Philosophy Academic

The Star Wars films continue to revolutionize science fiction, creating new standards for cinematographic excellence and permeating popular culture around the world. The films feature many complex themes ranging from good versus evil and moral development and corruption to religious faith and pragmatism, forgiveness and redemption, and many others.

Susan Shumsky is a successful author in the new age/spirituality field, writing books on meditation, intuition, prayer, auras, chakras, and the like. But in the 1970s, she was one of only a handful of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s personal attendants and administrators, in India, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Following the teachings of Maharishi displaced Susan’s devotion to the hippie lifestyle, as she learned about meditation and grew spiritually self-aware. Maharishi founded the spiritual movement TM (Transcendental Meditation).

With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger's immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism. "It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger." (George Kateb, The New Republic)

Dallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. His presence and ideas rippled through the lives of many prominent leaders and authors, such as John Ortberg, Richard Foster, James Bryan Smith, Paula Huston, and J. P. Moreland. As a result of these relationships and the books he wrote, he fundamentally altered the way tens of thousands of Christians have understood and experienced the spiritual life.

A powerful defense of intellectual freedom told through the ordeals of contemporary scientists attacked for exploring controversial ideas, by a noted science historian and medical activist.

Best-selling author Rafe Esquith, the only teacher to receive the National Medal of Arts, has garnered the American Teacher Award and numerous other honors. Still teaching fifth graders in a small, leaky classroom in downtown Los Angeles, Esquith fosters a wholesome climate where character, humility, and diligence matter and support is unconditional. For his mostly poor and Hispanic students, Esquith models two maxims: Be nice and work hard, and There are no shortcuts. And his students thrive!

What does it mean to know something? Can we have confidence in our knowledge? Epistemology, the study of knowledge, can often seem like a daunting subject. And yet few topics are more basic to human life. We are inquisitive creatures by nature, and the unending quest for truth leads us to raise difficult questions about the quest itself. What are the conditions, sources, and limits of our knowledge? Do our beliefs need to be rationally justified? Can we have certainty? In this primer on epistemology, James Dew and Mark Foreman guide readers through this discipline in philosophy.

Today, we take for granted that a telescope allows us to see galaxies millions of light years away. But before its invention, people used nothing more than their naked eye to fathom what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the 1500s - of different nationality, age, religion, and class - collaborate to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun? With this radical discovery that went against the Church, they created our contemporary world. Heaven on Earth is an intimate examination of this scientific family.

"Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony.... Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg", writes Edward O. Wilson in his most finely observed work in decades. In a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambique and New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico's Dauphin Island and even his parents' overgrown yard back in Alabama, Wilson thrillingly evokes his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with more than 15,000 ant species.

Called the "greatest stock picker of the century" by Money magazine, legendary fund manager Sir John Templeton is remembered as one of the world's foremost investors, known for his pioneering insights and phenomenal investment performance over a professional career which spanned more than half a century. Templeton's Way with Money provides a unique, professional 21st century appraisal of what made this formidable investor the success he was and why his methods remain as valid today as they were during his long and successful lifetime.

1898 in der norditalienischen Stadt Modena geboren, lebte Enzo Ferrari seinen Traum und gründete den berühmtesten Sportwagenhersteller der Welt. Dieses Buch analysiert, wie er seine Ziele mit als modern geltenden Konzepten erreicht hat oder wo Führungstheorien, emotionale Intelligenz, Wirtschaftsethik, Kundenorientierung und Nachhaltigkeit bereits zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts Leitprinzipien der Wirtschaft waren.

It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy that have no intellectual legitimacy. They argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech.

The discovery of DNA’s structure is the story of five towering minds in pursuit of the advancement of science, and for almost all of them, the prospect of fame and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and Linus Pauling. Howard Markel skillfully recreates the intense intellectual journey, and fraught personal relationships, that ultimately led to a spectacular breakthrough. But it is Rosalind Franklin - fiercely determined, relentless, and an outsider at Cambridge and the University of London in the 1950s - who becomes a focal point for Markel.

Since his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury and his return to academic life (Master of Magdalene College Cambridge), Rowan Williams has demonstrated a massive new surge of intellectual energy. In this new audiobook, he turns his attention to St Augustine. St Augustine not only shaped the development of Western theology, he also made a major contribution to political theory ( The City of God) and, through his Confessions, to the understanding of human psychology.

The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: Rocket Scientist Killed in Pasadena Explosion. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene.

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy.

In American Philosophy, John Kaag - a disillusioned philosopher at sea in his marriage and career - stumbles upon a treasure trove of rare books on an old estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that once belonged to the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. The library includes notes from Whitman, inscriptions from Frost, and first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As he begins to catalog and preserve these priceless books, Kaag rediscovers the very tenets of American philosophy.

दुनिया भर के दार्शनिकों में सुकरात का विशिष्‍ट स्थान है। उनमें सोचने-समझने की क्षमता थी और वह सत्य एवं न्याय की खोज के प्रति दृढ़-संकल्प थे। वह मानते थे कि एक बेहतर विश्‍व की कल्पना तभी साकार हो सकती है, जब लोग समझदार एवं बुद्धिमान हों। हमें किसी दूसरे के विचारों को यूँ ही स्वीकार नहीं कर लेना चाहिए, बल्कि उनको आलोचनात्मक तर्क की कसौटी पर परखना चाहिए।.

Alcune storie sono troppo assurde per non essere raccontate, come l'epico scontro Alessandro Volta VS Luigi Galvani, tra rane morte ed energia elettrica che ha ispirato la nascita del mostro di Frankenstein. O ancora Stephen Hawking e quella sua fissa per i buchi neri, Margherita Hack che pedalava verso l'osservatorio tra le bombe della seconda guerra mondiale, Richard Feynman che scassinava casseforti durante il progetto Manhattan, Lord Kelvin il barone della morte termica dell'Universo, Enrico Fermi che ha scisso l'atomo e dato il via all'era nucleare.

Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" challenged centuries of scientific understanding, placed him in direct opposition to Albert Einstein, and put Niels Bohr in the middle of one of the most heated debates in scientific history. Heisenberg's theorem stated that there were physical limits to what we could know about sub-atomic particles; this "uncertainty" would have shocking implications.