Philosophy Social Science

What does it actually mean to be rational? Not Hollywood-style "rational", where you forsake all human feeling to embrace Cold Hard Logic, but where you make good decisions, even when it's hard; where you reason well, even in the face of massive uncertainty; where you recognize and make full use of your fuzzy intuitions and emotions, rather than trying to discard them. In Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.

A leading thinker of the Stoic school of philosophy, Epictetus (A.D. 55-135) was a renowned teacher whose students transcribed and compiled his teachings; this collection presents the work of Arrian, a Greek philosopher and historian who was a disciple of Epictetus. In these two brief but highly influential works, Epictetus demonstrates that philosophy is more than a theoretical discipline; it is a way of life based on logic, reason, and self-reflection.

Said to be the world's longest poem, Mahabharata was originally composed in 100,000 Sanskrit verses by the ancient Indian sage Vyasa. Revered as a sacred text within Hinduism, it contains the great spiritual teaching Bhagavad-gita. Krishna Dharma has condensed the epic into a fast paced novel that fully retains the majestic mood of the original. A powerful and moving tale, it recounts the history of the five heroic Pandava brothers, sons of the Emperor Pandu.

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: The union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

The Eye of the I is a brilliant work that dissolves the barriers between the known and the unknown, between science and spirituality, and between the Newtonian linear paradigm of the ego and the nonlinear reality of Enlightenment. With the resolution of the self, the self shines forth and reveals one's true identity.

The Fountainhead studies the conflict between artistic genius and social convention, a theme Ayn Rand later developed into the idealistic philosophy knows as Objectivism. Rand's hero is Howard Roark, a brilliant young architect who won't compromise his integrity, especially in the unconventional buildings he designs.

Although he was born into slavery and endured a permanent physical disability, Epictetus (ca. 50-ca. 130 CE) maintained that all people are free to control their lives and live in harmony with nature. We will always be happy, he argued, if we learn to desire that things should be exactly as they are. After attaining his freedom, Epictetus spent his career teaching philosophy and advising a daily regimen of self-examination.

Communication from Nostradamus via several mediums through hypnosis, supervised by Dolores Cannon. Includes the Prophecies of Nostradamus, in Middle French with English translation.

In simple and straightforward language, Bhante Gunaratana shares the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness and how we can use these principles to improve our daily lives, deepen our mindfulness, and move closer to our spiritual goals. Based on the classic Satipatthana Sutta, one of the most succinct yet rich explanations of meditation, Bhante's presentation is nonetheless thoroughly modern.

Taking up Lenin's challenge to radically reconsider materialism in the wake of each big scientific discovery, and rejecting the recent vogue for giving a vague spiritualist spin to wave mechanics, Žižek embraces the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics with characteristic erudition and verve. Drawing on the central themes of the holographic universe, non-commutativity and the collapse of superpositions, Žižek evolves a quantum-inspired ontology which reinvents the historical materialism of Hegel and Heidegger...

Durant lucidly describes the philosophical systems of such world-famous “monarchs of the mind” as Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Along with their ideas, he offers their flesh-and-blood biographies, placing their thoughts within their own time and place and elucidating their influence on our modern intellectual heritage. This book is packed with wisdom and wit.

One of the most prominent thinkers of the 19th century, Nietzsche was a cultural critic and philosopher whose theories on truth, morality, nihilism and the meaning of existence have had enormous influence on Western philosophy.

Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl is known as the founder of logotherapy, a mode of psychotherapy based on human's motivation to search for meaning in his life. The author discusses his ideas in the context of other prominent psychotherapies and describes the techniques he uses with his patients to combat the "existential vacuum".

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives. In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life.

La grande histoire des croyances et des spiritualités des origines à nos jours : un voyage passionnant au cœur de ce que l’humanité a de plus sacré !

A seminal work of scientific and philosophical exploration. Ever since the Greeks coined the language we commonly use for scientific description, mythology and science have developed separately. But what if we could prove that all myths have one common origin in a celestial cosmology? What if the gods, the places they lived, and what they did are but ciphers for celestial activity, a language for the perpetuation of complex astronomical data?

"Le Prince" est un traité politique écrit au début du XVIe siècle par Nicolas Machiavel, homme politique et écrivain florentin. Ce livre audio montre comment devenir prince, et le rester. D'aucuns pourrait dire que les princes d'alors sont les dirigeants d'aujourd'hui. Machiavel analyse des exemples de l'histoire antique et de l'histoire italienne de l'époque, et en tire des enseignements. Cet ouvrage est universel et intemporel car il ne donne pas de conseils moraux. Le seul objectif est de conquérir le pouvoir puis de le conserver, par tous les moyens.

Epictetus, a Greek stoic and freed slave, ran a thriving philosophy school in Nicropolis in the early second century AD. His animated discussions were celebrated for their rhetorical wizardry and were written down by Arrian, his most famous pupil. Together with the Enchiridion, a manual of his main ideas, and the fragments collected here, The Discourses argue that happiness lies in learning to perceive exactly what is in our power to change and what is not, and in embracing our fate to live in harmony with god and nature.

This volume of short essays and other pieces by C.S. Lewis is part of a larger collection, C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. In addition to his many books, letters, and poems, C.S. Lewis wrote a great number of essays and shorter pieces on various subjects. He wrote extensively on Christian theology and the defense of faith but also on ethical issues and the nature of literature and storytelling. Within these pages is a treasure trove of Lewis' reflections on diverse topics.

"The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this." This is the key statement of Miracles, in which C.S. Lewis shows that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in His creation.