This book is the theological opus of Professor Max Bernhard Weinstein, probably best known as a physicist teaching at the prestigious University of Berlin, and as an early skeptic of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In addition to these activities, he carried a strong interest in theology and the history of religion, delivering several lectures on the relationship between those topics and the study of physics, culminating in his 1910 publication of Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis (World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature). And so, it is something of a lost classic, one able to be thoroughly eyebrow-raising to the German reader, and prospectively equally so to the English reader. Translating this fascinating book to a more widely spoken language-and enabling its republication in that form-has been a step towards preserving an almost-lost treasure chest of knowledge and analysis for a vast swath of the world. We hope to regenerate Weinstein's forward-thinking observations, keeping them and their context alive for a new generation of the world. Every effort has been made to match the content to the pagination of the original, so that when you cite to a passage in this translation, the page holding that content will exactly correspond to the page in Weinstein's original work. With a few exceptions made necessary by typesetting conventions, even the sentence breaks match those of the original. Naturally, this has led to some unusual points of division between the pages, but we feel this is worth it to fully replicate the feel of reading Professor Weinstein's original work as it was originally laid out.In addition to the translation of Professor Weinstein's text, an excellent and enlightening Foreword has been provided by the esteemed Danish historian of science, Professor Helge Kragh, currently Professor Emeritus at the Niels Bohr Institute. Here, Professor Kragh-who has previously examined Professor Weinstein's philosophy in his own 2008 book, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology-has painted in a few pages an encapsulating picture of the scientific milieu of Professor Weinstein's day, vital to understanding a book drawn from that period.

Originally published in German in 1910 as Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis, this philosophical opus of Dr. Max Bernhard Weinstein has been painstakingly translated into English, with exquisite attention paid to insuring that the pagination and illustrations remain identical to that of the original,

Life's Ultimate Questions is unique among introductory philosophy textbooks. By synthesizing three distinct approaches—topical, historical, and worldview/conceptual systems—it affords students a breadth and depth of perspective previously unavailable in standard introductory texts. Part One, Six Conceptual Systems, explores the philosophies of: naturalism, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, and Aquinas. Part Two, Important Problems in Philosophy, sheds light on: The Law of Noncontradiction, Possible Words, Epistemology I: Whatever Happened to Truth?, Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems, Epistemology III: Reformed Epistemology, God I: The Existence of God, God II: The Nature of God, Metaphysics: Some Questions About Indeterminism, Ethics I: The Downward Path, Ethics II: The Upward Path, Human Nature: The Mind-Body Problem and Survival After Death.

How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.

Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.

The question of what makes life worth living is more vital now than ever. In today's pluralistic, postsecular world, universal values are dismissed as mere matters of private opinion, and the question of what constitutes flourishing life--for ourselves, our neighbors, and the planet as a whole--is neglected in our universities, our churches, and our culture at large. Although we increasingly have technology to do almost anything, we have little sense of what is truly worth accomplishing. In this provocative new contribution to public theology, world-renowned theologian Miroslav Volf (named "America's New Public Intellectual" by Scot McKnight on his Jesus Creed blog) and Matthew Croasmun explain that the intellectual tools needed to rescue us from our present malaise and meet our new cultural challenge are the tools of theology. A renewal of theology is crucial to help us articulate compelling visions of the good life, find our way through the maze of contested questions of value, and answer the fundamental question of what makes life worth living.

Science, religion, philosophy: these three categories of thought have organized humankind’s search for meaning from time immemorial. Reality’s Fugue presents a compelling case that these ways of understanding, often seen as competing, are part of a larger puzzle that cannot be rendered by one account of reality alone. This book begins with an overview of the concept of reality and the philosophical difficulties associated with attempts to account for it through any single worldview. By clarifying the differences among first-person, third-person, and dualist understandings of reality, F. Samuel Brainard repurposes the three predominant ways of making sense of those differences: exclusionist (only one worldview can be right), inclusivist (viewing other worldviews through the lens of one in order to incorporate them all, and thus distorting them), and pluralist or relativist (holding that there are no universals, and truth is relative). His alternative mode of understanding uses Douglas Hofstadter’s metaphor of a musical fugue that allows different “voices” and “melodies” of worldviews to coexist in counterpoint and conversation, while each remains distinct, with none privileged above the others. Approaching reality in this way, Brainard argues, opens up the possibility for a multivoiced perspective that can overcome the skeptical challenges that metaphysical positions face. Engagingly argued by a lifelong scholar of philosophy and global religions, this edifying and accessible exploration of the nature of reality addresses deeply meaningful questions about belief, reconciliation, and being.