We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more “truthy” than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler’s ambitions were partly fueled by a story.But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral—they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.

    Political thought and practice are stifled by a misconceived search fro consensus and the promotion of a bland social unanimity which, as Chantal Mouffe shows, far from being the sign of progress, constitute a serious threat for democratic institutions. Indeed, in many countries this ‘consensus of the centre’ is providing a platform for the growth of populist right-wing parties which, by presenting themselves as the only ‘anti-establishment’ forces, are trying to occupy the terrain of contestation deserted by the left.Taking issue with the work of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on one side, and with the tenets of the third way as practised by Tony Blair and theorised by Anthony Giddens on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of modern liberal democracy. Against those who affirm that, with the demise of the left/right divide, antagonism has been eliminated from contemporary post-industrial societies and that an all-inclusive politics has become possible, she argues that the category of the ‘adversary’ plays a central role in the very dynamics of modern democracy. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein and Derrida, and engaging with the provocative theses of Carl Schmitt, she proposes a new understanding of democracy in terms of ‘agonistic pluralism’ which acknowledges the ineradicability of antagonism and the impossibility of a final resolution of conflicts.

    Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams."A magical book. . . . The Poetics of Space is a prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the new foreword by John R. Stilgoe

    The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

    She was, she writes, "just naturally reverent," a fact that didn't change when she--much to her own confusion--lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: "You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyonce."A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. Her celebrated essay "Thin Places" (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith?

    Sowell reveals the general principles behind any kind of economy-capitalist, socialist, feudal, and so on. In readable language, he shows how to critique economic policies in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the goals they proclaim. With clear explanations of the entire field, from rent control and the rise and fall of businesses to the international balance of payments, this is the first book for anyone who wishes to understand how the economy functions.

    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.

    Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question. The Genealogy is the most sustained of Nietzsche's later works and offers one of the fullest expressions of his characteristic concerns. This edition places his ideas within the cultural context of his own time and stresses the relevance of his work for a contemporary audience.

    (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do). Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"—from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten—and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them. It's a book for book lovers everywhere to enjoy, ponder, and argue about—and perhaps even read.Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? and of many other books. Jeffrey Mehlman is a professor of French at Boston University and the author of a number of books, including Emigré New York. He has translated works by Derrida, Lacan, Blanchot, and other authors.

    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

    Sidney argues with wit and irony that poetry is the art which best teaches what is good and true.

    Heather Masri, editor of Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts, has prepared an anthology that recognizes, and is designed to meet, the needs of students and instructors in an introductory survey course in science fiction.Grouped into major themes, her comprehensive selection of fiction — enjoyable and captivating stories, notable for their literary, philosophical, and cultural richness — are by classic and emerging writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The stories are uniquely complemented by contextual documents that suggest the scholarly, theoretical, and historical currents that drove the development of the genre, and informative editorial matter that contributes to the book’s flexibility for instructors and usefulness for students.

    Combine this with thoughtful and thorough apparatus, and Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues is the most flexible and comprehensive collection ever created for undergraduate courses.

    But what if you want a delightfully quick, witty, and readable reference that, in one compact volume, places the document and its clauses into context? You're out of luck--until now. Written by Seth Lipsky, described in the Boston Globe as "a legendary figure in contemporary journalism," The Citizen's Constitution draws on the writings of the Founders, case law from our greatest judges, and current events in more than 300 illuminating annotations. Lipsky provides a no-nonsense, entertaining, and learned guide to the fundamental questions surrounding the document that governs how we govern our country. Every American should know the Constitution. Rarely has it glinted so brightly.

    Steven M. Cahn brings together a rich, balanced, and wide-ranging collection of forty classic and contemporary readings. Most importantly, he has carefully edited the articles so that they will be exceptionally clear and understandable to undergraduate students. The selections are organized into three parts, providing instructors with flexibility in designing and teaching a variety of ethics courses. The first part, Challenges to Morality, considers the overly simple assumptions that beginning students may bring to moral issues. The second part, Moral Theories, provides selections from the most influential ethical theories of the past along with commentary by contemporary thinkers. The third part, Moral Problems, offers opposing perspectives on nine controversial issues: abortion, euthanasia, world hunger, terrorism, pornography, affirmative action, animal rights, the environment, and capital punishment. Exploring Ethics features selections from Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Thomas Nagel, James Rachels, John Rawls, Tom Regan, Peter Singer, Susan Wolf, and many others. Each reading is preceded by a detailed introduction and followed by study questions that encourage students to think philosophically. Ideal for courses in introduction to ethics or contemporary moral problems, this unique anthology can be used independently or as a companion to a single-authored text. An Instructor's Manual and Companion Website accompany the text. The instructor's materials include a testbank, key terms with definitions, reading summaries, and PowerPoint lectur