Philosophy Ethics

Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting the most basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.

Most of us want to succeed. And most of us want to do the right thing. But we often forget that the way tosucceed is by doing the right thing, as Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe remind us in Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. When the institutions that shape our society need to change, the people in them typically either make more rules or offer smarter incentives.

This recording presents a scholarly but accessible 20th century translation by Constantine FitzGibbon, and opens with an introduction to the life and works of La Rochefoucauld, as well as his own description of himself. It closes with a brief but interesting bibliography, in which FitzGibbon brings clarity to the various editions. It is presented in a very listenable manner by David Rintoul, who gives each maxim the weight and character it deserves.

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats, and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or 10? They adopt 20.

To flourish, humans need to develop virtues of independent thought and acknowledged social dependence. In this book, a leading moral philosopher presents a comparison of humans to other animals and explores the impact of these virtues.

At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence. We invented writing. Produced incredible achievements in music, the arts, and the sciences. We’ve built sprawling cities and traveled across oceans—and space—and expanded to every part of the globe. Yet, human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. Understood side-by-side, human exceptionalism begins to look more like a curse.

We all want to lead a happy life. Traditionally, when in need of guidance, comfort or inspiration, many people turn to religion. But there has been another way to learn how to live well - the humanist way - and in today's more secular world, it is more relevant than ever. In The Little Book of Humanism, Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson share over 2,000 years of humanist wisdom through an uplifting collection of stories, quotes and meditations on how to live an ethical and fulfilling life, grounded in reason and humanity.

Every time we think ahead, we are crafting a story. Every daily plan and every political vision, social movement, scientific hypothesis, business proposal, and technological breakthrough starts with “what if?” Linking causes to effects, considering hypotheticals and counterfactuals, asking how other people will react: these are the essence of narrative. So why do we keep overlooking story’s importance to intelligence in favor of logic?

Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a "slave morality". With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own "will to power" upon the world.

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom was written in 1647. It is a collection of 300 maxims on various topics, each elaborated with a commentary. The sayings offer advice and guidance on how to live well, advance socially, and be a better person.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is best known as the cofounder of theosophy, which is essentially a selective conflation of Hindu and Buddhist ideas combined with Blavatsky's idiosyncratic system of cosmology. The Voice of the Silence, first published in 1889, is described by the author as "chosen fragments from the Book of the Golden Precepts, for the daily use of disciples".

If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones! He's both a mild-mannered archaeology professor and an intrepid adventurer traversing the globe in search of lost artifacts. Whether seeking the Ark of the Covenant in Egypt, the Sankara Stones in India, the Holy Grail in Turkey, or a mysterious crystal skull in Peru, Indy's adventures never fail to delight audiences. Indiana Jones and Philosophy takes you on a whirlwind journey to investigate some of the most enduring questions about the human condition.

"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person." ( The World According to Mister Rogers)

Divided into short chapters that can be listened to in brief sittings, What Is Stoicism? compiles two millennia of Stoic thought into simple conversational prose.

In this treasure of a book, Anna Quindlen, the best-selling novelist and columnist, reflects on what it takes to “get a life” - to live deeply every day and from your own unique self, rather than merely to exist through your days. “Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us,” Quindlen writes, “because unless you know the clock is ticking, it is so easy to waste our days, our lives.”

In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a predetermined limit.

When we’re moving at 115 MPH, we rarely see the wall coming. But it comes for all of us and when it does, we grasp for lessons, for meaning, for purpose. Each moment (good or bad) and each win or loss, provides us an opportunity to learn, and if we choose to take it, that opportunity can change our lives - and the world - for the better. The human spirit craves connection. Authenticity. Belonging. Touch. Gratitude. Purpose. We need to make our interactions count.

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combinationof passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.

In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He reveals that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life, and what we do with our time together.