Philosophy

From renowned classicist Edith Hall, ARISTOTLE'S WAY is an examination of one of history's greatest philosophers, showing us how to lead happy, fulfilled, and meaningful lives

Two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote the most important book on happiness. The first philosopher to inquire into subjective happiness, he understood its essence better and more clearly than anyone since. Most importantly, Aristotle understood happiness as available to the vast majority of us, but only, crucially, if we decide to apply ourselves to its creation. According to Aristotle, happiness is not about well-being but instead is a lasting state of contentment, which should be the ultimate goal of human life. We become happy through finding a purpose, realizing our potential, and modifying our behavior to become the best version of ourselves. With these objectives in mind, Aristotle developed a humane program for becoming a happy person. Here, Professor Edith Hall shows how his timeless teachings are exactly what we need today to stride purposefully towards a life well lived. As Hall writes, "If you believe that the goal of human life is to maximize happiness, then you are a budding Aristotelian." In expert yet vibrant modern language, Hall lays out the crux of Aristotle's thinking, mixing affecting autobiographical anecdotes with a deep wealth of classical learning. For Hall, whose own life has been greatly improved by her understanding of Aristotle, this is an intensely personal subject. She distills his ancient wisdom into ten practical and universal lessons to help us confront life's difficult and crucial moments, summarizing a lifetime of the most rarefied and brilliant scholarship.

An expose of the psychiatric professions bible from a leading psychotherapist, "The Book of Woe " reveals the deeply flawed process by which mental disorders are invented and uninvented--and why increasing numbers of therapy patients are being declared mentally ill.

Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. In this, his last collection, the celebrated essayist and novelist observes the changing world around him with irrepressible curiosity and profound wisdom. He sees with fresh eyes the upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the unbridled individualism that have become the backdrop of our lives--a "liquid" society in which it's not easy to find a polestar, though stars and starlets abound.

In these pieces, written for his regular column in L'Espresso magazine, Eco brings his dazzling erudition and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as popular culture and politics, being seen, conspiracies, the old and the young, new technologies, mass media, racism, and good manners. It is a final gift to his readers--astute, witty, and illuminating.

"A swan song from one of Europe's great intellectuals . . . [Eco] entertains with his intellect, humor, and insatiable curiosity." -- Kirkus Reviews

"An intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores." -- Publishers Weekly

"Chronicles of a Liquid Society is a wonderful reminder of a great writer, thinker, and human being." -- Toronto Star

In her brilliant work Touching a Nerve, Patricia S. Churchland, the distinguished founder of neurophilosophy, drew from scientific research on the brain to understand its philosophical and ethical implications for identity, consciousness, free will, and memory. In Conscience, she explores how moral systems arise from our physical selves in combination with environmental demands.

All social groups have ideals for behavior, even though ethics vary among different cultures and among individuals within each culture. In trying to understand why, Churchland brings together an understanding of the influences of nature and nurture. She looks to evolution to elucidate how, from birth, our brains are configured to form bonds, to cooperate, and to care. She shows how children grow up in society to learn, through repetition and rewards, the norms, values, and behavior that their parents embrace.

Conscience delves into scientific studies, particularly the fascinating work on twins, to deepen our understanding of whether people have a predisposition to embrace specific ethical stands. Research on psychopaths illuminates the knowledge about those who abide by no moral system and the explanations science gives for these disturbing individuals.

Churchland then turns to philosophy--that of Socrates, Aquinas, and contemporary thinkers like Owen Flanagan--to explore why morality is central to all societies, how it is transmitted through the generations, and why different cultures live by different morals. Her unparalleled ability to join ideas rarely put into dialogue brings light to a subject that speaks to the meaning of being human.

A brilliant philosopher reimagines Stoicism for our modern age in this thought-provoking guide to a better life.
For more than two thousand years, Stoicism has offered a message of resilience in the face of hardship. Little wonder, then, that it is having such a revival in our own troubled times. But there is no denying how weird it can be: Is it really the case that we shouldn't care about our work, our loved ones, or our own lives? According to the old Stoics, yes.
In A Field Guide to a Happy Life, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers a renewed Stoicism that reflects modern science and sensibilities. Pigliucci embraces the joyful bonds of affection, the satisfactions of a job well done, and the grief that attends loss. In his hands, Stoicism isn't about feats of indifference, but about enduring pain without being overwhelmed, while enjoying pleasures without losing our heads. In short, he makes Stoicism into a philosophy all of us -- whether committed Stoics or simply seekers -- can use to live better.

The great French Marxist philosopher weighs up the contributions of the three major critics of modernity

With the translation of Lefebvre's philosophical writings, his stature in the English-speaking world continues to grow. Though certainly within the Marxist tradition, he consistently saw Marx as an 'unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point'. Unsurprisingly, Lefebvre always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. But the imposing Metaphilosophy also suggested the significance he ascribed to Nietzsche, in the 'realm of shadows' through which philosophy seeks to think the world. Lefebvre proposes here that the modern world is at the same time Hegelian in terms of the state; Marxist in terms of the social and society; and Nietzschean in terms of civilization and its values. As early as 1939, Lefebvre pioneered a French reading of Nietzsche that rejected the philosopher's appropriation by fascism, bringing out the tragic implications of Nietzsche's proclamation that 'God is dead' long before this approach was followed by such later writers as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Forty years later, in the last of his philosophical writings, Lefebvre juxtaposes the contributions of the three great thinkers, in a text whose themes remain surprisingly relevant today.

Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont--excursions informed by the worldview he's imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and philosophy. His broad-ranging discussion offers insight on everything from the mountain landscape to the origins of consciousness and the Cosmos, from geology to Chinese landscape painting, from parenting to pictographic oracle-bone script, to a family chutney recipe. It's a spiritual ecology that is profoundly ancient and at the same time resoundingly contemporary. Your view of the landscape--and of your place in it--may never be the same.

David R. Loy draws from giants of psychotherapy and existentialism, from Nietzsche to Kierkegaard to Sartre, to explore the fundamental issues of life, death, and what motivates us.

Psychotherapy, existentialism, and Buddhism are all concerned with the same fundamental issues of life and death--and death-in-life. David R. Loy's groundbreaking claim is that the unifying feature connecting these perspectives is a sense of pervasive sense of dissatisfaction--or, in a word, lack. In Lack & Transcendence, he brings all three traditions together in a way that casts new light on each, as he draws from giants of psychotherapy, particularly Freud, Ernest Becker, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, and Otto Rank; great existentialist thinkers, like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre; and the teachings of Buddhism, especially as interpreted by Nagarjuna, Huineng, and Dogen.

Written in accessible style that does not assume prior familiarity with any of its subjects, this book will appeal to readers of all backgrounds, including psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, religious scholars, Continental philosophers, and anyone seeking clarity on the Great Matter itself.

The reader will come away with fresh perspectives on ancient questions and deeper insights into the human predilection to be unhappy--and what the liberating alternative may be.

Who do you think you are? That's a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods.

Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn't primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation--of self-rule--is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage.

From Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who miraculously became an eminent European philosopher before retiring back to Africa, to Italo Svevo, the literary marvel who changed citizenship without leaving home, to Appiah's own father, Joseph, an anticolonial firebrand who was ready to give his life for a nation that did not yet exist, Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with vibrant narratives to expose the myths behind our collective identities.

These "mistaken identities," Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities--from chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities aren't something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns.

Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about who--and what--"we" are.

From the bestselling authors of The Daily Stoic comes an inspiring guide to the lives of the Stoics, and what the ancients can teach us about happiness, success, resilience and virtue.

Nearly 2,300 years after a ruined merchant named Zeno first established a school on the Stoa Poikile of Athens, Stoicism has found a new audience among those who seek greatness, from athletes to politicians and everyone in between. It's no wonder; the philosophy and its embrace of self-mastery, virtue, and indifference to that which we cannot control is as urgent today as it was in the chaos of the Roman Empire. In Lives of the Stoics, Holiday and Hanselman present the fascinating lives of the men and women who strove to live by the timeless Stoic virtues of Courage. Justice. Temperance. Wisdom. Organized in digestible, mini-biographies of all the well-known--and not so well-known--Stoics, this book vividly brings home what Stoicism was like for the people who loved it and lived it, dusting off powerful lessons to be learned from their struggles and successes. More than a mere history book, every example in these pages, from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius--slaves to emperors--is designed to help the reader apply philosophy in their own lives. Holiday and Hanselman unveil the core values and ideas that unite figures from Seneca to Cato to Cicero across the centuries. Among them are the idea that self-rule is the greatest empire, that character is fate; how Stoics benefit from preparing not only for success, but failure; and learn to love, not merely accept, the hand they are dealt in life. A treasure of valuable insights and stories, this book can be visited again and again by any reader in search of inspiration from the past.

By developing an Eastern existential understanding of death from the perspective of Zen Buddhism, Bushido (the Way of the Samurai), and Japanese haiku poets, this book articulates an ethics of sincerity between the contemplative-meditation practice of mindfulness and the three Buddhist characteristics of existence: impermanence, suffering, and non-substantiality. Through an examination and discussion of the six perfections of Buddhism, karma and enlightenment, the samurai virtues of Bushido, and the Japanese aesthetic masterfully expressed in the nature, travel, and death poems of haiku poets (a mixture of Zen and mono no aware), readers may gain a deeper appreciation of the death-centered character ethics, or art of living, Scalambrino calls "living in the light of death."

America's founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart brilliantly tracks the ancient, pagan, and continental ideas from which America's revolutionaries drew their inspiration. In the writings of Spinoza, Lucretius, and other great philosophers, Stewart recovers the true meanings of "Nature's God," "the pursuit of happiness," and the radical political theory with which the American experiment in self-government began.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss embarks on a rollicking intellectual journey, following in the footsteps of history's greatest thinkers and showing us how each--from Epicurus to Gandhi, Thoreau to Beauvoir--offers practical and spiritual lessons for today's unsettled times.

We turn to philosophy for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a dif-ferent perspective, to unearth hidden beauty, and to find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.

Eric Weiner combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pil-grimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from great thinkers around the world, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, Confucius to Simone Weil. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport), he journeys thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi, Wyoming, Coney Island, Frankfurt, and points in between to recon-nect with philosophy's original purpose: teaching us how to lead wiser, more meaningful lives. From Socrates and ancient Athens to Simone de Beauvoir and twentieth-century Paris, Weiner's chosen philosophers and places provide important signposts as we navigate today's chaotic times.

In The Socrates Express, Weiner invites us to voyage alongside him on his life-changing pursuit of wisdom and discovery as he attempts to find answers to our most vital questions.