Force of Habit

Force of Habit
Author: Jonas Frykman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 190
Release: 1996
Genre: Conduct of life
ISBN:

This work examines customs and habits such as crayfish parties, Christmas celebrations, and graduation rituals. The focus is not on the traditions as such, instead they provide a starting point for analyses of how the experiences of everyday life are manifested in a visible cultural garb. The text shows how many rituals serve to release people from the bonds of tradition, usually by creating a special cultural arena. Yet it also examines the ways in which habits and customs tacitly coerce thoughts, sometimes drawing attention to fundamental social and moral values but just as often acting as impediments to reflection. The contributors try to see how some features of everyday cultural identity can be easily replaced, while others may persist tenaciously.

The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit
Author: Charles Duhigg
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2012-02-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0679603859

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This instant classic explores how we can change our lives by changing our habits. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal • Financial Times In The Power of Habit, award-winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to the sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement, Duhigg presents a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, being more productive, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. As Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives. With a new Afterword by the author “Sharp, provocative, and useful.”—Jim Collins “Few [books] become essential manuals for business and living. The Power of Habit is an exception. Charles Duhigg not only explains how habits are formed but how to kick bad ones and hang on to the good.”—Financial Times “A flat-out great read.”—David Allen, bestselling author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity “You’ll never look at yourself, your organization, or your world quite the same way.”—Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of Drive and A Whole New Mind “Entertaining . . . enjoyable . . . fascinating . . . a serious look at the science of habit formation and change.”—The New York Times Book Review

Forces of Habit

Forces of Habit
Author: David T. Courtwright
Publisher:
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2001-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN:

What drives the drug trade, and how has it come to be what it is today? A global history of the acquisition of progressively more potent means of altering ordinary waking consciousness, this book is the first to provide the big picture of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet’s psychoactive resources, from tea and kola to opiates and amphetamines.

On Habit

On Habit
Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2014-03-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136725709

For Aristotle, excellence is not an act but a habit, and Hume regards habit as ‘the great guide of life’. However, for Proust habit is problematic: ‘if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first.’ What is habit? Do habits turn us into machines or free us to do more creative things? Should religious faith be habitual? Does habit help or hinder the practice of philosophy? Why do Luther, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard and Bergson all criticise habit? If habit is both a blessing and a curse, how can we live well in our habits? In this thought-provoking book Clare Carlisle examines habit from a philosophical standpoint. Beginning with a lucid appraisal of habit’s philosophical history she suggests that both receptivity and resistance to change are basic principles of habit-formation. Carlisle shows how the philosophy of habit not only anticipates the discoveries of recent neuroscience but illuminates their ethical significance. She asks whether habit is a reliable form of knowledge by examining the contrasting interpretations of habitual thinking offered by Spinoza and Hume. She then turns to the role of habit in the good life, tracing Aristotle’s legacy through the ideas of Joseph Butler, Hegel, and Félix Ravaisson, and assessing the ambivalent attitudes to habit expressed by Nietzsche and Proust. She argues that a distinction between habit and practice helps to clarify this ambivalence, particularly in the context of habit and religion, where she examines both the theology of habit and the repetitions of religious life. She concludes by considering how philosophy itself is a practice of learning to live well with habit.

The Case for Gold Vol 3

The Case for Gold Vol 3
Author: William Rees-Mogg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 992
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351221132

The role of gold in the world's exchange system has been hotly contested by leading economists. This work collects the most important arguments in favour of gold, including such works as David Ricardo's "High price of Bullion" and W. Stanley Jevons's "Money and the Mechanism of Exchange".

Gentlemen and Amazons

Gentlemen and Amazons
Author: Cynthia Eller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2011-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520948556

Gentlemen and Amazons traces the nineteenth-century genesis and development of an important contemporary myth about human origins: that of an original prehistoric matriarchy. Cynthia Eller explores the intellectual history of the myth, which arose from male scholars who mostly wanted to vindicate the patriarchal family model as a higher stage of human development. Eller tells the stories these men told, analyzes the gendered assumptions they made, and provides the necessary context for understanding how feminists of the 1970s and 1980s embraced as historical "fact" a discredited nineteenth-century idea.

Creatures of Attention

Creatures of Attention
Author: Johannes Wankhammer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2024-06-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501775820

Creatures of Attention excavates the early modern prehistory of our late modern crises of attention. At the threshold of modernity, philosophers, scientists, and poets across Europe began to see attention as the key to autonomous agency and knowledge. Recovering the philosophical and literary works from eighteenth-century Germany in which "attention," "subject," and "aesthetics" developed their modern meanings, Johannes Wankhammer examines control over attention as the cultural technique underpinning the ideal of individual autonomy. Aesthetics, founded by Alexander Baumgarten as a science of sense perception, challenged this ideal by reframing art as a catalyst for alternative modes of selfhood and attention. While previous scholarship on the history of attention emphasized the erosion of subjectivity by industrial or technological modernization, Wankhammer asks how attention came to define subjectivity in the first place. When periodically recurring crises of attention threaten the coherence of the subject, the subject comes undone at the very seams that first sutured it together. Creatures of Attention offers the first systematic study of a foundational discourse on attention from 1650 to 1780. Presenting pre-Kantian aesthetics as a critique of the Enlightenment paradigm of strained attention, the book offers a fresh perspective on poetics and aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany.

The Science Fiction Century, Volume One

The Science Fiction Century, Volume One
Author: David G. Hartwell
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2006-04-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312864842

Finally in trade paperback, the best historical overview anthology of 20th-century SF

The Force of Character

The Force of Character
Author: James Hillman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2000-07-05
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0345424050

In his powerful bestseller The Soul's Code, James Hillman brilliantly illuminated the central importance of character to our spiritual and emotional lives. Now, in this magnificent new book, Hillman completes his exploration of character with a profound and revolutionary reflection on life's second half. "Character requires the additional years," declares Hillman. "The last years confirm and fulfill character." Far from blunting or dulling the self, the accumulation of experience concentrates the essence of our being, heightening our individual mystery and unique awareness of life. Drawing on his grounding in Jungian psychology, Hillman explains here the archetypes and myths that govern the self's realignment in our final years. The Force of Character follows an enriching journey through the three stages of aging--lasting, the deepening that comes with longevity; leaving, the preparation for departure; and left, the special legacy we each bestow on our survivors. Along the way the book explores the meanings and often hidden virtues of characteristic physical and emotional changes, such as loss of memory, alterations in sleep patterns, and the mysterious upsurge in erotic imagination. Steeped in the wisdom of a lifetime, radiant with Hillman's reading in philosophy, poetry, and sacred texts, charged with a piercing clarity, The Force of Character is a book that will change--and affirm--the lives of all who read it.