Download or read book The Hedgehog and the Fox written by Isaiah Berlin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-02 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.

Download or read book The Elegance of the Hedgehog written by Muriel Barbery and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenal New York Times bestseller that “explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building” (Publishers Weekly). In an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, Renée, the concierge, is all but invisible—short, plump, middle-aged, with bunions on her feet and an addiction to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she’s everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in an upscale neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: She furtively, ferociously devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor, she scrutinizes the lives of the tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth. Paloma is a twelve-year-old who lives on the fifth floor. Talented and precocious, she’s come to terms with life’s seeming futility and decided to end her own on her thirteenth birthday. Until then, she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop culture, a good but not outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide their true talents and finest qualities from a world they believe cannot or will not appreciate them. But after a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building, they will begin to recognize each other as kindred souls, in a novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us, and “teaches philosophical lessons by shrewdly exposing rich secret lives hidden beneath conventional exteriors” (Kirkus Reviews). “The narrators’ kinetic minds and engaging voices (in Alison Anderson’s fluent translation) propel us ahead.” —The New York Times Book Review “Barbery’s sly wit . . . bestows lightness on the most ponderous cogitations.” —The New Yorker

Download or read book Schopenhauer s Porcupines written by Deborah Anna Luepnitz and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic compilation of psychological case studies from a master clinician and lyrical writer Each generation of therapists can boast of only a few writers likeDeborah Luepnitz, whose sympathy and wit shine in her fine, luminous prose. In Schopenhauer's Porcupines, she recounts five true stories from her practice, stories of patients who range from the super-rich to the destitute, who grapple with panic attacks, psychosomatic illness, marital despair, and sexual recklessness. Intimate, original, and triumphantly funny, Schopenhauer's Porcupines goes further than any other book in illuminating "how talking helps."

Download or read book Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer written by Arthur Schopenhauer and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

Download or read book Justice for Hedgehogs written by Ronald Dworkin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work, Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. Skepticism in all its forms—philosophical, cynical, or post-modern—threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics—reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being—and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. We need a new revolution. We must make the world of science safe for value.

Download or read book Parerga and Paralipomena written by Arthur Schopenhauer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These works won widespread attention on their publication in 1851, and helped secure lasting international fame for Schopenhauer. Their intellectual vigour, literary power and rich diversity are still striking today.

Download or read book The Hedgehog and the Fox written by Isaiah Berlin and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Brilliant. Searching and profound' E.H. Carr, Times Literary Supplement 'When reading Isaiah Berlin we breathe an altogether different air' New York Review of Books 'Beautifully written' W. H. Auden, New Yorker 'Ingenious. Exactly what good critical writing should be' Max Beloff, Guardian The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. For Isaiah Berlin, there is a fundamental distinction in mankind: those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things - foxes - and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system - hedgehogs. It can be applied to the greatest creative minds: Dante, Ibsen and Proust are hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Joyce are foxes. Yet when Berlin reaches the case of Tolstoy, he finds a fox by nature, but a hedgehog by conviction; a duality which holds the key to understanding Tolstoy's work, illuminating a paradox of his philosophy of history and showing why he was frequently misunderstood by his contemporaries and critics. With a foreword by Michael Ignatieff A W&N Essential

Download or read book Porcupine s Works written by William Cobbett and published by . This book was released on 1801 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pocket Philosophy Schopenhauer s Porcupine written by Alice Brière-Haquet and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2023-10-12 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher and a proponent of pessimistic philosophy. Deeply cynical of love and the want for children, he believed humans are all mere animals – just far more unhappy, because of our self-awareness. The porcupine dilemma is a metaphor about the challenges of human intimacy. Schopenhauer believed that, despite our good intentions, human intimacy cannot occur without substantial harm. By adapting famous animal parables, the Pocket Philosophy series seeks to introduce inquisitive readers of all ages – from 1 to 100! – to the biggest names in philosophy.

Download or read book Affect written by Charlene Elsby and published by The Porcupine's Quill. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever met a person who actually seems larger than life? I did, once, just where you’d least expect him to be (standing around), in an environment you wouldn’t be able to fit him into (the courtyard outside the Philosophy building), if the concept meant what it implies. Such a being makes us question whether we are, in fact, so limited, with the one life and the one death, and nothing else to reasonably look forward to, whether the whole system is flawed, whether it’s not the case that they’ve cheated the system and come out on the other side of it still living, living more, doing something more than living. That was Logan for me. Affect is the story of a hyper-rational and unapologetically cerebral philosophy graduate student, obsessed with both death and Logan. Their relationship develops through a series of surreal events (in which corpses appear with disturbing frequence), where Logan comes to infiltrate the narrator’s psyche and occasions the collision of her interior and exterior worlds. Affect examines and interprets, in prose that is spare, poetic, and philosophical, how we think about life and death, time and distance, and the deeply affecting effects of an intense entanglement of a ‘one’ with an ‘other’.

