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Tears and Saints by Emil M. Cioran


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The Wanderer


Kahlil Gibran - 1932
    He was born Gibran Khalil Gibran in Lebanon (at the time a Syrian Province of the Ottoman Empire) and spent much of his productive life in the United States. While most of Gibran's early writings were in Syriac and Arabic, most of his work published after 1918 was in English. Gibran also took part in the New York Pen League, also known as the "immigrant poets" (al-mahjar), alongside other important Lebanese American authors such as Ameen Rihani ("the father of Lebanese American literature"), Mikhail Naimy and Elia Abu Madi. Gibran's best-known work is The Prophet, a book composed of 26 poetic essays, first written in English in 1923. The Prophet remains famous to this day, having been translated into more than 20 languages. Other works in English include: Spirits Rebellious, (1908), The Broken Wings (1912), A Tear and a Smile (1914), The Forerunner (1920), Sand and Foam (1926), Jesus the Son of Man (1928), The Earth Gods (1929), The Wanderer (1932) and The Garden of the Prophet (1933).

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit


Alexandre Kojève - 1947
    This collection of lectures--originally compiled by Raymond Queneau and edited for its English-language translation by Allan Bloom--shows the intensity of Kojeve's study and thought and the depth of his insight into Hegel's Phenomenology. More important--for Kojeve was above all a philosopher and not an ideologue--this profound and venturesome work on Hegel will expose the readers to the excitement of discovering a great mind in all its force and power.

Crowds and Power


Elias Canetti - 1960
    Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory


Alasdair MacIntyre - 1982
    Newsweek called it “a stunning new study of ethics by one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world.” Since that time, the book has been translated into more than fifteen foreign languages and has sold over one hundred thousand copies. Now, twenty-five years later, the University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to release the third edition of After Virtue, which includes a new prologue “After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century.” In this classic work, Alasdair MacIntyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in personal and public life, and offers a tentative proposal for its recovery. While the individual chapters are wide-ranging, once pieced together they comprise a penetrating and focused argument about the price of modernity. In the Third Edition prologue, MacIntyre revisits the central theses of the book and concludes that although he has learned a great deal and has supplemented and refined his theses and arguments in other works, he has “as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions” of this book. While he recognizes that his conception of human beings as virtuous or vicious needed not only a metaphysical but also a biological grounding, ultimately he remains “committed to the thesis that it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity.”

A Little History of Philosophy


Nigel Warburton - 2011
    These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it.In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times.Warburton not only makes philosophy accessible, he offers inspiration to think, argue, reason, and ask in the tradition of Socrates. A Little History of Philosophy presents the grand sweep of humanity's search for philosophical understanding and invites all to join in the discussion.

The Poetics of Space


Gaston Bachelard - 1957
    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

Myths to Live By


Joseph Campbell - 1972
    Campbell stresses that the borders dividing the Earth have been shattered; that myths and religions have always followed the certain basic archetypes and are no longer exclusive to a single people, region, or religion. He shows how we must recognize their common denominators and allow this knowledge to be of use in fulfilling human potential everywhere.

The Nature of the Gods


Marcus Tullius Cicero
    Providing vital evidence of the views of the Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic age, Cicero also casts light on the intellectual life of first-century Rome. When these Greek beliefs are translated into the Roman context they result in a fascinating clash of ideologies.This new translation of a work whose importance is becoming increasingly recognized is complemented by an invaluable introduction to the main philosophical issues, as well as substantial and helpful annotation.

The Idea of the Holy


Rudolf Otto - 1917
    It offers an in-depth inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational.

The Arcades Project


Walter Benjamin - 1982
    In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Moral Man and Immoral Society: Study in Ethics and Politics


Reinhold Niebuhr - 1932
    Forthright and realistic, it discusses the inevitability of social conflict, the brutal behavior of human collectives of every sort, the inability of rationalists and social scientists to even imagine the realities of collective power, and, ultimately, how individual morality can overcome social immorality.The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.

Utilitarianism


John Stuart Mill - 1861
    The speech is significant both because its topic remains timely and because its arguments illustrate the applicability of the principle of utility to questions of large-scale social policy.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding


John Locke - 1690
    

The Way to Love


Anthony de Mello - 1991
    In thirty-one meditations, he implores his  readers with his usual pithiness to break through  illusion, the great obstacle to love. "Love  springs from awareness," de Mello insists, saying  that it is only when we see others as they are  that we can begin to really love. But not only must  we seek to see others with clarity, we must examine  ourselves without misconception. The task,  however, is not easy. "The most painful act,"  de Mello says, "is the act of seeing. But in  that act of seeing that love is born." Anthony  De Mello was the director of the Sadhana Institute  of Pastoral Counseling in Poona, India, and  authored several books. The Way To Love  is his last.

A Theory of Justice


John Rawls - 1971
    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.