The Aims of Education


Alfred North Whitehead - 1929
    Presents the texts of a series of lectures delivered between 1912 & 1928 on the purposes & practice of education.PrefaceThe aims of educationThe rhythm of educationThe rhythmic claims of freedom & disciplineTechnical education & its relation to science & literature The place of classics in educationThe mathematical curriculumUniversities & their functionThe organisation of thoughtThe anatomy of some scientific ideasSpace, time & relativity

Civilization on Trial


Arnold Joseph Toynbee - 1948
    

Three Treatises


Martin Luther - 1943
    In the three years that followed, Luther clarified and defended his position in numerous writings. Chief among these are the three treatises written in 1520. In these writings Luther tried to frame his ideas in terms that would be comprehensible not only to the clergy but to people from a wide range of backgrounds. [i]To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation[/i] is an attack on the corruption of the church and the abuses of its authority, bringing to light many of the underlying reasons for the Reformation. The second treatise, [i]The Babylonian Captivity of the Church[/i], contains Luther's sharp criticism of the sacramental system of the Catholic church. [i[The Freedom of a Christian[/i] gives a concise presentation of Luther's position on the doctrine of justification by faith. The translations of these treatises are all taken from the American edition of Luther's Works. This new edition of [i]Three Treatises[/i] will continue to be a popular resource for individual study, church school classes, and college and seminary courses.

Summa Theologica


Thomas Aquinas
    St. Thomas Aquinas has much to teach us--most especially how to confront the classic questions that are still with us after centuries of thought.

An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth


Bertrand Russell - 1940
    He approaches his subject through a discussion of language, the relationships of truth to experience and an investigation into how knowledge of the structure of language helps our understanding of the structure of the world.This edition includes a new introduction by Thomas Baldwin, Clare College, Cambridge

Scepticism and Animal Faith


George Santayana - 1923
    The central concept of his philosophy is found in a careful discrimination between the awareness of objects independent of our perception and the awareness of essences attributed to objects by our mind, or between what Santayana calls the realm of existents and the realm of subsistents. Since we can never be certain that these attributes actually inhere in a substratum of existents, skepticism is established as a form of belief, but animal faith is shown to be a necessary quality of the human mind. Without this faith there could be no rational approach to the necessary problem of understanding and surviving in this world.Santayana derives this practical philosophy from a wide and fascinating variety of sources. He considers critically the positions of such philosophers as Descartes, Euclid, Hume, Kant, Parmenides, Plato, Pythagoras, Schopenhauer, and the Buddhist school as well as the assumptions made by the ordinary man in everyday situations. Such matters as the nature of belief, the rejection of classical idealism, the nature of intuition and memory, symbols and myth, mathematical reality, literary psychology, the discovery of essence, sublimation of animal faith, the implied being of truth, and many others are given detailed analyses in individual chapters.

Leisure: The Basis of Culture


Josef Pieper - 1948
    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.

What Is Art?


Leo Tolstoy - 1898
    These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.

The Soul of the World


Roger Scruton - 2014
    He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive and to understand what we are is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are?Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God s-eye perspective on reality.Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open."

Science and Method


Henri Poincaré - 1908
    Drawing on examples from many fields, it explains how scientists analyze and choose their working facts, and it explores the nature of experimentation, theory, and the mind. 1914 edition.

Essays in Radical Empiricism


William James - 1912
    Originally published in journals between 1884 and 1906, these 12 essays were selected by William James to illustrate the doctrine he called "radical empiricism" — a concept that made him the center of a new philosophic approach.Proclaiming experience to be the ultimate reality, James explores the applications of experience to the problem of relations, the role of feeling in experience, and the nature of truth. He argues in favor of a pluralistic universe, denying that experience can be defined in terms of an absolute force determining the relationships between things and events. Relationships, regardless of whether they hold things together or apart, are as real as the things themselves — their functions are real, and there are no hidden factors responsible for life's harmonies and dissonances.Seminal essays in this collection include "Does Consciousness Exist?: "The Essence of Humanism," and "Absolutism and Empiricism." In addition, this edition features a new translation of "On the Notion of Consciousness" — the first English rendering of the essay, which was written in French. Indispensable to an understanding of the great philosopher's other works, this systematic and compact treatment functions equally well in and out of the classroom.

New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis


Sigmund Freud - 1936
    Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions. Newly designed in a uniform format, each new paperback in the Standard Edition opens with a biographical essay on Freud's life and work —along with a note on the individual volume—by Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale.

What's Wrong with the World


G.K. Chesterton - 1910
    A steadfast champion of the working man, family, and faith, Chesterton eloquently opposed materialism, snobbery, hypocrisy, and any adversary of freedom and simplicity in modern society.Culled from the thousands of essays he contributed to newspapers and periodicals over his lifetime, the critical works collected for this edition pulse with the author's unique brand of clever commentary. As readable and rewarding today as when they were written over a century ago, these pieces offer Chesterton's unparalleled analysis of contemporary ideals, his incisive critique of modern efficiency, and his humorous but heartfelt defense of the common man against trendsetting social assaults.

The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening


Søren Kierkegaard - 1849
    Present here is a remarkable combination of the insight of the poet and the contemplation of the philosopher.In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard moves beyond anxiety on the mental-emotional level to the spiritual level, where — in contact with the eternal — anxiety becomes despair. Both anxiety and despair reflect the misrelation that arises in the self when the elements of the synthesis — the infinite and the finite — do not come into proper relation to each other. Despair is a deeper expression for anxiety and is a mark of the eternal, which is intended to penetrate temporal existence.

A Summa of the Summa


Peter Kreeft - 1990
    Combines selected philosophical passages from Thomas' Summa Theologica with detailed footnotes and explanations for modern readers.