Social Philosophy

When Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Thuan met at an academic conference in the summer of 1997, they began discussing the many remarkable connections between the teachings of Buddhism and the findings of recent science. That conversation grew into an astonishing correspondence exploring a series of fascinating questions. Did the universe have a beginning? Might our perception of time in fact be an illusion, a phenomenon created in our brains that has no ultimate reality? What is consciousness and how did it evolve?

Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

Aristotle was the first philosopher to write ethical treatises. His best-known work in this field, The Nicomachean Ethics, consists of 10 books addressing the question of how the individual should best live. For Aristotle, ethics seeks to determine what makes a virtuous character possible, which is essential for a state of well-being. He describes a sequence of necessary steps to achieve this, such as righteous actions that promote the development of the right habits. He examines the moral virtues and their corresponding vices, like courage versus fear.

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose—and why we need them. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share.

Your argument is valid and you know it; yet once again you find yourself leaving a debate feeling defeated and embarrassed. The matter is only made worse when you realize that your defeat came at the hands of someone's abuse of logic - and that with the right skills you could have won the argument. The ability to recognize logical fallacies when they occur is an essential life skill. Mastering Logical Fallacies is the clearest, boldest, and most systematic guide to dominating the rules and tactics of successful arguments.

As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption - even murder and genocide - generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie. In Lying, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie.

Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over 30 years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.

As the failures of physicalism begin to shake the confidence of even the most biased of its supporters, a new view on the nature of reality is establishing itself as the only tenable alternative: Analytic Idealism. According to it, there is a world out there independent of our individual minds, but such world is—just like ourselves—also mental or experiential. While being a realist, naturalist, rationalist, and even reductionist view, Analytic Idealism flips our culture-bound intuitions on their head.

This groundbreaking audiobook by Michel Foucault, the most influential philosopher since Sartre, compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as Foucault examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, he suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to his soul-and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.

Gurdjieff warned against taking anything literally or on faith and advised accepting only experience that could be lived oneself. He also said that one has to find out “how to know” and that understanding knowledge of being depends on the “level of being.” The aim of the Fourth Way is toward a change of being—from the level of man number one, two, and three to that of man number four. Stephen Grant offers a profound reassessment of Gurdjieff’s role as a spiritual leader and the Fourth Way in terms of esoteric theory.

The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) is one of Nietzsche's greatest books. His wonderfully fertile mind roams over mankind, his thoughts, his emotions, his behaviour and his weaknesses with remarkable clarity, with insight - but also with humour!In this work are 383 separate paragraphs, some short, some long, but all singular observations - the epitome of his famous aphoristic style. 'Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.'

Born out of the political turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan stands out as one of the most in influential political and philosophical texts of the 17th century. It argues for the restoration of the monarchy in light of the republic and calls for a commonwealth ruled by an authoritative, autocratic figure with absolute sovereignty. This would put an end to all controversy, war, and fear and establish peace via social contract.

The Cave and the Light reveals how two Greek philosophers became the twin fountainheads of Western culture, and how their rivalry gave Western civilization its unique dynamism down to the present.

Counsels and Maxims is a classic work by noted German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His work has influenced some of the modern world's greatest thinkers, including Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erwin Schrödinger. This piece was originally translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders.

Vous sentez-vous perdu, bloqué ou en quête d'un sens plus profond à votre existence ? Aspirez-vous à découvrir la mission de votre âme, à vous libérer des blessures du passé ou à créer des liens plus authentiques avec les autres ? Si vous avez répondu "oui" à l'une de ces questions, alors ce livre est fait pour vous !

Credited as the Father of Liberalism and revered for his ground-breaking theories, John Locke left behind a legacy which has radically shaped political and philosophical thought for over 300 years. His writings continue to inspire and educate people to this day, from founding our central ideas of consciousness and knowledge to creating a framework for society which greatly influenced America’s founding fathers.

In 1962, the young Eugene Rose - the future Hieromonk Seraphim - undertook to write a monumental chronicle of the abandonment of truth in the modern age. Of the hundreds of pages of materials he compiled for this work, only the present essay, on nihilism, has come down to us in completed form. Here Eugene reveals the core of all modern thought and life - the belief that all truth is relative - and shows how this belief has been translated into action in our era. Today, more than half a century after he wrote it, this essay is more timely than ever.

Perfect for any listener who is searching for a deceptively simple yet powerful approach to life, this book offers you a source of inner strength and guidance, allowing you to enrich your life and face your challenges with a renewed level of insight.

Here, in this second collection of Socratic Dialogues from Plato's Early Period, read by David Rintoul as Socrates with a full cast, are contrasting six works. Often, as with Gorgias, which opens the recording, Socrates combats the popular subjects of sophistry and rhetoric, in direct conversation with Gorgias (a leading sophist teacher), and with one of his pupils, Callicles.

In Prometheus and Atlas, Dr. Jorjani endeavors to deconstruct the nihilistic materialism and rootless rationalism of the modern West by showing how it was grounded on a dishonest suppression of the spectral and why it has a parasitic relationship with Abrahamic religious fundamentalism. Rejecting the marginalization of ESP and psychokinesis as “paranormal”, Prometheus and Atlas makes the case that psi is only “super natural” insofar as our reductive modern scientific models have occluded supernature for practical purposes.