Download or read book On the Duties of Philosophers written by Eric v.d. Luft and published by Gegensatz Press. This book was released on 2020-09-13 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how and why philosophy is the most important and most practical of all human endeavors, because its mission is to sit in judgment of everything, including itself.
Download or read book Letters to a Young Philosopher written by Ramin Jahanbegloo and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired from 'Letters to a Young Poet' by Rainer Maria Rilke, this work is in the form of letters from an old philosopher to a young student, guiding, instructing, and passing on wisdom gathered from the experiences of life. They cover a comprehensive introduction to philosophy, wisdom, and the art of thinking, as well as discuss a range of themes and issues such as love, education, friendship, violence, ignorance, mediocrity, and happiness.
Download or read book Philosophy and Philosophers written by John Shand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised and updated edition of a standard work provides a clear and authoritative survey of the Western tradition in metaphysics and epistemology from the Presocratics to the present day. Aimed at the beginning student, it presents the ideas of the major philosophers and their schools of thought in a readable and engaging way, highlighting the central points in each contributor's doctrines and offering a lucid discussion of the next-level details that both fills out the general themes and encourages the reader to pursue the arguments still further through a detailed guide to further reading. Whether John Shand is discussing the slow separation of philosophy and theology in Augustine, Aquinas and Ockham, the rise of rationalism, British empiricism, German idealism or the new approaches opened up by Russell, Sartre and Wittgenstein, he combines succinct but insightful exposition with crisp critical comment. This new edition will continue to provide students with a valuable work of initial reference.
Download or read book Philosophers in the Republic written by Roslyn Weiss and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Plato’s Republic Socrates contends that philosophers make the best rulers because only they behold with their mind’s eye the eternal and purely intelligible Forms of the Just, the Noble, and the Good. When, in addition, these men and women are endowed with a vast array of moral, intellectual, and personal virtues and are appropriately educated, surely no one could doubt the wisdom of entrusting to them the governance of cities. Although it is widely—and reasonably—assumed that all the Republic’s philosophers are the same, Roslyn Weiss argues in this boldly original book that the Republic actually contains two distinct and irreconcilable portrayals of the philosopher. According to Weiss, Plato’s two paradigms of the philosopher are the "philosopher by nature" and the "philosopher by design." Philosophers by design, as the allegory of the Cave vividly shows, must be forcibly dragged from the material world of pleasure to the sublime realm of the intellect, and from there back down again to the "Cave" to rule the beautiful city envisioned by Socrates and his interlocutors. Yet philosophers by nature, described earlier in the Republic, are distinguished by their natural yearning to encounter the transcendent realm of pure Forms, as well as by a willingness to serve others—at least under appropriate circumstances. In contrast to both sets of philosophers stands Socrates, who represents a third paradigm, one, however, that is no more than hinted at in the Republic. As a man who not only loves "what is" but is also utterly devoted to the justice of others—even at great personal cost—Socrates surpasses both the philosophers by design and the philosophers by nature. By shedding light on an aspect of the Republic that has escaped notice, Weiss’s new interpretation will challenge Plato scholars to revisit their assumptions about Plato’s moral and political philosophy.
Download or read book Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy written by Peter Olsthoorn and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military and some other pockets of resistance, the notion of honor has become seriously out of date, while the term itself has almost disappeared from our moral language. Most of us think that people ought to do what is right based on a love for jus-tice rather than from a concern with how we are perceived by others. Wide-ranging and accessible, the book explores the role of honor in not only philosophy but also literature and war to make the case that honor can still play an important role in contemporary life.
Download or read book Animal Rights and Wrongs written by Roger Scruton and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this acclaimed book, Scruton takes the issues relating to vivisection, hunting, animal testing and BSE and places them in a wider framework of thought and feeling. Now available in paperback
Download or read book The Republic written by Plato and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic is Plato's most famous work and one of the seminal texts of Western philosophy and politics. The characters in this Socratic dialogue - including Socrates himself - discuss whether the just or unjust man is happier. They are the philosopher-kings of imagined cities and they also discuss the nature of philosophy and the soul among other things.
