Living Without Philosophy
Title | Living Without Philosophy PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Levine |
Publisher | SUNY Press |
Pages | 308 |
Release | 1998-07-16 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9780791438985 |
Drawing on implications from ethics, theology, law, politics, and education, this book argues that we can decide what is right by describing particular cases in detail, without the aid of ethical theories and principles.
Living Without Philosophy
Title | Living Without Philosophy PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Levine |
Publisher | State University of New York Press |
Pages | 308 |
Release | 1998-07-16 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 143841062X |
Living Without Philosophy argues that we do not need ethical theories, rules, and principles to decide what is right. Instead, particular cases can be judged by a detailed description of the relevant circumstances. When our judgments differ, we can decide how to act by deliberating under fair conditions. The author provides both a philosophical argument for this position and readings of literary texts in which moral theorists are portrayed as concrete characters. These works include Plato's Protagoras, selections from the Gospels and Dante, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, the debate between Erasmus and Luther, Erasmus's Praise of Folly, Shakespeare's King Lear, Nabokov's Lolita, and Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Thus, Levine offers essentially a moral argument for the humanities, discussing the implications not only for ethics, but also for theology, law, politics, and education.
Living Without Free Will
Title | Living Without Free Will PDF eBook |
Author | Derk Pereboom |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 257 |
Release | 2006-11-02 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0521029961 |
Argues that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible for our actions.
Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations
Title | Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations PDF eBook |
Author | Jules Evans |
Publisher | New World Library |
Pages | 322 |
Release | 2013-10-03 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1608682307 |
When philosophy rescued him from an emotional crisis, Jules Evans became fascinated by how ideas invented over two thousand years ago can help us today. He interviewed soldiers, psychologists, gangsters, astronauts, and anarchists and discovered the ways that people are using philosophy now to build better lives. Ancient philosophy has inspired modern communities — Socratic cafés, Stoic armies, Epicurean communes — and even whole nations in the quest for the good life. This book is an invitation to a dream school with a rowdy faculty that includes twelve of the greatest philosophers from the ancient world, sharing their lessons on happiness, resilience, and much more. Lively and inspiring, this is philosophy for the street, for the workplace, for the battlefield, for love, for life.
Philosophy in a Meaningless Life
Title | Philosophy in a Meaningless Life PDF eBook |
Author | James Tartaglia |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 233 |
Release | 2015-12-17 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1474247687 |
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Philosophy in a Meaningless Life provides an account of the nature of philosophy which is rooted in the question of the meaning of life. It makes a powerful and vivid case for believing that this question is neither obscure nor obsolete, but reflects a quintessentially human concern to which other traditional philosophical problems can be readily related; allowing them to be reconnected with natural interest, and providing a diagnosis of the typical lines of opposition across philosophy's debates. James Tartaglia looks at the various ways philosophers have tried to avoid the conclusion that life is meaningless, and in the process have distanced philosophy from the concept of transcendence. Rejecting all of this, Tartaglia embraces nihilism ('we are here with nothing to do'), and uses transcendence both to provide a new solution to the problem of consciousness, and to explain away perplexities about time and universals. He concludes that with more self-awareness, philosophy can attain higher status within a culture increasingly in need of it.
The Free Market Existentialist
Title | The Free Market Existentialist PDF eBook |
Author | William Irwin |
Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Pages | 214 |
Release | 2015-11-02 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1119121280 |
Incisive and engaging, The Free Market Existentialist proposes a new philosophy that is a synthesis of existentialism, amoralism, and libertarianism. Argues that Sartre’s existentialism fits better with capitalism than with Marxism Serves as a rallying cry for a new alternative, a minimal state funded by an equal tax Confronts the “final delusion” of metaphysical morality, and proposes that we have nothing to fear from an amoral world Begins an essential conversation for the 21st century for students, scholars, and armchair philosophers alike with clear, accessible discussions of a range of topics across philosophy including atheism, evolutionary theory, and ethics
The Deepest Human Life
Title | The Deepest Human Life PDF eBook |
Author | Scott Samuelson |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 231 |
Release | 2014-04-03 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 022613041X |
This accessible and thought-provoking introduction to philosophy shows how the eternal questions can shed light on our lives and struggles. These days, we generally leave philosophical matters to professional philosophers. Scott Samuelson thinks this is tragic, for our lives as well as for philosophy. In The Deepest Human Life, he restores philosophy to its proper place at the center of our humanity, rediscovering it as our most profound effort toward understanding, as a way of life that anyone can live. Exploring the works of some of history’s most important thinkers in the context of the everyday struggles of his students, Samuelson guides readers through the most vexing quandaries of existence—and shows just how enriching the examined life can be. Samuelson begins at the beginning: with Socrates, and the method he developed for approaching our greatest mysteries. From there he embarks on a journey through the history of philosophy, demonstrating how it is encoded in our own personal quests for meaning. Through heartbreaking stories, humanizing biographies, accessible theory, and evocative interludes like “On Wine and Bicycles” or “On Zombies and Superheroes,” Samuelson invests philosophy with the personal and vice versa. The result is a book that is at once a primer and a reassurance—that the most important questions endure, coming to life in each of us. Winner of the 2015 Hiett Prize in the Humanities