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Millman distills decades of experience into a concise map of the journey to discover what one's purpose is. He explains the higher purpose of daily life, 12 required lessons in the school of life, and the keys to mastering the most important purpose of all.

A Companion to Latin American Philosophy presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing the central themes in Latin American philosophy. Contributed by a distinguished team of scholars, many of them Latin American, the essays discuss and analyze the diversity and multifaceted nature of philosophical thought emerging from Latin America. Addressing both analytical and continental traditions, the Companion explores the history of Latin American philosophy and its current issues, traces the development of the discipline, and offers biographical sketches of key Latin American thinkers. Themes and topics discussed include the nature of philosophy, justice, human rights, and cultural identity. Taken together, the essays provide rich insights into Latin American philosophical thought as it developed from pre-Columbian societies through the colonial era and up to the present day

Does the Center Hold? is an entertaining, topically-organized introductory text with more than 500 original illustrations. The ideas and issues typically covered in introductory courses are presented here in a remarkably accessible and enjoyable manner. The author demonstrates that serious philosophical inquiry may be perplexing but is ultimately enlightening and liberating.

this lively jaunt through the course of a day treats readers to such disquisitions as Thomas Hobbes on rush-hour traffic, Jacques Lacan on shopping, and Friedrich Nietzsche on work. Journalist Rowland Smith does a fair job of concisely explaining big ideas, and he offers a surprisingly colorful cast of thinkers from Carl Schmitt to Michel Foucault. He's at his best teasing out the little idiosyncrasies of modern experience, where simply washing your face in the morning betrays a remarkable optimism for the day ahead and fighting with your partner once in a while might actually be a good idea. While occasionally skirting into shallow discussions of some philosophers, the author maintains the central conceit of describing a typical day with admirable resourcefulness. This charming book wears its erudition with ease and suggests that despite what Socrates says, it is in fact the unexamined day that is not worth living.

Honderich accomplishes something remarkable in this short book. He simply and clearly explains most of the issues grouped by philosophers under "free will" and "determinism" while at the same time conveying to lay readers the complexity of the field. Honderich argues for a version of determinism; human beings, in his view, are subject to causal laws that account for their behavior. Along the way, most of the standard arguments, and a few nonstandard ones, receive Honderich's penetrating attention. Many people shy away from determinism because they think that human life as we know it depends on belief in free will. Honderich disagrees; if we resolutely accept determinism, he argues, our lives will be tolerable. The book is based on Honderich's long, difficult, and influential A Theory of Determinism .

n an increasingly global society, non-Western thought can no longer be an afterthought for educators and their students. Asian Texts — Asian Contexts helps bring Asian philosophy and religion into wider classroom consideration by giving nonspecialists entrée to primary texts from India, China, and Japan and pedagogical strategies for presenting this material to Western students.

The texts section includes material on Buddhism, Daoism, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy. In the contexts section, nonspecialists are presented with ways to think about the integration of Asian material that includes considerations of religion, philosophy, history, and art. These useful and accessible essays are written with the nonspecialist in mind, but provide a creative edge that will be of interest to specialists as well.

In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought, science, religion, and consciousness. Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson's view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

In The Fundamentals of Ethics, Second Edition, author Russ Shafer-Landau employs a uniquely engaging writing style to introduce students to the essential ideas of moral philosophy. Offering more comprehensive coverage of the good life, normative ethics, and metaethics than any other text of its kind, this book also addresses issues that are often omitted from other texts, such as the doctrine of doing and allowing, the doctrine of double effect, ethical particularism, the desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, and moral error theory. Shafer-Landau carefully reconstructs and analyzes dozens of arguments in depth, at a level that is understandable to students with no prior philosophical background.

Organon (The collection of Aristotle's logical treatises) --Categories, On interpretation, Prior analytics, Posterior analytics, Topics, On Sophistical refutations, Physics, On the heavens, On generation and corruption, On the soul, The short physical treatises, On memory and reminiscence, On dreams, On prophesying by dreams, The history of animals, On the parts of animals, On the generation of animals, Metaphysics, Nicomachean ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics

The Dhammapada, the Pali version of one of the most popular texts of the Buddhist canon, ranks among the classics of the world's great religious literature.
Like all religious texts in Pali, the Dhammapada belongs to the Therevâda school of the Buddhist tradition, adherents of which are now found primarily in Kampuchea, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Dhammapada, or "sayings of the dhamma," is taken to be a collection of the utterances of the Buddha himself. Taken together, the verses form a key body of teaching within Buddhism, a guiding voice along the struggle-laden path towards true enlightenment, or Nirvana. However, the appeal of these epithets of wisdom extends beyond its religious heritage to a general and universal spirituality.

Descartes's Meditations, is one of the most influential books in the history of Western philosophy. Discovering his own existence as a thinking entity in the very exercise of doubt--in the famous formulation cogito, ergo sum--Descartes goes on to develop new conceptions of body and mind, capable of serving as foundations for a new science of nature. Subsequent philosophy has grappled with Descartes's ideas, but his arguments set the agenda for many of the greatest philosophical thinkers, and their fascination endures.

If moral principles apply to everyone, in every situation, at all times, they must be based on concepts of reason rather than on culture or individual personality. "The Metaphysics of Morals" uncovers the principles that guide moral duties and determine the moral compass for good will. By explaining why actions are moral only if they are intentionally moral (not for ulterior motive) and why intention is more important than the outcome of an act (with respect to morality), Kant makes the case for a definable basis for human morality.

The anthology begins with Kierkegaard's early journal entries and traces the development of his work chronologically to the final The Changelessness of God. The book presents generous selections from all of Kierkegaard's landmark works, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death, and draws new attention to a host of such lesser-known writings as Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions and The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The selections are carefully chosen to reflect the unique character of Kierkegaard's work, with its shifting pseudonyms, its complex dialogues, and its potent combination of irony, satire, sermon, polemic, humor, and fiction. We see the esthetic, ethical, and ethical-religious ways of life initially presented as dialogue in two parallel series of pseudonymous and signed works and later in the "second authorship" as direct address. And we see the themes that bind the whole together, in particular Kierkegaard's overarching concern with, in his own words, "What it means to exist; . . . what it means to be a human being."

Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism and its deleterious effect on all aspects of life, from the increasing rift between the classes to the destruction of the nuclear family, has proven remarkably prescient. Their spectre, manifested in the Manifesto's vivid prose, continues to haunt the capitalist world, lingering as a ghostly apparition even after the collapse of those governments which claimed to be enacting its principles.

It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic & free.

In these influential dialogues—Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Ion, Phaedo, Symposium—Plato employs the dialectic method to examine the trial and death of his mentor, Socrates, and address the eternal questions of human existence.