A superb work on the nature of human action, it features influential discussions of numerous topics. These include the freedom to act; weakness of the will; thelogical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory.

    

    It features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the novel, and a great deal more. If you're studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, you'll find this guide informative and helpful. Part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

    To Taylor, self-fulfillment, although often expressed in self-centered ways, isn't necessarily a rejection of traditional values and social commitment; it also reflects something authentic and valuable in modern culture. Only by distinguishing what is good in this modern striving from what is socially and politically dangerous, Taylor says, can our age be made to deliver its promise.

    In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophic intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

    That wish has come true for us. Now what? In this radically illuminating book, Alan Cohen delves into one of the world’s most venerated wisdom texts for answers and brings the lofty and enigmatic concepts of the Tao Te Ching down to earth in fresh, easy-to-grasp language with practical, personal examples we can use to uplift our daily lives.Most other interpretations of the Tao march through the stanzas one by one. Here Alan Cohen calls forth the ancient verses around themes that are central to our modern lives —from love to work to the lessons we learn from pain. Then he brings each message to life in short vignettes where he imagines himself a student of Lao Tse and interacts with the master directly and intimately. He invites you to join the ancient sage and the contemporary seeker as they wend their way through the challenges and triumphs of the same journey you’re taking yourself.

    It is a subject that he explores in the widest context but underpinning this examination is his belief that religion has given us many of the best stories and metaphors for the act. He proceeds to relate forgiveness to such events as September 11th, the Truth Commission in South Africa, and the ongoing conflicts in Palestine/Israel, Northern Ireland and Serbia. On Forgiveness is a discourse on how forgiveness works, where it came from and how the need to embrace it is greater than ever if we are to free ourselves from the binds of the past. Drawing on philosophers and writers of the caliber of George Steiner, Frederick Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and Nelson Mandela, Holloway has written another fascinating and timely book.

    Magee does a great job of balancing the various aspects of the history of philosophy that may be of interest to different readers. Each philosopher is covered in a section of a few pages outlining the thinker's major ideas, but also containing sidebars with famous quotes, major works, related topics and historical notes. The book is organized chronologically and philosophers are grouped into intellectual movements, introduced and expanded by insets. This format allows the book to be used as a point reference on a single thinker or school of thought, but also reads well from cover to cover as the "story of thought". If you are looking for a good introduction to philosophy, it would be hard to find a more complete, accessible, and universally appealing resource.

    At a glance, it bears few similarities to any place we know and inhabit. But upon closer examination, the differences between this complex virtual reality and our own might not be as vast as we think. In “How You Play the Game,” author and philosopher Charlie Huenemann looks philosophically at the game of Minecraft (“What is the point of this game? How does one win? Well, this depends on what you want to do”) and grapples with the ethical conundrums, existential crises and moral responsibilities of the virtual realm. From the Overworld to the Ender Dragon, Huenemann offers an entertaining, insightful and often hilarious examination of Minecraft and the strange worlds—both virtual and not—surrounding it.Charlie Huenemann is a Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. He writes for 3quarksdaily, and has published several books on the history of philosophy.Cover design by Adil Dara.

    David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument.Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue.

    In this important new study he develops his analysis of the phenomenon of postmodernity.In a wide-ranging discussion the author examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida and looks at the works of modernist and postmodernist artists such as Cézanne, Debussy, and Boulez. Lyotard addresses issues such as time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Throughout his discussion he considers the close but problematic links between modernity, progress, and humanity, and the transition to postmodernity. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, philosophy, and the arts, to bear witness to and explain this difficult transition.This important contribution to aesthetic and philosophical debates will be of great interest to students in philosophy, literary, and cultural theory and politics.

    Travel back to ancient Greece with Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Donald R. Moor and author Robert M. Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance") to meet this legendary thinker. In addition to expanding upon his famous allegory of the cave, Plato talks about learning through dialogue, the primacy of good and the price of wrong doing, democracy, freedom and censorship, women's equality, love, and mathematics, and the search for truth.

    In this revised and augmented English translation of his 1985 classic, Spinoza et la Politique, Etienne Balibar presents a synoptic account of Spinoza’s major works in relation to the political and historical conjuncture in which they were written. Balibar admirably demonstrates, through fine readings of the principal treatises, Spinoza’s relevance to contemporary political life.In successive chapters Balibar he examines the political situation in the United Provinces during Spinoza’s lifetime, Spinoza’s own religious and ideological associations, the concept of democracy developed in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the theory of the state advanced in the Political Treatise and the anthropological basis for politics established in the Ethics.Written with supreme clarity and engaging liveliness, this book will appeal to specialists and general audiences alike. It is certain to become the standard introductory work on Spinoza, an indispensable guide to the intricacies of this most vital of the seventeenth-century rationalists.

    The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris. The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges. Alasdair MacIntyre is research professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of numerous books, including After Virtue, A Short History of Ethics, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, all published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

    He argues that the only feasible explanations of scientific successes are historical explanations, and that anarchism must now replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge.