Want to sort out the claims of experts, pseudo-experts, scam artists, and liars alike? Want to protect yourself from the dangers of the ubiquitous nonsense and outright frauds that assault you from every side? Want to become acquainted with the pleasurable activity of discovering truth while enhancing your sophistication as a thinker?In this erudite yet entertaining handbook on critical thinking, Dr. Bernard M. Patten uses neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry to teach you to do all this and more. He shows you that clear thinking is not just fun but also keeps you out of trouble, makes you more efficient, helps you develop and maintain prosperity, and generally gives you an edge in both your personal and business life.A Board Certified neurologist and a lecturer in formal, informal, and symbolic logic at Rice University, Dr. Patten has the scientific background as well as the philosophical training to give readers the most reliable and current information on how the brain thinks, learns, and remembers. By means of multiple (and sometimes startling) contemporary examples and insights, the author exercises your mind as an exercise machine might exercise your muscles. Each exercise is specifically formulated with the neuropsychology of learning in mind (repetition, tied association, visual images, distribution of tasks in time, modularity, etc.), so the reader acquires valuable knowledge quickly and painlessly.Emphasizing practical usefulness in real-life situations and evidence-based analysis, Dr. Patten examines: -investment frauds and other scams-groupthink-the psychology of belief-content analysis-hidden meanings-negotiation strategiesHe also gives careful attention to the rules of clear thinking, discusses the reality principle, explains inductive and deductive logic, exposes traditional fallacies, and elucidates truth tables, syllogisms, and symbolic logic.Fast, fact-filled, and fun, this superb self-help guide to better thinking teaches you to take control of your own destiny by accurately determining the truth value of statements and behaviors in many contexts

Ibn al-'Arabi is still known as "the Great Sheik" among the surviving Sufi orders. Born in Muslim Spain, he has become famous in the West as the greatest mystical thinker of Islamic civilization. He was a great philosopher, theologian, and poet. William Chittick takes a major step toward exposing the breadth and depth of Ibn al-'Arabi's vision. The book offers his view of spiritual perfection and explains his theology, ontology, epistemology, hermeneutics, and soteriology. The clear language, unencumbered by methodological jargon, makes it accessible to those familiar with other spiritual traditions, while its scholarly precision will appeal to specialists. Beginning with a survey of Ibn al-'Arabi's major teachings, the book gradually introduces the most important facets of his thought, devoting attention to definitions of his basic terminology. His teachings are illustrated with many translated passages introducing readers to fascinating byways of spiritual life that would not ordinarily be encountered in an account of a thinker's ideas. Ibn al-'Arabi is allowed to describe in detail the visionary world from which his knowledge derives and to express his teachings in his own words. More than 600 passages from his major work, al-Futuhat al-Makkivva, are translated here, practically for the first time. These alone provide twice the text of the Fusus al-hikam. The exhaustive indexes make the work an invaluable reference tool for research in Sufism and Islamic thought in general.

Cuneiform records made some three thousand years ago are the basis for this essay on the ideas of death and the afterlife and the story of the flood which were current among the ancient peoples of the Tigro-Euphrates Valley. Following up on his previous volume, The Babylonian Genesis, the author interprets the famous Gilgamesh epic and other related Babylonian and Assyrian documents. He compares them with corresponding portions of the Old Testament in order to determine the inherent historical relationship of Hebrew and Mesopotamian ideas.

Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously' How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion' The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.