Download or read book American Philosophy written by John Kaag and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic wisdom contained in a lost library helps the author turn his life around John Kaag is a dispirited young philosopher at sea in his marriage and his career when he stumbles upon West Wind, a ruin of an estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that belonged to the eminent Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy and a direct intellectual descendent of William James, the father of American philosophy and psychology, with whom Kaag feels a deep kinship. It is James’s question “Is life worth living?” that guides this remarkable book. The books Kaag discovers in the Hocking library are crawling with insects and full of mold. But he resolves to restore them, as he immediately recognizes their importance. Not only does the library at West Wind contain handwritten notes from Whitman and inscriptions from Frost, but there are startlingly rare first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As Kaag begins to catalog and read through these priceless volumes, he embarks on a thrilling journey that leads him to the life-affirming tenets of American philosophy—self-reliance, pragmatism, and transcendence—and to a brilliant young Kantian who joins him in the restoration of the Hocking books. Part intellectual history, part memoir, American Philosophy is ultimately about love, freedom, and the role that wisdom can play in turning one’s life around.
Download or read book The Philosophy of erotic Love written by Robert C. Solomon and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solomon and Higgins have chosen excerpts from the great philosophical texts and combined them with the most exciting new work of philosophers writing today. It examines the mysteries of erotic love from a variety of philosophical perspectives and provides an impressive display of wisdom that the world's best thinkers have brought, and continue to bring, to the study of love.
Download or read book Understanding Animals written by Lars Svendsen and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do animals perceive the world? What does it really feel like to be a cat or a dog? In Understanding Animals, Lars Svendsen investigates how humans can attempt to understand the lives of other animals. The book delves into animal communication, intelligence, self-awareness, loneliness, and grief, but most fundamentally how humans and animals can cohabit and build a form of friendship. Svendsen provides examples from many different animal species—from chimpanzees to octopus—but his main focus is on cats and dogs: the animals that many of us are closest to in our daily lives. Drawing upon both philosophical analysis and the latest scientific discoveries, Svendsen argues that the knowledge we glean from our relationships with our pets is as valid and insightful as any scientific study of human-animal relations. With this entertaining and thought-provoking book, animal lovers and pet owners will gain a deeper understanding of what it is like to be an animal—and in turn, a human.
Download or read book Sex Love and Friendship written by Adrianne Leigh McEvoy and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The joke is that all the prostitutes go on vacation when the philosophers come to town. The reason that the other conventioneers do it; philosophers just talk about it. And talk about sex and love, and friendship is what the contributors to this volume do! They talk and argue, split hairs and clarify, all trying to advance our understanding of this most interesting practice of the human species. Some of the best minds on three continents, from four nations, and eighteen of the United States discuss such topics as adultery, commitment, cross dressing, gender politics, date rape, family, friendship, friends as lovers, gayness, love, marital pluralism, marriage, prostitution, religiously motivated anti-queer sentiments, same sex marriage, seduction, and self-respect. Rather than preach, participants probe our attitudes and practices involving these issues with the aim of better understanding the broad range of sexual practices of our species. The result is a collection of stimulating essays that can enliven class discussions as well as provide guidance for the sexually perplexed. The work is accessible to readers from high school through college and beyond.
Download or read book To Love the Good written by Patricia J. O'Connor and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1996 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iris Murdoch is a philosopher, as well as a prominent and prolific novelist. Although she has not provided a systematic account of her moral philosophy, Murdoch's ideas have nevertheless influenced certain practitioners of feminist philosophy, including Marilyn Frye and Sara Ruddick. Murdoch's ideas also have appeared in the writings of Lawrence Blum and Charles Taylor, among others. This volume gives a developed account of Murdoch's position, making it more accessible by fitting ideas from her lesser-known works into a systematic picture of her moral philosophy as a whole. The book also argues for a connection between Murdoch's novels and her philosophy, seeing in both her deep concern with attention, love, and the Good. Readers of Murdoch's fiction and those intrigued by her philosphy will find much of interest here.
