Silent Virtues addresses six areas of mental functioning namely patience, curiosity, privacy, intimacy, humility, and dignity. Each of the areas is elucidated with the help of clinical, literary, and cultural material. The book introduces a series of novel ideas, including: (i) the distinction between patience as a component of the therapeutic attitude and the exercise of patience as a specific technical intervention; (ii) the description of the five psychopathological syndromes involving curiosity: excessive, deficient, uneven, anachronistic, instinctualized, and false curiosity; (iii) the description of four psychopathological syndromes (failed, florid, fluctuating, and false) involving intimacy; (iv) the discourse on the importance of humility in selecting patients and in deciding upon the longevity of our professional careers; and (v) the description of three forms of dignity (metaphysical, existential, and characterological) and the various ways in which they affect psychoanalytic technique.

Silent Virtues addresses six areas of mental functioning, namely, patience, curiosity, privacy, intimacy, humility, and dignity. Each of the areas is elucidated with the help of clinical, literary, and cultural material. This important book by a renowned author will appeal to all readers with an interest in psychoanalysis.

Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship offers a fresh perspective on what it is to be a ‘good knower’ in a social and educational environment dominated by the market order. It explores how narrowly conceived epistemic virtues might be broadened out by seeing those who work and study in the university in their full humanity. In an era characterized by deep and enduring social and cultural divisions, it offers a timely, accessible and critical perspective on the perils of retreating behind disciplinary boundaries, reminding readers of the need to remain open to the other in a time of increased social and political polarization. Drawing on the work of Leonard Cohen, Ali Smith, Italo Calvino and Raymond Carver, the book seeks to move across disciplines and distort the line between the humanities and the social sciences as a way of bringing them closer together. It explores virtue in the context of scholarship and research, particularly how the ‘virtues of unknowing’ challenge traditional notions of the ‘good knower’. The book offers the framework within which to bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in relation to developments in the university sector, addressing the urgent need for a form of language that promotes unity over division. Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship will be vital reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, sociology of education, research methods in education and education policy.

Big, colorful virtues like courage and decisiveness in crisis easily get our attention. But sometimes it's those everyday values that shape us much more profoundly. Lost in our noisy, flashy, gaudy world are the quiet virtues that work behind the scenes - molding our character, guiding our actions, enriching our lives. Greg Spencer unfolds the beauty and nature of each, showing us how to take notice of discernment, innocence, generosity, authenticity and more. In this book you'll discover how far from being dull these quieter virtues actually are. Though often hidden, they play a formative role in who we become and what we do.

“A tour de force. It is a thoughtful, subtle, beautifully written discussion of what it takes to live a meaningful life.” —Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice Throughout history most of us have looked to faith, relationships, or deeds to give our lives purpose. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about meaning, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey—and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life alongside rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them. May starts by looking at the fundamental fact that life unfolds over time, and as it does so, it begins to develop certain qualities, certain themes. Our lives can be marked by intensity, curiosity, perseverance, or many other qualities that become guiding narrative values. These values lend meanings to our lives that are distinct from—but also interact with—the universal values we are taught to cultivate, such as goodness or happiness. Offering a fascinating examination of a broad range of figures—from music icon Jimi Hendrix to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, from cyclist Lance Armstrong to The Portrait of a Lady’s Ralph Touchett to Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler—May shows that narrative values offer a rich variety of criteria by which to assess a life, specific to each of us and yet widely available. They offer us a way of reading ourselves, who we are, and who we might like to be.

This book contains methods for transforming everyday actions into the cause of enlightenment, anger into patience, and the ordinary view of phenomena as inherently existent into the wisdom realizing emptiness. It also includes several meditations led by Rinpoche, although everything in the book is a topic for meditation.It would be hard to find a simpler, clearer, more practical explanation of the two fundamental paths of compassion and wisdom than the one Lama Zopa offers us here.

When Michael Dukakis accused George H. W. Bush of being the "Joe Isuzu of American Politics" during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate—often impotently—between moral outrage and amoral realism. In The Virtues of Mendacity, Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Jay proceeds to show that each philosopher’s argument corresponds to a particular conception of the political realm, which decisively shapes his or her attitude toward political mendacity. He then applies this insight to a variety of contexts and questions about lying and politics. Surprisingly, he concludes by asking if lying in politics is really all that bad. The political hypocrisy that Americans in particular periodically decry may be, in Jay’s view, the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth.