This study identifies and analyzes a compelling theory and practice of persuasion that integrates the complexity of human desire. It demonstrates how the philosophical component in Pascal's description of the will makes a seamless integration into a vehicle of persuasion and poetics, providing a privileged viewpoint for understanding the author's complete works, arguing that the notion of will is of fundamental importance in Pascal's anthropology as well as in his rhetoric. This avenue of interpretation is both fruitful and difficult, because the word "volonte" means very different things in Pascal and in modern French. Beginning by contextualizing the notion of 'volonte' and explaining its expanded use in the seventeenth-century lexicon, the author then endeavors to show that Pascal borrows an essentially Augustinian paradigm of desire to create a depiction of the will divided against itself, surreptitiously yearning for what its bearer does not want.

This book explores the origins and significance of the French concept of terroir, demonstrating that the way the French eat their food and drink their wine today derives from a cultural mythology that developed between the Renaissance and the Revolution. Through close readings and an examination of little-known texts from diverse disciplines, Thomas Parker traces terroir’s evolution, providing insight into how gastronomic mores were linked to aesthetics in language, horticulture, and painting and how the French used the power of place to define the natural world, explain comportment, and frame France as a nation.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

A new, definitive translation of Heidegger's most important work.

"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.