Download or read book Poets Philosophers Lovers written by Frederick Luis Aldama and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a foreword by Ilan Stavans This collection of essays, by fifteen scholars across diverse fields, explores forty years of writing by Giannina Braschi, one of the most revolutionary Latinx authors of her generation. Since the 1980s, Braschi’s linguistic and structural ingenuities, radical thinking, and poetic hilarity have spanned the genres of theatre, poetry, fiction, essay, musical, manifesto, political philosophy, and spoken word. Her best-known titles are El imperio de los sueños, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. She writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English and embraces timely and enduring subjects: love, liberty, creativity, environment, economy, censorship, borders, immigration, debt, incarceration, colonialization, terrorism, and revolution. Her work has been widely adapted into theater, photography, film, lithography, painting, sculpture, comics, and music. The essays in this volume explore the marvelous ways that Braschi’s texts shake upside down our ideas of ourselves and enrich our understanding of how powerful narratives can wake us to our higher expectations.
Download or read book Blues Philosophy for Everyone written by Jesse R. Steinberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-01-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of the blues From B.B. King to Billie Holiday, Blues music not only sounds good, but has an almost universal appeal in its reflection of the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Its ability to powerfully touch on a range of social and emotional issues is philosophically inspiring, and here, a diverse range of thinkers and musicians offer illuminating essays that make important connections between the human condition and the Blues that will appeal to music lovers and philosophers alike.
Download or read book Wittgenstein s Antiphilosophy written by Alain Badiou and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the “linguistic turn” in modern philosophy, and anatomizes the “anti-philosophy” of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Addressing the crucial moment where Wittgenstein argues that much has to be passed over in silence—showing what cannot be said, after accepting the limits of language and meaning—Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a series of esoteric aphorisms. in the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project—and that a continuing dialogue with the exemplar of anti-philosophy is crucial for contemporary philosophy.
Download or read book Love s Philosophy written by Richard John White and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love comes in many forms and touches all our lives, and despite its changing history, it remains constant in human experience. Love's Philosophy explores the basic expressions of love. In this book, White looks at friendship, romance, parenthood, and humanitarian love in classical and contemporary perspective. He argues that the philosophical oblivion of love has been a mistake. By examining both the historical and contemporary formations of love, he proposes alternative models to guide both our thinking and our experience of loving.
Download or read book Love Justice and Autonomy written by Rachel Fedock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-28 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers have long been interested in love and its general role in morality. This volume focuses on and explores the complex relation between love and justice as it appears within loving relationships, between lovers and their wider social context, and the broader political realm. Special attention is paid to the ensuing challenge of understanding and respecting the lovers’ personal autonomy in all three contexts. Accordingly, the essays in this volume are divided into three thematic sections. Section I aims at shedding further light on conceptual and practical issues concerning the compatibility or incompatibility of love and justice within relationships of love. For example, are loving relations inherently unjust? Might love require justice? Or do love and justice belong to distinct moral domains? The essays in Section II consider the relation between the lovers on the one hand and their broader societal environment on the other. Specifically, how exactly are love and impartiality related? Are they compatible or not? Is it unjust to favor one’s beloved? Finally, Section III looks at the political dimensions of love and justice. How, for instance, do various accounts of love inform how we are to relate to our fellow citizens? If love is taken to play an important role in fostering or hindering the development of personal autonomy, what are the political implications that need to be addressed, and how? In addressing these questions, this book engenders a better understanding both of conceptual and practical issues regarding the relation between love, justice, and autonomy as well as their broader societal and political implications. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working on the philosophy of love from ethical, political, and psychological angles.
Download or read book Thinking About Love written by Diane Enns and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does love command an ineffability that remains inaccessible to the philosopher? Thinking About Love considers the nature and experience of love through the writing of well-known Continental philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Evolving forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand new approaches to and ways of talking about love. Rather than offering prescriptive claims, this volume explores how one might think about the concept philosophically, without attempting to resolve or alleviate its ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations. The essays focus on the contradictions and limits of love, manifested in such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, violence, politics, and desire. An erudite examination of the many facets of love, this book fills a lacuna in the philosophy of this richly complicated topic. Along with the editors, the contributors are Sophie Bourgault, John Caruana, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Marguerite La Caze, Alphonso Lingis, Christian Lotz, Todd May, Dawne McCance, Dorothea Olkowski, Felix Ó Murchadha, Fiona Utley, and Mélanie Walton.
