Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory


Herbert Marcuse - 1940
    When it first appeared in 1940, Reason and Revolution by Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was acclaimed for its profound and undistorted reading of Hegel's social and political theory. Today, the appreciation of Marcuse's work has remained high, more relevant now than ever before.In the rapidly changing context of post-Cold War political realities, there is no better guide than Marcuse to where we have been and to what we might expect. As he well understood, turbulent and spectacular political events always ran within channels earlier set by political theory; and he equally understood that it was Hegel's often unappreciated and misunderstood theory which actually set a fundamental path of modern political life.It is a fortunate combination to have a scholar of Marcuse's brilliance and lucid honesty addressing the sources and consequences of Hegel's social theory.

A Navajo Nation Mystery: Books 1-3


R. Allen Chappell - 2018
    Allen Chappell’s Navajo Nation Mystery series—the official starter pack includes books one through three. The set includes Navajo Autumn, the book readers asked to become a series. Boy Made of Dawn, its exciting sequel, and Ancient Blood, which enthralled an international audience. Each book was a #1 Bestseller in the Native American category. Though each book in the series is a stand-alone mystery a better sense of character and series progression may be gained by reading in order. This starter pack was made available to help facilitate that option at an affordable price. There are secrets yet to tell, and in the mysterious world of the desert southwest, no writer tells them better than Chappell. With a rock solid grip on the people, history and lives of the Diné, Chappell leads the reader into a world of mystery and intrigue.

Psycholinguistics


Thomas Scovel - 1998
    This brief introduction shows how psycholinguistic research can act as a window to the workings of the human mind and the study of consciousness.

The Idea of a Social Science: And Its Relation to Philosophy


Peter Winch - 1958
    Originally published in 1958, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a full understanding of 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'.

Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary


Marjorie Perloff - 1996
    Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal."This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature"[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review"Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review"Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance

The Fear In Her Eyes


Grant McKenzie - 2014
     What if everything you believed about the worst event in your life was a lie? Ian Quinn’s day begins with an anonymous death threat, but that’s not entirely unusual in his line of work as a court-ordered child protection officer. The frustrated parents of his clients often need someone to lash out at — and Ian makes sure that he is the easiest target. But the threat is nothing compared to the envelope stuffed into his hand by a foul-smelling vagrant who mutters the cryptic message, “He says he’s sorry” before scurrying away. The envelope with his name scrawled across the front contains a lone visitor’s pass to the Oregon State Penitentiary, and the accompanying message fills Ian’s heart with both terror and revulsion. The author of the note destroyed Ian’s life. In the blink of an eye, this drunk-driving scum took the most precious thing in Ian’s life. Worst of all, Ian had watched it happen. And now the bastard wants to see him. The message is short. Only seven words. I was paid to kill your daughter.

On Interpretation


Aristotle
    Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. This matter has, however, been discussed in my treatise about the soul, for it belongs to an investigation distinct from that which lies before us.As there are in the mind thoughts which do not involve truth or falsity, and also those which must be either true or false, so it is in speech. For truth and falsity imply combination and separation. Nouns and verbs, provided nothing is added, are like thoughts without combination or separation; ‘man’ and ‘white’, as isolated terms, are not yet either true or false. In proof of this, consider the word ‘goat-stag.’ It has significance, but there is no truth or falsity about it, unless ‘is’ or ‘is not’ is added, either in the present or in some other tense.

The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook


Victor Klemperer - 1947
    The existing social culture was manipulated and subverted as the German people had their ethical values and their thoughts about politics, history and daily life recast in a new language. This Notebook, originally called LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii)-the abbreviation itself a parody of Nazified language-was written out of Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: "it isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism." This brilliant, entertaining, profound, and ultimately saddening and horrifying book is one of the great twentieth-century studies of language and of its engagement with history.

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature


Erich Auerbach - 1942
    A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.

