Fear and Trembling
by Soren Kierkegaard
from Wilder Publications
The perfect books for the true book lover, PenguinÂ’s Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of historyÂ’s most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the bookmakerÂ’s art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped our world.
Beyond Good and Evil (Penguin Classics)
by Friedrich Nietzsche
from Penguin Classics
New chronology and further reading
Translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Introduction by Michael Tanner.
This is a major work by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings have been deeply influential on subsequent generations of philosophers. It is offered here in a new translation by Judith Norman, with an introduction by Rolf Peter Horstmann that places the work in its historical and philosophical context.
Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
by Susan Neiman
from Princeton University Press
Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.
Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.
Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.
Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way (Popular Culture and Philosophy)
from Open Court
Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves
by James Hollis
from Gotham
Now in paperback, a penetrating understanding of the discrepancies that lie between our professed values and our frequently destructive actions
How is it that good people do bad things? Why do otherwise ordinary people gamble, drink, embezzle company funds, become addicted to Internet porn, cheat on their spouse, or repeat the same destructive behaviors in relationships, at work, or in their habits? And, on a grander scale, how can we reconcile all of the pain and suffering present in the world?
In Why Good People Do Bad Things, James Hollis offers wisdom to help you acquire a new level of awareness to your daily actions and choices. Exploring the Shadow is important to our growth because it helps us repair inner fractures and explore what forces are working against us, and why. Hollis also looks at the larger picture of the Shadow at work in our culture—in history, religion, organizations, and corporations—in addition to its presence in our personal lives.
Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong
by Louis P. Pojman
from Wadsworth Publishing
How do you know right from wrong? ETHICS: DISCOVERING RIGHT AND WRONG shows you how history's greatest thinkers have understood ethics and gives you the tools to decide for yourself what's moral and immoral. And, of course, along the way youÂ’ll master the basics of ethical philosophy.
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
by Michael Shermer
from Holt Paperbacks
that is "a paragon of popularized science and philosophy" The Sun (Baltimore)
A century and a half after Darwin first proposed an "evolutionary ethics," science has begun to tackle the roots of morality. Just as evolutionary biologists study why we are hungry (to motivate us to eat) or why sex is enjoyable (to motivate us to procreate), they are now searching for the very nature of humanity.
In The Science of Good and Evil, science historian Michael Shermer explores how humans evolved from social primates to moral primates; how and why morality motivates the human animal; and how the foundation of moral principles can be built upon empirical evidence.
Along the way he explains the implications of scientific findings for fate and free will, the existence of pure good and pure evil, and the development of early moral sentiments among the first humans. As he closes the divide between science and morality, Shermer draws on stories from the Yanamamö, infamously known as the "fierce people" of the tropical rain forest, to the Stanford studies on jailers' behavior in prisons. The Science of Good and Evil is ultimately a profound look at the moral animal, belief, and the scientific pursuit of truth.
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Wo Es War)
by Alain Badiou
from Verso
With this little black book, Alain Badiou sows the seeds of intellectual revolt in the fields of contemporary ethical theory. He argues that the bedrock of present-day ethics--the normative conception of human rights--is morally bankrupt. "It amounts to a genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such," he writes. As Badiou sees it, current ethics has been enlisted in the army of capitalist-liberalism: "The theme of ethics and of human rights is compatible with the self-satisfied egoism of the affluent West, with advertising, and with service rendered to the powers that be." In support of his startling claim, he sketches a history of ethical theory and argues that today's ethics--the traffic not only of philosophers, but of politicians and professionals--is rooted in Kantian origins and a facile understanding of evil.
Badiou proposes a positive doctrine that he calls "The Ethic of Truths," ultimately arguing that "there is no ethics in general." Instead, there are only "processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation." The book's main failing is its length. It is simply too short to do justice to the panoply of literature on ethics or to inoculate Badiou against a host of objections that are lurking nearby. Nonetheless, his reasoning is powerful and surprising, marking some of the best writing in current European philosophy, and his credentials are impeccable. He teaches at the École normale supérieure in Paris and is author of a half dozen well-regarded books on a range of philosophical topics. --Eric de Place
Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil.
The Culture of Make Believe
by Derrick Jensen
from Chelsea Green
Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to todayÂ’s death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. The Culture of Make Believe is a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking.
Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts
from Open Court
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