Pieper shows that the Greeks understood and valued leisure, as did the medieval Europeans. He points out that religion can be born only in leisure - a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.He maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture - and ourselves.These astonishing essays contradict all our pragmatic and puritanical conceptions about labor and leisure; Josef Pieper demolishes the twentieth-century cult of "work" as he predicts its destructive consequences.

    Now in book form for the first time, their simple method will teach you how to use basic design tools to create a life that will work for you.Using real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping and mind-mapping, you will learn how to build your way forwards, step-by-positive-step, to a life that’s better by a design of your own making.Because a well-designed life means a life well-lived.

    Writing in Harper's, Irving Howe described it as an exhilarating performance--this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be. Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has revised the text, incorporating a fifth essay that Berlin himself had wanted to include. He has also added further pieces that bear on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are at last available together in one volume. Finally, in an extended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlin's unpublished writings, he exhibits some of the biographical sources of Berlin's lifelong preoccupation with liberalism. These additions help us to grasp the nature of Berlin's inner citadel, as he called it--the core of personal conviction from which some of his most influential writing sprung.

    This revised edition collects forty-one of the most important articles in the field, making it the most up-to-date and comprehensive volume on the subject. The fourth edition features several new articles including influential work by Bertrand Russell, John R. Searle, John Perry, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and John Stuart Mill. Other selections include classic articles by such distinguished philosophers as Gottlob Frege, P. F. Strawson, J. L. Austin, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan. The selections represent evolving and varying approaches to the philosophy of language, with many articles building upon earlier ones or critically discussing them. Eight sections cover the central issues: Truth and Meaning; Speech Acts; Reference and Descriptions; Names and Demonstratives; Propositional Attitudes; Metaphor; Interpretation and Translation; and The Nature of Language. The revised general introduction and introductions to each section give students background to the issues and explain the connections between them. A list of suggested further reading follows each section.

    Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

    In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy--the insidious persistence of dualism--in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable--but surmountable--failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the logical space of reasons" into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

    In a work free of technical language and jargon, Andrew Fisher covers the main ideas that have shaped metaethics from the work of G.E. Moore to the latest thinking. Written specifically for students new to this subject, Metaethics assumes no prior philosophical knowledge. It also highlights ways to avoid common errors, offers hints and tips on learning the subject, includes a glossary of core terms, and provides guidance for further study.

    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.

    Defying sacrosanct platitudes (and risking the wrath of the rationalist, the enmity of the empiricist, the malice of the modalist, and the antipathy of the absolutist), Goodman argues that some true statements and some right versions conflict with one another and that therefore there must be 'many worlds if any'. Included are detailed studies of aspects or examples of worldmaking found in the psychological laboratory, in literary criticism, in scientific theories, and in works of art—all contributing to the central themes that facts are fabricated and that knowing or understanding is no more a matter of finding than of making.