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Download Natural Right and History Online Book ByLeo Strauss Total Download 11 “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” -Ernest Hemingway Synopsis In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever. |Strauss . . . makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves . . . [and] brings to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind.|—John H. Hallowell, American Political Science Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Download and Read How Ficta Follow Fiction Book PDF ByAlberto Voltolini Total Download 17 “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’” –Helen Exley Synopsis This book is devoted to fictional entities or, to be more precise, fictional entities as they emerge from the literary process of storytelling. They encompass the great immortal figures in human literature—Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes and so on—as well as the protagonists of single novels such as Anna Karenina, Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary and even the unknown characters in the oral tradition of storytelling developed by small communities of people for their own entertainment. This is p- sumably how Achilles, Penelope and Ulysses originated. We must also include among these figures mythological characters such as Apollo, Odin and Zeus, regardless of the fact that they were originally thought to be supernatural beings rather than fictional individuals. The subject of this book is...

Download and Read State Violence and Moral Horror PDF ByJeremy Arnold Total Download 36 “Drink deeply from good books.” -John Wooden Synopsis Explores the concept of “moral horror” as the experience of living amidst unjustifiable state violence. Can state violence ever be morally justified? In State Violence and Moral Horror, Jeremy Arnold critically engages a wide variety of arguments, both canonical and contemporary, arguing that there can be no justification. Drawing on the concept of singularity found in the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Arnold demonstrates that any attempt to justify state violence will itself be violent and, therefore, must fail as a justification. On the basis of this argument, the book explores the concept of “moral horror” as the experience of living amidst and acquiescing to unjustifiable state violence. The careful explanation of arguments from across the spectrum of political theory and exceptionally clear prose will enable both advanced unde...

Download The Morals of History Online Book PDF ByTzvetan Todorov Total Download 23 Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back. Synopsis The celebrated theorist Tzvetan Todorov offers here a thought provoking study of the complex relationship between 'ethics' and 'history'. In exploring such issues as how one practices and assesses equality among different societies, Todorov confronts topics ranging from the conquest of America and nineteenth-century colonialism, to democracy and conflicts of the Self versus the Other.

Download and Read Ethics at the Cinema Online Book ByWard E. Jones,Samantha Vice Total Download 35 “Classic – a book which people praise and don’t read.” –Mark Twain Synopsis The editors of Ethics at the Cinema invited a diverse group of moral philosophers and philosophers of film to engage with ethical issues raised within, or within the process of viewing, a single film of each contributor's choice. The result is a unique collection of considerable breadth. Discussions focus on both classic and modern films, and topics range from problems of traditional concern to philosophers (e.g. virtue, justice, and ideals) to problems of traditional concern to filmmakers (e.g. sexuality, social belonging, and cultural identity).

Download and Read Laughing at Nothing Online Book PDF ByJohn Marmysz Total Download 36 “You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.” –Dr. Seuss Synopsis Explores the concept of nihilism and argues that it need not imply despair, but can be responded to positively.

Download The History of Sexuality Online Book PDF ByMichel Foucault Total Download 28 Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. Synopsis Michel Foucult offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Download Humour: A Very Short Introduction Book PDF ByNoël Carroll Total Download 41 “A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.” –Chinese Proverb Synopsis Humour has been discovered in every known human culture and thinkers have discussed it for over two thousand years. Humour can serve many functions; it can be used to relieve stress, to promote goodwill among strangers, to dissipate tension within a fractious group, to display intelligence, and some have even claimed that it improves health and fights sickness. In this Very Short Introduction Noel Carroll examines the leading theories of humour including The Superiority Theory and The Incongruity Theory. He considers the relation of humour to emotion and cognition, and explores the value of humour, specifically in its social functions. He argues that humour, and the comic amusement that follows it, has a crucial role to play in the construction of communities, but he also demonstrates that the social aspect of humour raises que...

Free Download The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-century Philosophy PDF ByKnud Haakonssen Total Download 18 “No two persons ever read the same book.” –Edmund Wilson Synopsis This two-volume set presents a comprehensive and up-to-date history of eighteenth-century philosophy. The subject is treated systematically by topic, not by individual thinker, school, or movement, thus enabling a much more historically nuanced picture of the period to be painted.

Download Free Introduction to The Philosophy of History Online Book PDF ByG. W. F. Hegel,Leo Rauch Total Download 29 Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back. Synopsis |An elegant and intelligent translation. The text provides a perfect solution to the problem of how to introduce students to Hegel in a survey course in the history of Western philosophy.| -- Graham Parkes, University of Hawaii

Download Free Love Online Book BySimon May Total Download 38 “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” –P.J. O’Rourke Synopsis Traces the history of love and how it developed from its Hebraic and Greek origins to an ideal that obsesses the modern Western world, and highlights philosophers that have challenged conventional thoughts on love and happiness.

