Reflections on the Human Condition

Reflections on the Human Condition PDF Author: Eric Hoffer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
This collection of aphorisms and philosophical comment represents Eric Hoffer at his best. It offers stunning insights that strike home with startling frequency, often most uncomfortably; it has a fine unity, a well-defined theme. That some of the statements invite argument and questioning is inevitable and stimulating. Here is a book of the "wry epigram and the icy aphorism" which made his earlier books so appealing and gained for him a wide audience.--Publisher description.

Reflections on the Human Condition

Reflections on the Human Condition PDF Author: Eric Hoffer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of aphorisms and philosophical comment represents Eric Hoffer at his best. It offers stunning insights that strike home with startling frequency, often most uncomfortably; it has a fine unity, a well-defined theme. That some of the statements invite argument and questioning is inevitable and stimulating. Here is a book of the "wry epigram and the icy aphorism" which made his earlier books so appealing and gained for him a wide audience.--Publisher description.

Autobiography of a Restless Mind

Autobiography of a Restless Mind PDF Author: Dee Hock
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1475966555
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Volume 1 Autobiography of a Restless Mind is a fascinating, exceptionally diverse collection of observations and reflections written over the past twenty-five years by one of the most innovative thinkers, writers, and leaders of the past half century. Witty and wise, playful and profound, prophetic and immensely quotable, it is a companion no thinking, caring person should be without. Written in an unforgettable style reminiscent of Aurelius, Montaigne, Lao-Tse, and Bacon, it is a classic that will be read with pleasure and profit for generations to come.

Reflections on Human Nature

Reflections on Human Nature PDF Author: Arthur O. Lovejoy
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421432447
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Originally published in 1961. Arthur O. Lovejoy, beginning with his book The Great Chain of Being, helped usher in the discipline of the History of Ideas in America. In Reflections on Human Nature, Lovejoy devotes particular attention to influential figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Bishop Butler, and Mandeville, tracing developments and changes in the concept of human nature through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He also discusses the theory of human nature held by the founders of the American Constitution, giving special attention to James Madison and the "Federalist Papers."

Religious Reflections on the Human Body

Religious Reflections on the Human Body PDF Author: Jane Marie Law
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253115447
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
"It provides imaginative and thought-provoking... coverage of the ways in which religious thought and practice construct understandings of the human body." -- Journal of Asian Studies "Drawing on a remarkably diverse set of studies discussing the major Western religious traditions (including Islam) and East and South Asian traditions, the book challenges easy theorization of 'the body in religion.'... an excellent source book for college-level comparative religion courses... " -- Bruce Mannheim, University of Michigan "... an important study that... should be of considerable interest to the general student of the history and phenomenology of religions." -- Muslim World Book Review The first cross-cultural and interdisciplinary survey on the relationship between religious practice and ideology and the human body.

Gardens

Gardens PDF Author: Robert Pogue Harrison
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459606264
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur'an; Plato's Academy and Epicurus's Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt - all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.

Natural Reflections

Natural Reflections PDF Author: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300166230
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
In this important and original book, eminent scholar Barbara Herenstein Smith describes, assesses, and reflects upon a set of contemporary intellectual projects involving science, religion, and human cognition. One, which Smith calls "the New Naturalism", is the effort to explain religion on the basis of cognitive science. Another, which she calls "the New Natural Theology", is the attempt to reconcile natural-scientific accounts of the world with traditional religious belief. These two projects, she suggests, are in many ways mirror images -- or "natural reflections"--Of each other. Examing these and related efforts from the perspective of a constructivist-pragmatist epistemology, Smith argues that crucial aspects of belief - religious and other - that remain elusive or invisible under dominant rationalist and computational models are illuminated by views of human cognition that stress its dynamic, embodied, and interactive features. She also demonstrates how constructivist understandings of the formation and stabilization of knowledge - scientific and other - alert us to simularities in the springs of science and religion that are elsewhere seen largely in terms of difference and contrast. In Natural Reflections, Smith develops a sophisticated approach to issues often framed only polemically. Recognizing science and religion as complex, distinct domains of human practice, she also insists on their significant historical connections and cognitive continuities and offers important new modes of engagement with each of them--Jacket.

Human Nature

Human Nature PDF Author: Malcolm Jeeves
Publisher: Templeton Foundation Press
ISBN: 1932031960
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Malcolm Jeeves, former editor-in-chief of Neuropsychologia, a leading international scientific journal in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, explores the intersection of science and faith in defining what it means to be human. He reports on recent scientific research on consciousness and the link between mind, brain, and behavior. He examines issues such as determinism by indicating the possible relevance of chaos theory to enduring concerns about freedom and responsibility. He looks at similarities and differences between human nature and animal nature. He reexamines traditional dualist views of soul and body in the light of contemporary research on mind and brain and argues for a wholistic model. This leads to addressing questions such as: does spiritual awareness depend on the intactness of our brains or does spirituality stand apart from our biological substrate?

The Western Illusion of Human Nature

The Western Illusion of Human Nature PDF Author: Marshall Sahlins
Publisher: Paradigm
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.

Black Mirror and Philosophy

Black Mirror and Philosophy PDF Author: David Kyle Johnson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119578264
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
A philosophical look at the twisted, high-tech near-future of the sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror, offering a glimpse of the darkest reflections of the human condition in digital technology Black Mirror―the Emmy-winning Netflix series that holds up a dark, digital mirror of speculative technologies to modern society—shows us a high-tech world where it is all too easy to fall victim to ever-evolving forms of social control.In Black Mirror and Philosophy, original essays written by a diverse group of scholars invite you to peer into the void and explore the philosophical, ethical, and existential dimensions of Charlie Brooker’s sinister stories. The collection reflects Black Mirror’s anthology structure by pairing a chapter with every episode in the show’s five seasons—including an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure analysis of Bandersnatch—and concludes with general essays that explore the series’ broader themes. Chapters address questions about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, surveillance, privacy, love, death, criminal behavior, and politics, including: Have we given social media too much power over our lives? Could heaven really, one day, be a place on Earth? Should criminal justice and punishment be crowdsourced? What rights should a “cookie” have? Immersive, engaging, and experimental, Black Mirror and Philosophy navigates the intellectual landscape of Brooker’s morality plays for the modern world, where humanity’s greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide.

Reflections on Human Development

Reflections on Human Development PDF Author: Mahbub ul Haq
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195356306
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This work explores a new development paradigm whose central focus is on human well-being. Increase in income is treated as an essential means, but not as the end of development, and certainly not as the sum of human life. Development policies and strategies are discussed which link economic growth with human lives in various societies. The book also analyzes the evolution of a new Human Development Index which is a far more comprehensive measure of socio-economic progress of nations than the traditional measure of Gross National Product. For the first time, a Political Freedom Index is also presented. The book offers a new vision of human security for the twenty-first century where real security is equated with security of people in their homes, their jobs, their communities, and their environment. The book discusses many concrete proposals in this context, including a global compact to overcome the worst aspects of global poverty within a decade, key reforms in the Bretton Woods institutions of World Bank and IMF, and establishment of a new Economic Security Council within the United Nations.