Dogs

Dogs
Author: Mark Alizart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 71
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509537309

Man’s best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great outdoors—dogs matter to us because we love them. But is that all there is to the canine’s good-natured voracity and affectionate dependency? Mark Alizart dispenses with the well-worn clichés concerning dogs and their masters, seeing them not as submissive pets but rather as unexpected life coaches, ready to teach us the elusive recipes for contentment and joy. Dogs have faced their fate in life with a certain detachment that is not easy to understand. Unlike other animals in a similar situation, they have not become hardened, nor have they let themselves die a little inside. On the contrary, they seem to have softened. This book is devoted to understanding this miracle, the miracle of the joy of dogs – to understanding it and, if at all possible, to learning how it’s done. Weaving elegantly and eruditely between historical myth and pop-culture anecdote, between the peculiar views of philosophers and the even more bizarre findings of science, Alizart offers us a surprising new portrait of the dog as thinker—a thinker who may perhaps know the true secret of our humanity.

How to Be a Friend

How to Be a Friend
Author: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691183899

A splendid new translation of one of the greatest books on friendship ever written In a world where social media, online relationships, and relentless self-absorption threaten the very idea of deep and lasting friendships, the search for true friends is more important than ever. In this short book, which is one of the greatest ever written on the subject, the famous Roman politician and philosopher Cicero offers a compelling guide to finding, keeping, and appreciating friends. With wit and wisdom, Cicero shows us not only how to build friendships but also why they must be a key part of our lives. For, as Cicero says, life without friends is not worth living. Filled with timeless advice and insights, Cicero’s heartfelt and moving classic—written in 44 BC and originally titled De Amicitia—has inspired readers for more than two thousand years, from St. Augustine and Dante to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Presented here in a lively new translation with the original Latin on facing pages and an inviting introduction, How to Be a Friend explores how to choose the right friends, how to avoid the pitfalls of friendship, and how to live with friends in good times and bad. Cicero also praises what he sees as the deepest kind of friendship—one in which two people find in each other “another self” or a kindred soul. An honest and eloquent guide to finding and treasuring true friends, How to Be a Friend speaks as powerfully today as when it was first written.

The Stuff of Thought

The Stuff of Thought
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2007-09-11
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1101202602

This New York Times bestseller is an exciting and fearless investigation of language from the author of Rationality, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Sense of Style and Enlightenment Now. "Curious, inventive, fearless, naughty." --The New York Times Book Review Bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books - including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate - have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important popular science writers. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker presents a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. Considering scientific questions with examples from everyday life, The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship

Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship
Author: Lorraine Smith Pangle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2002-11-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139441868

This book offers a comprehensive account of the major philosophical works on friendship and its relationship to self-love. The book gives central place to Aristotle's searching examination of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Lorraine Pangle argues that the difficulties surrounding this discussion are soon dispelled once one understands the purpose of the Ethics as both a source of practical guidance for life and a profound, theoretical investigation into human nature. The book also provides fresh interpretations of works on friendship by Plato, Cicero, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne and Bacon. The author shows how each of these thinkers sheds light on central questions of moral philosophy: is human sociability rooted in neediness or strength? is the best life chiefly solitary, or dedicated to a community with others? Clearly structured and engagingly written, this book will appeal to a broad swathe of readers across philosophy, classics and political science.

The Everything Guide to Understanding Philosophy

The Everything Guide to Understanding Philosophy
Author: Kenneth Shouler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2008-06-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1605502022

Complex ideas explained in everyday language! Is there life after death? Are euthanasia, suicide, or stem cell research ethical acts? Does the use of performance enhancers in sports constitute cheating? These are the types of philosophical questions people face today. Philosophy is not a dead set of doctrines--it's a living body of knowledge that you can use to guide behavior and problem solving. In a lively, easy-to-follow approach, The Everything Guide to Understanding Philosophy introduces you to the major thinkers and the problems they've pondered over the last 2,600 years. In plain English, author Kenneth Shouler, Ph.D. explains all of the great philosophies--and provides contemporary examples to put them in perspective. He delves into the minds of such philosophers as: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle Augustine and Aquinas Spinoza and Descartes Locke and Hume Mill and Nietzsche Russell and Sartre If you're ready to broaden your outlook on life, this is the book for you. Endlessly fascinating--and always clear and concise--it's the perfect introduction for budding philosophers!

The Philosophy of Friendship

The Philosophy of Friendship
Author: M. Vernon
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2005-09-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0230204112

In this new accessible philosophy of friendship, Mark Vernon links the resources of the philosophical tradition with numerous illustrations from modern culture to ask what friendship is, how it relates to sex, work, politics and spirituality. Unusually, he argues that Plato and Nietzsche, as much as Aristotle and Aelred, should be put centre stage. Their penetrating and occasionally tough insights are invaluable if friendship is to be a full, not merely sentimental, way of life for today.

A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes
Author: Witold Gombrowicz
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2007-06-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0300132069

George Sand was the most famous, and the most scandalous, woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific: she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange. Drawing on archival sources, much of it neglected by Sand's previous biographers, Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand's writing and defined her life. Why was Sand's relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women's liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand's identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand's mother and grandmother, and Sand's own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.

Guide to Philosophy

Guide to Philosophy
Author: Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 607
Release: 1957-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0486202976

Brilliant British expositor surveys various problems, explanations, solutions, systematizations of great philosophers. Three parts include "Theory of Knowledge," "Critical Metaphysics," and "Constructive Metaphysics."