Read and Download Dignity Online Book ByRemy Debes Total Download 33 “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” –Haruki Murakami Synopsis In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this, dignity was instead a concept associated with social status. Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery in existing scholarship. Exactly when and why did -dignity- change its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that -dignity- now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disci...

Get Download History and Truth Book PDF ByPaul Ricoeur Total Download 30 Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Synopsis Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.

Download Free All Too Human PDF ByLydia L. Moland Total Download 12 “Never judge a book by its movie.” –J.W. Eagan Synopsis This book offers an analysis of humor, comedy, and laughter as philosophical topics in the 19th Century. It traces the introduction of humor as a new aesthetic category inspired by Laurence Sterne’s |Tristram Shandy| and shows Sterne’s deep influence on German aesthetic theorists of this period. Through differentiating humor from comedy, the book suggests important distinctions within the aesthetic philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Solger, and Jean Paul Richter. The book links Kant’s underdeveloped incongruity theory of laughter to Schopenhauer’s more complete account and identifies humor’s place in the pessimistic philosophy of Julius Bahnsen. It considers how caricature functioned at the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and ethics in Karl Rosenkranz’s work, and how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche made humor central not only to their philosophical content but al...

Free Download Conceptually Distinguishing Mirth, Humor, and Comedy Online Book PDF ByEva Kort Total Download 15 I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Synopsis This book opens a new dialogue for philosophical treatments of humor and comedy. It traces their history from the Dionysian Performance Tradition and brings a fresh perspective to the issue as it recasts standard interpretations of the Aristotelian theory in broader terms that offer new grounds for distinguishing humor', comedy' and mirth'.

Free Download History of Aesthetics PDF ByWladyslaw Tatarkiewicz Total Download 22 “A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.” –Thomas Carlyle Synopsis Tatarkiewicz's History of Aesthetics is an extremely comprehensive account of the development of European aesthetics from the time of the ancient Greeks to the 1700s. Published originally in Polish in 1962-7, it achieved bestseller status and acclaim as the best work of its kind in the world. The English translation of 1970-74 is a rare masterpiece. Covering ancient, medieval and modern aesthetics, Tatarkiewicz writes substantial essays on the views of beauty and art through the ages and then goes on to demonstrate these with extracts from original texts from each period. The authors he cites include Homer, Democritus, Plato, St Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, William of Ockham, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Bacon, Shakespeare and Rubens. His study is systematic and extremely wide, including the aes...

Free Download Infancy and History PDF ByGiorgio Agamben Total Download 18 “Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.” -William Feather Synopsis How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a “dumb” experience? For Walter Benjamin, the “poverty of experience” was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin’s complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice. Agamben’s profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between...

Free Download History of the Concept of Time Book PDF ByMartin Heidegger Total Download 34 “A good book has no ending.” -R.D. Cumming Synopsis Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the summer of 1925, an early version of Being and Time (1927), offers a unique glimpse into the motivations that prompted the writing of this great philosopher's master work and the presuppositions that gave shape to it. The book embarks upon a provisional description of what Heidegger calls |Dasein,| the field in which both being and time become manifest. Heidegger analyzes Dasein in its everydayness in a deepening sequence of terms: being-in-the-world, worldhood, and care as the being of Dasein. The course ends by sketching the themes of death and conscience and their relevance to an ontology that makes the phenomenon of time central. Theodore Kisiel's outstanding translation premits English-speaking readers to appreciate the central importance of this text in the developm...

Free Download Ethics, Evil, and Fiction Online Book ByColin McGinn Total Download 22 “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” -Henry David Thoreau Synopsis Ethics, Evil, and Fiction brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that offers original new insights for both. Its central aim is to enrich the domain of moral reflection, by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination. Colin McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects as the nature of goodness, evil character, and the meaning of monstrosity, in the context of an aesthetic theory of virtue, which maintains that goodness of character is the same thing as beauty of soul. Works discussed include Billy Budd, Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein; and McGinn draws upon examples from film and painting...

Read and Download Politics Out of History Online Book PDF ByWendy Brown Total Download 40 “The book you don’t read won’t help.” –Jim Rohn Synopsis What happens to left and liberal political orientations when faith in progress is broken, when both the sovereign individual and sovereign states seem tenuous, when desire seems as likely to seek punishment as freedom, when all political conviction is revealed as contingent and subjective? Politics Out of History is animated by the question of how we navigate the contemporary political landscape when the traditional compass points of modernity have all but disappeared. Wendy Brown diagnoses a range of contemporary political tendencies--from moralistic high-handedness to low-lying political despair in politics, from the difficulty of formulating political alternatives to reproaches against theory in intellectual life--as the consequence of this disorientation. Politics Out of History also presents a provocative argument for a new approach to...