Philosophy Ethics

When The Stone Reader—a landmark collection of 133 essays from the New York Times’ award-winning philosophy column—first published, in 2015, the world urgently needed insight and wisdom, and for many, the book served as a bulwark of reason against the rising tide of post-fact rhetoric. Now, as disinformation continues to run rampant and our rights are increasingly called into question, editors Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley contend that philosophy in the public sphere is more crucial than ever.

For twenty years, Mark Tuitert has used the principles of Stoic philosophy to become a gold-medal winning Olympic champion athlete, successful entrepreneur, as well as to deal with the challenges in his professional and private life. Now, in the internationally bestselling book The Stoic Mindset, Mark lays out the ten practical lessons through which everyone, in any situation, can develop a Stoic mindset.

From bestselling author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, the classic guide to the art of principled dissent and disagreement “Hitchens is, first and last, a writer, an always exciting, often exacting, furious polemicist.”―The Boston Globe In Letters to a Young Contrarian, bestselling...

Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of vertebrates and trillions of invertebrates every year for a variety of purposes. We also plan to use animals, AI systems, and other nonhumans at even higher levels in the future. Yet as the dominant species, humanity has a responsibility to ask: Which nonhumans matter, how much do they matter, and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology?

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For 18th-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.

As people come to understand more about animals' inner lives, we feel a growing compassion, a desire to better their lives. But how do we translate this compassion into helping other creatures, both those that are and are not our pets? Bringing together the latest science with heartfelt storytelling, Animals' Best Friends reveals the opportunities we have in everyday life to help animals in our homes, in the wild, in zoos, and in science labs, as well as those considered to be food.

This audiobook contains a selection of writings from Fear and Trembling, Either Or, and The Present Moment, written by Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard's theological work focuses on Christian ethics, the institution of the Church, the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity, the infinite qualitative distinction between man and God, and the individual's subjective relationship to the God-Man Jesus the Christ, which came through faith.

A train is racing toward five men, tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. If a fat man is pushed onto the line, although he will die, his body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man? As David Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex, and important, than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.

Vanessa Kisuule is a big Michael Jackson fan. This fixation once gave her great joy, but now it keeps her up at night. In her bracingly honest, energetic and lively book she explores the fall-out from that fandom and how, or if, we can hold people to account whilst loving them at the same time. Why do famous musicians mean so much to us? How does the pop culture machine both mirror and magnify the worst aspects of human nature? Why is it so hard to accept that the people we love, famous or not, are capable of doing terrible things?

Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.

In the face of continuing advances in medical research and treatment, bioethical questions remain at the heart of many of our society’s difficult moral problems. Since its original publication in 1996, Gilbert Meilaender’s Bioethics has proven itself an effective introduction into this arena, providing thoughtful guidance on today’s most relevant issues, including abortion, assisted reproduction, genetic research, euthanasia, human experimentation, and much more.

Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness. Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, IMoral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle delves into the question of what is best for mankind and humans as individuals. His conclusion is that happiness is the best possible human condition, though he is not referencing the emotion of happiness. Instead, Aristotle concludes that true happiness comes as a way of life in which the individual contributes to the good of his community, as well as his mind.

Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us—as universal as it is painful—is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we grieve, and how grief can ultimately lead us to a richer self-understanding and a fuller realization of our humanity.

Tras la partida de Sócrates al Hades, todos los hombres de Grecia se llenaron la cabeza de interrogantes respecto a su muerte. En este libro —uno de los diálogos más importantes de Platón—, se sostiene una charla entre Equécrates y Fedón, revelándose las últimas preocupaciones del famoso filósofo, así como también valiosos debates en lo que intervendrían Simias y Cebete, respecto a la naturaleza del alma y como esta representa un ser inmortal que trasciende al cuerpo; y que, para su propio bienestar, debe estar lo más desapegada posible a las bajas ambiciones terrenales.

Como sus predecesores y contemporáneos, Aristóteles no fue la excepción dentro de los filósofos que abordaron el amplio cuestionamiento de lo que significaba el alma. A partir del análisis de las opiniones dadas por muchos de sus colegas, el padre de la filosofía occidental, no solo descartaría los viejos mitos respecto a la naturaleza del alma, sino que también explicaría las dinámicas y diferencias existentes entre los distintos tipos de almas de los seres vivos, usando para ello el movimiento, las sensaciones, los deseos, los pensamientos y las facultades de los sentidos.

In his essay The Over-Soul, Ralph Waldo Emerson outlines his belief in a God that resides in each of us and whom we can communicate with, without membership in a church or the assistance of an intermediary church official.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Fiction is an Art in every way, worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry; that is to say, her field is as boundless, her possibilities as vast, her excellences as worthy of admiration, as may be claimed for any of her sister Arts.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) is the first of Immanuel Kant's mature works on moral philosophy and remains one of the most important in the field. Kant examines the core concepts and principles of moral theory, showing that they are normative for rational agents. He aspires to lay bare the fundamental principle of morality and prove that it applies to us. Kant offers the argument that the rightness of an action is determined by the character of the principle that a person chooses to act upon.