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 The Ontology and Function of Money written by Leonidas Zelmanovitz and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central thesis of the book is that in order to evaluate monetary policy, one should have a clear idea about the characteristics and functions of money as it evolved and in its current form. That is to say that without an understanding about how money evolved as a social institution, what it is today, and what is possible to know about monetary phenomena, it is not possible to develop a meaningful ethics for money; or, to put it differently, to find what kind of institutional arrangements may be deemed good money for the kind of society we are in. And without that, one faces severe limitations in offering a normative position about monetary policy. The project is, consequently, an interdisciplinary one. Its main thread is an inquiry of moral philosophy and its foundations, as applied to money, in order to create tools to evaluate public policy in regard to money, banking, and public finance; and the views of different schools on those topics are discussed. The book is organized in parts on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics of money to facilitate the presentation of all the subjects discussed to an educated readership (and not necessarily just one with a background in economics).
Download or read book Laws written by Plato and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Laws is Plato's last, longest, and perhaps, most famous work. It presents a conversation on political philosophy between three elderly men: an unnamed Athenian, a Spartan named Megillus, and a Cretan named Clinias. They worked to create a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony that would make all of its citizens happy and virtuous. In this work, Plato combines political philosophy with applied legislation, going into great detail concerning what laws and procedures should be in the state. For example, they consider whether drunkenness should be allowed in the city, how citizens should hunt, and how to punish suicide. The principles of this book have entered the legislation of many modern countries and provoke a great interest of philosophers even in the 21st century.
Download or read book Taking Back Philosophy written by Bryan W. Van Norden and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bryan W. Van Norden lambastes academic philosophy for its Eurocentrism and insularity and challenges educational institutions to live up to their cosmopolitan ideals. Taking Back Philosophy is at once a manifesto for multicultural education, an accessible introduction to Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, and a defense of the value of philosophy.
Download or read book On Duties written by Cicero and published by Stonewell Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Duties was written in October-November of 44 B.C. during Cicero's last year at age sixty-two in an attempt to define the ideals of public behavior. Active in politics, the practical philosopher tried to prevent revolutionary forces from taking control of the Roman Republic. Despite his efforts, the republican system failed to revive even upon the assassination of Caesar, and Cicero was himself assassinated shortly thereafter. Fortunately, his writings on how citizens of a republic should live have survived in this remarkable book, with as much relevance now as it had 2,000 years ago. Written in the form of a letter to Cicero's son, On Duties expounds the philosopher's conception of the best way to live, behave, and observe moral obligations--something desperately needed in the midst of today's political turmoil. In addition to sharing excellent moral instruction, On Duties gives a clear-eyed depiction of Roman political life under the Republic. On Duties is also known as On Obligations or On Moral Duties. The original Latin title was De Officiis. When the Gutenberg printing press was invented, De Officiis was the second book to be printed, after the Holy Bible. Early philosophers, historians, and religious thinkers who spoke highly of De Officiis included St. Ambrose, St. Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Grotius, and Locke.
Download or read book The Ethics of Giving written by Paul Woodruff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In giving to charity, should we strive to do the greatest good or promote a lesser good that we care more about? On such issues, ethical theory can have momentous practical effects. This volume is a unique collection of new papers on philanthropy from a range of philosophical perspectives. The authors are among the best-regarded philosophers writing on ethics today and include a number of thinkers who have not previously published on the subject. Most recently published work by philosophers on charitable giving tends to support what is called effective altruism-doing the most good you can. In practice, however, charitable giving is often local and relatively ineffective, supporting causes dear to the givers' hearts. Are ineffective givers doing wrong or merely doing less praiseworthy work than they might? This volume includes at least three challenges to the effective altruism movement, as well as two chapters that defend it against the gathering tide of objections. Most thinkers who align with utilitarianism support effective altruism, and some other perspectives do as well. But the ideal of personal integrity can push the other way. So can justice-based theories of giving: perhaps I could do the most good by stealing and giving to the poor, but that would be unjust. In the most important cases, however, justice leads to the same result as effective altruism. Other theories give different results. The authors represent include intuitionism, virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, theory of justice, and the ideal of personal integrity.
