According to Oscar Wilde, 'the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not'. Through a series of close and often unusual readings, this book endeavours to develop Wilde's remark into a detailed and creative theory of reading. It focuses on a series of neologisms from writing of the period.

We live in a world beset by many problems, and most of these problems are of our own creation. There is a method for solving these problems, and it can be found in the Christ message. In A New Age of Vision, author J. Craig Woods revisits the message Jesus brought to earth in an attempt to understand Gods purpose for us and how we can improve our human condition through spiritual growth. A spiritual journey to find the truth in the gospel of Jesus Christ, A New Age of Vision takes a new and bold look at what his message really means for us today. It explores the history of Christian religion and offers examples of how Christian doctrines were developed, and why these man-made doctrines missed the mark. It seeks to provide an understanding of why the Christian religion has failed us, and it also discusses the nature of our mind which provides the connection between the spiritual and physical realm. Finally, it investigates the missing gospel books and reveals an exciting truth about the teaching of Jesus Christ. A New Age of Vision shows how the Christ message offers us the truth we need for our tumultuous times. Learning and understanding this message provides the instructions for spiritual growth and the return to our spiritual Garden of Eden.

AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION An Instant New York Times Bestseller Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

"The Republic" is a Socratic dialogue, authored by the famed Greek Philosopher Plato around 375 BC, concerning justice, the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato's best-known work, and one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically. In the dialogue, Socrates discusses the meaning of justice and whether the just man is happier than the unjust man with various Athenians and foreigners. They consider the natures of existing regimes and then propose a series of different, hypothetical cities in comparison, culminating in Kallipolis, a utopian city-state ruled by a philosopher-king. They also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the role of the philosopher and of poetry in society. The dialogue's setting seems to be during the Peloponnesian War.

"An imposing edifice of thought. Every one of its twenty chapters will richly repay careful reading. Those passages dealing with ethics, love, the significance of knowledge, and the meaning of life are hard to surpass." - New York Evening Post The title of this book, Tertium Organum, boldly refers no less to a reorganization of all knowledge, but it is primarily a study of psychology, more specifically the psychology of our higher mind. For Ouspensky what we can call the higher mind represents, within a single person, the development of an entirely new way of understanding. In short, psychology is the art of self-study. With remarkable scope and sophistication, Ouspensky shows us in this book, which has been hailed as "a work of genius," just how vast and strange our universe really is.

The complete title of one of the most famous works ever written, Isaac Newton's Principia, was actually Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Sadly, many contemporary philosophers would be hard-pressed to say just what natural philosophy (or philosophy of nature) is all about. Without question, the philosophy of nature has received relatively less attention than ethics and metaphysics for some time. In Nature, the Soul, and God, Jean W. Rioux has brought together a number of important readings in natural philosophy, from the Pre-Socratic philosophers and Aristotle to the 19th-century entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. Collectively, they present three ways in which one might conceive of the natural world in a pre-scientific reflection upon the way things are: either the classical materialism of Empedocles, Democritus, and Epicurus, the formalism of Plato, or the hylomorphic view espoused and defended by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. In the sections following the consideration of nature are selections from these representative views concerning the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. Through the medium of philosophers both ancient and modern, Rioux makes the point that one's philosophical account of the natural world will have an impact upon how one regards human nature, as well as divinity itself. It all begins with nature.