Enlightenment Now

Enlightenment Now PDF Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525427570
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Enlightenment Now

Enlightenment Now PDF Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525427570
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book

Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Real-World Enlightenment

Real-World Enlightenment PDF Author: Susan Kaiser Greenland
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834845717
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Wisdom and encouragement from mindfulness, psychology, science, and time-honored traditions. Featuring 50 practical tools to ease anxiety, overwhelm, and stress by recognizing the enduring sense of love and well-being that’s with us regardless of our circumstances. Enlightenment isn’t a lofty and unattainable goal. Real-world enlightenment is always here, and you can find it any time in life’s highs, lows, and everything in-between. Beloved mindfulness teacher, best-selling author, and longtime Buddhist practitioner Susan Kaiser Greenland explores time-honored themes that tap into a sense of love, connection, and well-being that is with us regardless of our circumstances. These universal themes—including Change, Humility, Interdependence, Concentration, Joy, Kindness, and Discernment, among many others—emphasize attitudes and mindsets that lead to emotional and psychological freedom by lessening our reactivity, broadening our perspectives, and deepening our relationships. Kaiser Greenland draws from science, psychology, Buddhism, wisdom traditions, and personal stories to give us a view of “real-world enlightenment”— where we shift from a narrow survival-driven frame of mind to one that is grounded and as vast as the sky. When we cultivate this expansive worldview from the inside out, we become more resilient, and that’s just the beginning. A view as vast as the sky charts the course for kind, resilient people to build a kinder and more resilient world. To help us do this, she offers valuable methods and takeaways that allow you to apply these life-changing universal themes every day. They include: Practical ways to recognize the basic goodness within and around you by tapping into sensory pleasures like music or nature. Robust tools to manage stress and develop attention by focusing on a sight, sound, image, word, or phrase. Catchy slogans that promote emotional balance when you feel overwhelmed, like “right now, I’m okay,” “drop the baggage,” or “don’t play the scene before you get there.” These and other phrases can interrupt spiraling thoughts and move you back into your comfort zone. Accessible meditation methods to experience life with greater equanimity by slowing down your thinking process to heighten awareness of the natural movement of your mind. Time-tested life hacks to care for yourself and others with greater kindness and compassion. Insightful strategies that bring greater ease and effortlessness into your life and relationships by helping you remain flexible and creative, even in challenging situations. And much more.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: Ritchie Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1008

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Book Description
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

History and the Enlightenment

History and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Hugh Trevor-Roper
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300139349
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The historical philosophy of the Enlightenment -- The Scottish Enlightenment -- Pietro Giannone and Great Britain -- Dimitrie Cantemir's Ottoman history and its reception in England -- From deism to history: Conyers Middleton -- David Hume, historian -- The idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire -- Gibbon and the publication of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire 1776-1976 -- Gibbon's last project -- The romantic movement and the study of history -- Lord Macaulay: the history of England -- Thomas Carlyle's historical philosophy -- Jacob Burckhardt.

Journal of My Life

Journal of My Life PDF Author: Jacques-Louis Ménétra
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231061292
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Jaques-Louis Menetra's journal reads like a historian's dream come true. It conveys his understanding of what it meant to grow up in Paris, where he was born in 1738; to tramp around provincial shops on a journeyman's tour de France; to settle down as a Parisian master with a shop and family of his own; and to live through the great events of the Revolution as a militant in his local Section.

The Influence of the Enlightenment on the French Revolution ; Creative, Disastrous Or Non-existent?

The Influence of the Enlightenment on the French Revolution ; Creative, Disastrous Or Non-existent? PDF Author: William F. Church
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description


The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses PDF Author: Carolyn Purnell
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393249360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch—as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today. Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing “flea”-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past three hundred years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. And perhaps more surprisingly, she shows how many of our own ways of life are a legacy of this earlier time. The Sensational Past focuses on the ways in which small, peculiar, and seemingly unimportant facts open up new ways of thinking about the past. You will explore the sensory worlds of the Enlightenment, learning how people in the past used their senses, understood their bodies, and experienced the rapidly shifting world around them. In this smart and witty work, Purnell reminds us of the value of daily life and the power of the smallest aspects of existence using culinary history, fashion, medicine, music, and many other aspects of Enlightenment life.

The Florentine Enlightenment, 1400-50

The Florentine Enlightenment, 1400-50 PDF Author: George Holmes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198202929
Category : Florence (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description


How to Attain Enlightenment

How to Attain Enlightenment PDF Author: James Swartz
Publisher: Sentient+ORM
ISBN: 1591811619
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
“Goes through the entire gamut of topics covered by the Vedas, making use of yoga, detachment, the ego, karma, dharma, love, meditation and much more.” —East and West Magazine This complete guide to enlightenment presents the wisdom of the ancient science of self-inquiry, a time-tested means for achieving spiritual freedom. The author discusses the purpose of self-inquiry, the quest for lasting happiness, issues of identity and transcendence, the role of wisdom and action, and the subconscious obstacles to freedom. He convincingly refutes the popular view that enlightenment is a unique state of consciousness and debunks a host of other enlightenment myths. In his straightforward style he reveals proven methods for purifying the mind, and includes chapters on love, the science of energy transformation and meditation. He takes the reader from the beginning to the end of the spiritual path, patiently unfolding the logic of self-inquiry. “Vedanta is the original systemized enlightenment teaching, and James does an extraordinary job of extracting the essential nectar of the teachings from its dusty, ancient, Sanskrit origins and elucidating it with utmost clarity. One review cannot do this teaching, with its rich history and depth, even a modicum of justice. James’s book is the best introduction there is to this subject.” —Consciousness Junkie “Explains methods of Vedanta in his survey of spiritual techniques, pairing theory with practice and explaining the myths and realities behind an enlightened state. From reflections on moving to a larger living space and clutter to assimilating experiences, How to Attain Enlightenment is a powerful survey any new age library needs.” —The Bookwatch

Enlightenment's Wake

Enlightenment's Wake PDF Author: John Gray
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134097050
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
John Gray is the bestselling author of such books as Straw Dogs and Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern which brought a mainstream readership to a man who was already one of the UK's most well respected thinkers and political theorists. Gray wrote Enlightenment’s Wake in 1995 – six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and six years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Turning his back on neoliberalism at exactly the moment that its advocates were in their pomp, trumpeting 'the end of history' and the supposedly unstoppable spread of liberal values across the globe, Gray’s was a lone voice of scepticism. The thinking he criticised here would lead ultimately to the invasion of Iraq. Today, its folly might seem obvious to all, but as this edition of Enlightenment’s Wake shows, John Gray has been trying to warn us for some fifteen years – the rest of us are only now catching up with him.