To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies


Gilles Châtelet - 1998
    Gulled by a ‘realism’ that reassures them that political struggle is for anachronistic losers, their allegiances began to slide inexorably toward the ‘revolutionary’ forces of the market’s invisible hand, and they join the celebrants of a new order governed by boredom, impotence and envy…. As might be expected of Châtelet—mathematician, philosopher, militant gay activist, political polemicist, praised by contemporaries such as Deleuze and Badiou for his singularly penetrating philosophical mind—this is no mere lament for a bygone age. To Live and Think Like Pigs is the story of how the perverted legacy of liberalism, allied with statistical control and media communication, sought to knead Marx’s ‘free peasant’ into a statistical ‘average man’—pliant raw material for the cybernetic sausage-machine of postmodernity.Combining the incandescent wrath of the betrayed comrade with the acute discrimination of the mathematician-physicist, Châtelet proceeds to scrutinize the pseudoscientific alibis employed to naturalize ‘market democracy’. As he acerbically recounts, ‘chaos’, ‘emergence’, and the discourses of cybernetics and networks merely impart a futuristic sheen to Hobbesian ‘political arithmetic’ and nineteenth-century ‘social physics’—a tradition that places the individual at the center of its apolitical fairy-tales while stringently ignoring the inherently political process of individuation.When first published in 1998, Châtelet’s book was a fierce revolt against the ‘winter years’ and a mordant theory-science-fiction of the future portended by the reign of Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand. Today its diagnoses seem extraordinarily prescient: the ‘triple alliance’ between politics, economics and cybernetics; the contrast between the self-satisfied ‘nomadism’ of a global overclass and the cultivated herds of ‘neurolivestock’ whose brains labour dumbly in cybernetic pastures; the arrogance of the ‘knights of finance’; and the limitless complacency and petty envy of middle-class dupes haplessly in thrall to household gods and openly hostile to the pursuit of a freedom that might require patience or labour. Mercantile empiricists and acrobat-intellectuals, fluid nomads and viscous losers, Robinsons on wheels, Turbo-Bécassines and Cyber-Gideons…Châtelet deploys a cast of grotesque ‘philosophical personae’ across a series of expertly-staged set-pieces: from Hobbes’s Leviathan to Wiener’s cybernetics; from the ecstasies of Parisian nightlife to the equilibrial dystopia of Singapore’s ‘yoghurt-maker’; from the mercantile empiricist for whom the state is a glorified watermelon-seller to the coy urbanite with a broken hairdryer; from the ‘petronomadic’ stasis of the traffic jam to the financier chasing the horizon of absolute volatility; from the demonization of cannabis to the fatuous celebration of ‘difference’.To Live and Think Like Pigs is both an uproarious portrait of the evils of the new world order, and a technical manual for its innermost ideological workings. Châtelet’s diagnosis of the ‘neoliberal counter-reformation’ is a significant moment in French political philosophy worthy to stand alongside Deleuze’s ‘Control Society’ and Foucault’s ‘liberal governmentality’. His book is crucial reading for any future politics that wants to replace individualism with an understanding of individuation, libertarianism with liberation, liquidity with plasticity, and the statistical average with the singular exception. Its appearance in translation is an important new contribution to contemporary debate on neoliberalism, economics and capitalist subjectivation.

Toefl Grammar Flash


Milada Broukal - 2000
    Suitable for learners of all levels, from the novice to the more advanced, the series is geared specifically for nonnative English speakers and is perfect as supplemental desk references.

Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings


Walter Benjamin - 1978
    Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. He moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

The Forged Night With A Sadistic Serviceman Vol.1 (TL Manga): Cry with your lovely voice


Kiha Chihana - 2017
    One day, she finds a service man making a woman cry; she attacks him with her wooden sword, but gets beaten like nothing. Her parents bring up a potential marriage proposal, and the potential husband happens to be the naval officer that beat her, Yoshimi. On top of that, the two proceed with a loveless marriage, and get married. On their first night, Chiyoka is told that “This is what married couples do” and gets pinned down on the bed. “Your skin… it’s so white” he tells her, as if he’s used to handling women. His caresses continue… Chiyoka’s eyes and heavy breathing makes Yoshimi even more aroused, but this man is actually…!! Vol.1, 62 pages.

Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom


Jon M. Sweeney - 2019
    They make Eckhart clear, concise, and very compelling!" —Richard Rohr, OFM, bestselling author of Falling UpwardAn elegant rendering of the great mystic's thoughts on the mysteries of the authentic lifeThis is a little book about soul freedom. It is a book about discovering the secret to all the things we most desire: contentment, meaning, peace of mind, and true freedom. This skillfully edited translation of selections from the writings of Meister Eckhart provides a roadmap to the spiritual life for contemporary seekers. Eckhart takes us on a journey of discovery; a journey in which we learn to let go, relinquish our need to know everything, and lose those things that we think are important for a life of worth. And in the end he shows us that the true secret is this: to find yourself, you must lose yourself.Here is timeless wisdom from a medieval mystic who has influenced a wide range of spiritual teachers and mystics both inside and outside the Christian tradition. Erich Fromm, Arthur Schopenhauer, Dag Hammarskjöld, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rohr, D. T. Suzuki, Rudolf Steiner, and Matthew Fox have all credited Eckhart as being an important influence on their thought. In addition, his work has influenced the development of 20th-century American Buddhism and the Theosophical tradition.Divided into five sections—Seeking the Light, Facing Darkness, Risking Love, Knowing Nothing, and Embracing Everything—the book leads readers on the path to an authentic spiritual life.

The Greatest Game


Greg Rajaram
    The price we paid for becoming intelligent was to become painfully ignorant of the difference between good and evil.Adi, a 10-year-old boy, works together with two old philosophers as they try to unravel the prophecy of a promised King. With insatiable curiosity, Adi must work with the wise men as they rationalize with each other on why and how humans became intelligent. Together they attempt to answer some of the most profound questions related to existence. Does evolution end with human beings or is there an ‘Overman’ who can reach evolution’s pinnacle? Will this Overman be able to define values for humankind?Centuries later a young boy promises his mother that he will always uphold the love that she has taught him. It is a promise that drowns him in the nectar of the gods. Krish grows up to be an engineer and joins a team of scientists as they try to create artificial consciousness in a machine.Krish soon realizes that he has a bigger fight on his hands. A fight to preserve love in a desolate world. His quest for true love ultimately leads him down a path where he comes face to face with a fearsome snake delivering a kiss of death.Humans have come a long way by questioning the nature of objects around us and pushing the limits of our intelligence, but it’s now time that we ask the greatest question yet: when does intelligence transcend to become consciousness?