Social Ethics

Pendant plus de quinze ans, Gilles Deleuze a donné son cours le mardi, de 10 h à 13 h 30, dans une salle ordinaire de l'université Paris VIII. Il était hostile aux amphithéâtres dont il disait qu'ils coupaient tout échange. Au premier rang, les prévoyants arrivaient dès 8 h 30 : étudiants japonais avec magnéto high-tech, retraités ou habitués passionnés. Les suivants se mettaient où ils pouvaient jusqu'à former des grappes autour de la porte. Ce cours était un mélange incroyable de liberté et d'une parole magistrale avec des moments d'inspiration de haute volée.

When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality.

When Thomas Aquinas addressed the best arguments against God in his masterwork, the Summa Theologica, he listed only two. The first was the problem of evil: How can God—who is perfectly good—exist alongside that which is against Him? His second: Is God needed to explain the world? Patrick Flynn presents the best arguments for God while also addressing the strongest objections. This book is destined to become the apologetic gold standard for defending classical theism against atheistic naturalism.

The Enchiridion or Manual of Epictetus (Enchiridion is Greek for "that which is held in the hand") is a short manual of Stoic ethical advice. This manual has been carefully adapted in to modern English to allow for easy listening. Enjoy.

When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to.

Revolutionary War officer Nathan Hale, one of America's first spies, said, "Any kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary." A statue of Hale stands outside CIA headquarters, and the agency often cites his statement as one of its guiding principles. But who decides what is necessary for the public good, and is it really true that any kind of service is permissible for the public good? These questions are at the heart of James M. Olson's book, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying.

Publicado por primera vez en 1781 y revisado en 1787, Crítica de la Razón Pura es considerada la obra maestra de Kant y una de las piezas centrales de la filosofía moderna. Kant busca responder a preguntas fundamentales sobre la naturaleza del conocimiento humano, la relación entre la experiencia y la realidad, y los límites de la razón. La Crítica de la Razón Pura marcó un punto de inflexión en la filosofía al proponer que ni el empirismo ni el racionalismo por sí solos podían explicar completamente el conocimiento humano.

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.

In Pedagogy of Freedom Paulo Freire travels ever more deeply into the territory where learning and activism are the essence of human life. This profound book shows why an engaged way of learning and teaching is central to the creation of the individual, culture, and history. This book displays the striking creativity and profound insight that characterized Freire's work to the very end of his life—an uplifting and provocative exploration not only for educators, but also for all that learn and live.

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve.

In these 20 short chapters, Karen Casey explores what matters most about loss, unconditional love, security, surrender, powerlessness, peace, strength, and fear. Each chapter touches on how her own commitment to a spiritual path has had the greatest influence on her life’s direction.

In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies". Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.

The essays in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics have a rather special place in Schopenhauer’s work, both being written as entries to Scandinavian philosophy competitions, one in Norway and one in Sweden.

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.

The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the United Nations in 2015, comprise an ambitious and sweeping agenda that unites economic, social, and environmental aims. What resources do the world's religious and secular traditions offer in support of these objectives? Which principles do these traditions hold in common? This book presents an in-depth and deeply engaged conversation among interfaith religious leaders and interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners in pursuit of an ethical consensus that could ground sustainable development efforts.

Following Jesus has never been harder. In a culture that glamorizes sex, chases fame, and shames those who don't fall in line, it takes a rebel to be a Christian. In this book, Sean McDowell aims to encourage and inspire a generation of rebels who will dare to stand up to the madness in a just and loving manner. A Rebel's Manifesto offers clear guidance to help people navigate the many moral issues that plague this generation.

Para los antiguos, la justicia iba mucho más allá que lo que sucedía en un tribunal. Era mucho más urgente que las ideas que se debatían en las aulas de Filosofía. Implicaba una forma de vida, el compromiso personal de hacer lo correcto por difícil que fuera.

Janet Malcolm delves into the psychopathology of journalism using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example: the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. Examining the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject, Malcolm finds that neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation.

The ancient biographer and essayist Plutarch thought deeply about the leadership qualities of the eminent Greeks and Romans he profiled in his famous - and massive - Lives, including politicians and generals such as Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. Luckily for us, Plutarch distilled what he learned about wise leadership in a handful of essays, which are filled with essential lessons for experienced and aspiring leaders in any field today.

While quackery—loosely defined as the spread of false "knowledge," often accompanied by various versions of "snake oil"—is not a novel phenomenon, it has never posed as great a threat to public health as today. In Quack Quack, Dr. Joe Schwarcz focuses on the deluge of anecdotes, cherry-picked data, pseudoscientific nonsense, and seductive baseless health claims that undermine efforts to educate the public about evidence-based science. The wide scope of the topics drawn from past and present aims to cast a life preserver to people drowning in a sea of misinformation.