Download or read book Lovers of Philosophy written by Warren Ward and published by Ockham Publishing Group. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They were Europe's greatest thinkers, but what were they like at love? Lovers of Philosophy explores the love lives of seven philosophers, and how their most intimate experiences came to shape their ideas. In these pages, the reader learns about the significance of Kant's infatuation, Hegel's premarital liaisons, Nietzsche's heartbreak, Heidegger's hypocrisy, Sartre's promiscuous polyamory, Foucault's sexual liberation, and Derrida's dalliances in extramarital desire. The stories of these philosophers' love lives are told against a backdrop of Europe undergoing tumultuous change. Beginning in the eighteenth-century Prussian Enlightenment, the book traverses the French Revolution, Napoleonic wars, Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, and events of May 1968 before arriving at the culture wars of the late twentieth century. For anyone who has struggled to understand continental philosophy's vast array of movements, from German idealism through to phenomenology, existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism, Lovers of Philosophy also provides the reader with an easy-to-follow overview of the progression of ideas from Kant to Derrida.
Download or read book The Natural Philosophy of Love written by Remy De Gourmont and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love written by Andrew Shaffer and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few people have failed at love as spectacularly as the great philosophers. Although we admire their wisdom, history is littered with the romantic failures of the most sensible men and women of every age, including: Friedrich Nietzsche: "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent." (Rejected by everyone he proposed to, even when he kept asking and asking.) Jean-Paul Sartre: "There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty." (Adopted his mistress as his daughter.) Louis Althusser: "The trouble is there are bodies and, worse still, sexual organs." (Accidentally strangled his wife to death.) And dozens of other great thinkers whose words we revere—but whose romantic decisions we should avoid at all costs. Includes an excerpt from Andrew Shaffer's new book Literary Rogues.
Download or read book Love As Human Freedom written by Paul A. Kottman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.
Download or read book When Children Love to Learn written by Elaine Cooper and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2004-04-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They're hallmarks of childhood. The endless "why" questions. The desire to touch and taste everything. The curiosity and the observations. It can't be denied-children have an inherent desire to know. Teachers and parents can either encourage this natural inquisitiveness or squelch it. There is joy in the classroom when children learn-not to take a test, not to get a grade, not to compete with each other, and not to please their parents or their teachers-but because they want to know about the world around them! Both Christian educators and parents will find proven help in creating a positive learning atmosphere through methods pioneered by Charlotte Mason that show how to develop a child's natural love of learning. The professional educators, administrators, and Mason supporters contributing to this volume give useful applications that work in a variety of educational settings, from Christian schools to homeschools. A practical follow-up to Crossway's For the Children's Sake, this book follows a tradition of giving serious thought to what education is, so that children will be learning for life and for everlasting life.
Download or read book Friends Lovers Chocolate written by Alexander McCall Smith and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-05-21 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The delightful second installment in Alexander McCall Smith’s already hugely popular new detective series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, starring the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie — editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics — and her no-nonsense housekeeper, Grace. When Isabel’s niece, Cat, asks Isabel to run her delicatessen while she attends a wedding in Italy, Isabel meets a man with a most interesting problem. He recently had a heart transplant, and is suddenly plagued with memories of events that never happened to him. The situation appeals to Isabel as a philosophical question. Is the heart truly the seat of the soul? And it piques her insatiable curiosity: could the memories be connected with the donor’s demise? Grace, of course, thinks it is none of Isabel’s business. Add to the mix the lothario Cat brings home from the wedding in Italy, who, in accordance with all that Isabel knows about lotharios, shouldn’t be trusted . . . but goodness, he is charming. That makes two mysteries of the heart to be solved — just the thing for Isabel Dalhousie.
