Philosophy

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.

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.

Essayist Matthew Arnold described the man who wrote these words as "the most beautiful figure in history." Possibly so, but he was certainly more than that. Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire at its height, yet he remained untainted by the incalculable wealth and absolute power that had corrupted many of his predecessors. Marcus knew the secret of how to live the good life amid trying and often catastrophic circumstances, of how to find happiness and peace when surrounded by misery and turmoil, and of how to choose the harder right over the easier wrong without apparent regard for self-interest.

The historian Michael Grant praises Marcus's book as "the best ever written by a major ruler," and Josiah Bunting, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, calls it "the essential book on character, leadership, duty." Never intended for publication, the Meditations contains the practical and inspiring wisdom by which this remarkable emperor lived the life not of a saintly recluse, but of a general, administrator, legislator, spouse, parent, and judge besieged on all sides.

The Emperor's Handbook offers a vivid and fresh translation of this important piece of ancient literature. It brings Marcus's words to life and shows his wisdom to be as relevant today as it was in the second century. This book belongs on the desk and in the briefcase of every business executive, political leader, and military officer. It speaks to the soul of anyone who has ever exercised authority or faced adversity or believed in a better day.

An engaging, thought-provoking, illustrated analysis of the classical principles of ethics applied to everyday dilemmas.

Ethics: The Art of Character is the quintessential little book of big ideas. It draws on the work of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato--and on the words of Dante, Spinoza, Kant, Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Chuang Tzu.

Ethicist Gregory Beabout describes Aristotle's lectures as aimed, not at the young, but at listeners "experienced in life . . . with a desire to pursue the common good and in possession of a sense of what it is to live a beautiful, meaningful life." This wise little book contemplates the quest for courage, justice, temperance, wisdom, empathy, humility, and much more--timeless goals that also remain timely. A chapter on "Ethics in Real Life" invites the reader to explore two contemporary dilemmas and puzzle out the ethical choices when the situations "present a clear choice whether or not to do something that appears wrong, in order to avert an apparently greater evil." Featuring chapters on medical ethics, workplace ethics, and environmental ethics, Ethics: The Art of Character distills the wisdom of the ages into a sixty-four-page, unforgettable life lesson.

From one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, and the author of the international bestseller Small Is Beautiful, the reissue of a timeless treatise on the meaning of living.

In A Guide for the Perplexed, bestselling author E. F. Schumacher explores our relation to the world: our obligations--to other people, to the earth, to progress and technology, but most importantly to ourselves. If man can fulfill these obligations, then and only then can he enjoy a truly authentic relationship with the world--and truly know the meaning of living.

Schumacher argues that we need maps: a "map of knowledge" and a "map of living." The concern of the mapmaker is to find for everything its proper place. For things out of place tend to get lost; they become invisible and their proper places are filled by other things that should not be there at all and therefore serve to mislead.

A Guide for the Perplexed teaches us to be our own map makers in following our destined path in life's journey.

"A stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection." --Heller McAlpin, NPR.org

Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. One of Lit Hub's 15 Books You Should Read in September and one of Outside's Best Books of Fall

A revelatory Alpine journey in the spirit of the great Romantic thinker Friedrich Nietzsche

Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys--one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition.

Just as Kaag's acclaimed debut, American Philosophy: A Love Story, seamlessly wove together his philosophical discoveries with his search for meaning, Hiking with Nietzsche is a fascinating exploration not only of Nietzsche's ideals but of how his experience of living relates to us as individuals in the twenty-first century. Bold, intimate, and rich with insight, Hiking with Nietzsche is about defeating complacency, balancing sanity and madness, and coming to grips with the unobtainable. As Kaag hikes, alone or with his family, but always with Nietzsche, he recognizes that even slipping can be instructive. It is in the process of climbing, and through the inevitable missteps, that one has the chance, in Nietzsche's words, to "become who you are."

Monty was just like any other dog. A scruffy and irascible Maltese terrier, he enjoyed barking at pugs and sniffing at trees. But after yet another dramatic confrontation with the local Rottweiler, Anthony McGowan realizes it's high time he and Monty had a chat about what makes him a good or a bad dog.

Taking his lead from Monty's canine antics, McGowan takes us on a hilarious and enlightening jaunt through the major debates of philosophy. Will Kant convince Monty to stop stealing cheesecake? How long will they put up with Socrates poking holes in every argument?

In this uniquely entertaining take on morality and ethics, the dutiful duo set out to uncover who--if anyone--has the right end of the ethical stick and can tell us how best to live one's life.

The "philosopher of truth" (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker) returns with a clear-eyed and timely critique of our culture's narcissistic obsession with thinking that "we" know and "they" don't.

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.