Download or read book Porcupines written by Graham Higgin and published by Penguin USA. This book was released on 2000-11-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book How to Hug a Porcupine written by June Eding and published by Hatherleigh Press. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innovative and refreshing strategies for how to love, understand, and communicate with difficult people—at home, at work, and in your community Most of us know someone who, for whatever reason, always seems to cause problems, irritate others, or incite conflict. Often, these people are a part of our daily lives. The truth is that these troublemakers haven’t necessarily asked to be this way. Sometimes we need to learn new approaches to deal with people who are harder to get along with or love. How to Hug a Porcupine explains that making peace with others isn’t as tough or terrible as we think it is—especially when you can use an adorable animal analogy and apply it to real-life problems. Whether you want to calm the quills of parents, children, siblings, or strangers, How to Hug a Porcupine provides useful tips for your encounters with “prickly” people, such as: • Three easy ways to end an argument • How to spot the porcupine in others • How to spot the porcupine in ourselves With a foreword by noted psychotherapist Dr. Debbie Ellis, widow of Dr. Albert Ellis, How to Hug a Porcupine is a truly special book.

Download or read book Wittgenstein s Poker written by David Edmonds and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2002-09-17 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 25, 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, the great twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face to face for the first and only time. The meeting -- which lasted ten minutes -- did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend, but precisely what happened during that brief confrontation remained for decades the subject of intense disagreement. An engaging mix of philosophy, history, biography, and literary detection, Wittgenstein's Poker explores, through the Popper/Wittgenstein confrontation, the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. It evokes the tumult of fin-de-siécle Vienna, Wittgentein's and Popper's birthplace; the tragedy of the Nazi takeover of Austria; and postwar Cambridge University, with its eccentric set of philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell. At the center of the story stand the two giants of philosophy themselves -- proud, irascible, larger than life -- and spoiling for a fight.

Download or read book The Porcupine of Truth written by Bill Konigsberg and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stonewall Book Award winner. “Konigsberg weaves together a masterful tale of uncovering the past, finding wisdom, and accepting others as well as oneself.” —School Library Journal (starred review) Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Children’s/Young Adult A YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection Carson Smith is resigned to spending his summer in Billings, Montana, helping his mom take care of his father, a dying alcoholic he doesn’t really know. Then he meets Aisha Stinson, a beautiful girl who has run away from her difficult family, and discovers a secret regarding his grandfather, who disappeared without warning or explanation decades before. Together, Carson and Aisha embark on an epic road trip to try and save Carson’s dad, restore his fragmented family, and discover the “Porcupine of Truth” in all of their lives. “Words like ‘brilliant’ are so overused when praising novels—so I won’t use that word. I’ll just think it.” —Benjamin Alire Sáenz, author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe “Undeniably human and unforgettably wise, this book is a gift for us all.” —Andrew Smith, author of Grasshopper Jungle “Konigsberg . . . crafts fascinating, multidimensional teen and adult characters. A friendship between a straight boy and a lesbian is relatively rare in YA fiction and is, accordingly, exceedingly welcome.” —Booklist (starred review) “The story tackles questions about religion, family, and intimacy with depth and grace . . . Equal parts funny and profound.” —Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book Porcupine s Works Containing Various Writings and Selections Exhibiting a Faithful Picture of the United States of America written by William Cobbett and published by . This book was released on 1801 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Porcupine Philosophy written by Steven Iwersen and published by . This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The secret to genuine success is to resist taking the exit right before the extra mile."From the author of The Porcupine Principles! comes an inspiring and practical daily/weekly guide for taking your leadership skills and your team to a new level of success in work and life. Based on nearly 40 years of leadership experience and speaking to leaders of Fortune 500 companies, military, government, churches, and associations, Steven J. Iwersen shares a wealth of insightful wisdom on how your leadership philosophy can improve your motivation, productivity, communication, team-building, and influence. The author wants to help you become a leader that people admire and trust. This compilation of thought-provoking insights and quotes will help you build an extra mile reputation. Challenge your self with this book to become a thoughtful leader who understands the power of character, clarity of vision, courage, and a positive mindset.What do Plato, Aristotle, and a porcupine have in common? Find out in this guide of 365 Leadership Points to Ponder.Whether you are a business leader, team member, student, parent, or anyone hoping to achieve more in your life, this book will be an inspiring and practical guide to unleashing your potential in leadership and in life.