applications outside the lab often exceed the bounds of responsible science. Poldrack also details the unique and sometimes disorienting experience of having his own brain scanned more than a hundred times as part of a landmark study of how human brain function changes over time.Written by one of the world's leading pioneers in the field, The New Mind Readers cuts through the hype and misperceptions surrounding these emerging new methods, offering needed perspective on what they can and cannot do--and demonstrating how they can provide new answers to age-old questions about the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.

    Topics discussed include dualism, behaviorism, the identity theory, functionalism, the computationaltheory of mind, connectionism, physicalism, mental causation, and consciousness. The text is enhanced by chapter summaries, a glossary, suggestions for further reading, and self-assessment questions.

    --Theodor W. Adorno Adorno was fascinated by his dreams and wrote them down throughout his life. He envisaged publishing a collection of them although in the event no more than a few appeared in his lifetime.Dream Notes offers a selection of Adornos writings on dreams that span the last twenty-five years of his life. Readers of Adorno who are accustomed to high-powered reflections on philosophy, music and culture may well find them disconcerting: they provide an amazingly frank and uninhibited account of his inner desires, guilt feelings and anxieties. Brothel scenes, torture and executions figure prominently. They are presented straightforwardly, at face value. No attempt is made to interpret them, to relate them to the events of his life, to psychoanalyse them, or to establish any connections with the principal themes of his philosophy.Are they fiction, autobiography or an attempt to capture a pre-rational, quasi-mythic state of consciousness? No clear answer can be given. Taken together they provide a highly consistent picture of a dimension of experience that is normally ignored, one that rounds out and deepens our knowledge of Adorno while retaining something of the enigmatic quality that energized his own thought.

    “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely this point that of a people faced with the end of their way of life that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’ story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse? This is a vulnerability that affects us all insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions and these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.

    The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion -- and indeed our future.

    Workers need to clarify their habits, build mindset-based strategies, and be proactive. Womack's signature "workplace performance" techniques offer specific strategies to consistently and incrementally improve performance.Readers will:Understand the fundamentals of workflow and the principles of human performance Arm themselves with the tools and the processes to get more of their work done, on time, with fewer resources, and with less stress Making your best better won't happen overnight, but learning how to effectively manage just a few critical success factors lead to an effective workday and an overall successful professional career.

    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.