Download or read book Pursuits of Wisdom written by John M. Cooper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-25 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major reinterpretation of ancient philosophy that recovers the long Greek and Roman tradition of philosophy as a complete way of life--and not simply an intellectual discipline. Distinguished philosopher John Cooper traces how, for many ancient thinkers, philosophy was not just to be studied or even used to solve particular practical problems. Rather, philosophy--not just ethics but even logic and physical theory--was literally to be lived. Yet there was great disagreement about how to live philosophically: philosophy was not one but many, mutually opposed, ways of life. Examining this tradition from its establishment by Socrates in the fifth century BCE through Plotinus in the third century CE and the eclipse of pagan philosophy by Christianity, Pursuits of Wisdom examines six central philosophies of living--Socratic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, and the Platonist life of late antiquity. The book describes the shared assumptions that allowed these thinkers to conceive of their philosophies as ways of life, as well as the distinctive ideas that led them to widely different conclusions about the best human life. Clearing up many common misperceptions and simplifications, Cooper explains in detail the Socratic devotion to philosophical discussion about human nature, human life, and human good; the Aristotelian focus on the true place of humans within the total system of the natural world; the Stoic commitment to dutifully accepting Zeus's plans; the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure through tranquil activities that exercise perception, thought, and feeling; the Skeptical eschewal of all critical reasoning in forming their beliefs; and, finally, the late Platonist emphasis on spiritual concerns and the eternal realm of Being. Pursuits of Wisdom is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what the great philosophers of antiquity thought was the true purpose of philosophy--and of life.
Download or read book Thought Economics written by Vikas Shah and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Stimulating, intelligent and enjoyable discussions of the most important issues of our day.' STEVEN PINKER 'From entrepreneurs to athletes, and world leaders to entertainers, this is a fascinating collection of interviews with some of the world's most influential individuals.' MARK CUBAN 'Thought Economics is a fine rebuke to the soundbite culture; these interviews are driven by real curiosity, and there is a wealth of wisdom here.' EDWARD STOURTON ________________________ Since 2007, entrepreneur and philanthropist Vikas Shah has been on a mission to interview the people shaping our century. Including conversations with Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, politicians, artists and Olympians, he has been in the privileged position of questioning the minds that matter on the big issues that concern us all. We often talk of war and conflict, the economy, culture, technology and revolutions as if they are something other than us. But all these things are a product of us - of our ideas, our dreams and our fears. We live in fast-moving and extraordinary times, and the changes we're experiencing now, in these first decades of the twenty-first century, feel particularly poignant as decisions are made that will inform our existence for years to come. What started out as a personal interest in the mechanisms that inform our views of the world, and a passion for understanding, has grown into a phenomenal compilation of once-in-a-lifetime conversations. In this incredible collection, Shah shares some of his most emotive and insightful interviews to date.
Download or read book Philosophers Walks written by Bruce Baugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, André Breton, Rousseau, Simone de Beauvoir: who could imagine a better group of walking companions? In this engaging and invigorating book, Bruce Baugh takes us on a philosophical tour, following in the footsteps and thoughts of some great philosophers and thinkers. How does walking reveal space and place and provide a heightened sense of embodied consciousness? Can walking in André Breton’s footsteps enable us to "remember" Breton’s experiences? A chapter on Sartre and Beauvoir investigates walking in relation to anxiety and our different ways of responding to our bodies. Walking in the Quantocks, Baugh seeks out the connection between Coleridge’s walking and his poetic imagination. With Rousseau and Nietzsche, he examines the link between solitary mountain walks and great thoughts; with Kierkegaard, he looks at the urban flâneur and the disjunction between outward appearances and spiritual inwardness. Finally, in Sussex and London, Baugh explores how Virginia Woolf transposed a Romantic nature pantheism to London in Mrs. Dalloway. Philosophers’ Walks provides a fresh and imaginative reading of great philosophers, offering a new way of understanding some of their major works and ideas.
Download or read book Plato s Political Philosophy written by Mark Blitz and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, yet compact, introduction examines Plato's understanding of law, justice, virtue, and the connection between politics and philosophy. Focusing on three of Plato's dialogues—The Laws, The Republic, and The Statesman—Mark Blitz lays out the philosopher's principal interests in government and the strength and limit of the law, the connection between law and piety, the importance of founding, and the status and limits of political knowledge. He examines all of Plato's discussions of politics and virtues, comments on specific dialogues, and discusses the philosopher's explorations of beauty, pleasure, good, and the relations between politics and reason. Throughout, Blitz reinforces Plato's emphasis on clear and rigorous reasoning in ethics and political life and explains in straightforward language the valuable lessons one can draw from examining Plato's writings. The only introduction to Plato that both gathers his separate discussions of politically relevant topics and pays close attention to the context and structure of his dialogues, this volume directly contrasts the modern view of politics with that of the ancient master. It is an excellent companion to Plato's Dialogues.
