Socrates

Socrates PDF Author: Paul Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122215
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
“Spectacular . . . A delight to read.” —The Wall Street Journal From bestselling biographer and historian Paul Johnson, a brilliant portrait of Socrates, the founding father of philosophy In his highly acclaimed style, historian Paul Johnson masterfully disentangles centuries of scarce sources to offer a riveting account of Socrates, who is often hailed as the most important thinker of all time. Johnson provides a compelling picture of Athens in the fifth century BCE, and of the people Socrates reciprocally delighted in, as well as many enlightening and intimate analyses of specific aspects of his personality. Enchantingly portraying "the sheer power of Socrates's mind, and its unique combination of steel, subtlety, and frivolity," Paul Johnson captures the vast and intriguing life of a man who did nothing less than supply the basic apparatus of the human mind.

Socrates

Socrates PDF Author: Paul Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122215
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Spectacular . . . A delight to read.” —The Wall Street Journal From bestselling biographer and historian Paul Johnson, a brilliant portrait of Socrates, the founding father of philosophy In his highly acclaimed style, historian Paul Johnson masterfully disentangles centuries of scarce sources to offer a riveting account of Socrates, who is often hailed as the most important thinker of all time. Johnson provides a compelling picture of Athens in the fifth century BCE, and of the people Socrates reciprocally delighted in, as well as many enlightening and intimate analyses of specific aspects of his personality. Enchantingly portraying "the sheer power of Socrates's mind, and its unique combination of steel, subtlety, and frivolity," Paul Johnson captures the vast and intriguing life of a man who did nothing less than supply the basic apparatus of the human mind.

Rescuing Socrates

Rescuing Socrates PDF Author: Roosevelt Montas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.

Why Socrates Died

Why Socrates Died PDF Author: Robin Waterfield
Publisher: Emblem Editions
ISBN: 0771088639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A revisionist account of the most famous trial and execution in Western civilization — one with great resonance for modern society In the spring of 399 BCE, the elderly philosopher Socrates stood trial in his native Athens. The court was packed, and after being found guilty by his peers, Socrates died by drinking a cup of poison hemlock, his execution a defining moment in ancient civilization. Yet time has transmuted the facts into a fable. Aware of these myths, Robin Waterfield has examined the actual Greek sources, presenting a new Socrates, not an atheist or guru of a weird sect, but a deeply moral thinker, whose convictions stood in stark relief to those of his former disciple, Alcibiades, the hawkish and self-serving military leader. Refusing to surrender his beliefs even in the face of death, Socrates, as Waterfield reveals, was determined to save a morally decayed country that was tearing itself apart. Why Socrates Died is then not only a powerful revisionist book, but a work whose insights translate clearly from ancient Athens to the present day.

Free Speech

Free Speech PDF Author: Jacob Mchangama
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 154162033X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
“The best history of free speech ever written and the best defense of free speech ever made.” —P.J. O’Rourke Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat. In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech’s many defenders—from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists—Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant, and he explores how even its champions can be led down this path when the rise of new and contrarian voices challenge power and privilege of all stripes. Meticulously researched and deeply humane, Free Speech demonstrates how much we have gained from this principle—and how much we stand to lose without it.

Socrates

Socrates PDF Author: Luis E. Navia
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1616140860
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Philosopher Luis E. Navia presents a compelling portrayal of Socrates in this very readable and well-researched book, which is both a biography of the man and an exploration of his ideas.

Breakfast With Socrates

Breakfast With Socrates PDF Author: Robert Rowland Smith
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847652085
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
What does it mean to be awake? What exactly is therapeutic about retail therapy? And what are you really working on when you're at your desk, in the gym, or having dinner? From getting ready in the morning, through heading to work, going to a party, having sex and falling back to sleep, Breakfast with Socrates provides an hour-by-hour commentary on what history's greatest philosophers have said about the meaning behind everything we do. A fascinating exploration of our daily lives, Breakfast with Socrates also draws on literature, art, politics and psychology to offer an informal introduction to the history of ideas that will help anyone to think more healthily. Breakfast will never be the same again...

Socrates Meets Kant

Socrates Meets Kant PDF Author: Peter Kreeft
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1586173480
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Immanuel Kant is one of the greatest philosophers in history. But, as Peter Kreeft notes in this book, Kant is really two philosophers--a philosopher about how we know things (epistemology) and a philosopher of right and wrong (ethics). If he had written only on either topic, he would still be the most important and influential of the modern philosophers. The combination of the two, though, makes for a formidable thinker, one it would take a figure such as the Father of Philosophy, the relentless Socrates, to confront. Confront he does, in Peter Kreeft's next installment of the popular Socrates Meets series. Set in the afterlife, the conversation between the two great minds lays out the key issues. Kreeft's Socrates reflects what the historical philosopher would likely have made of Kant's ideas, while also recognizing the greatness, genius, and insightfulness of Kant. The result of their dialogues is a helpful, highly readable, even amusing book, useful for beginner as well as master. Kant's philosophy of knowing truly is a "Copernican revolution in philosophy" as he dubbed it. His ethics was intended to set out the rational grounds for morality. Did he achieve his goals? What would Socrates say about the matter? Dr. Kreeft has written a book no student of modern thought should be without.

The Trial

The Trial PDF Author: Sadakat Kadri
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030743270X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
For as long as accuser and accused have faced each other in public, criminal trials have been establishing far more than who did what to whom–and in this fascinating book, Sadakat Kadri surveys four thousand years of courtroom drama. A brilliantly engaging writer, Kadri journeys from the silence of ancient Egypt’s Hall of the Dead to the clamor of twenty-first-century Hollywood to show how emotion and fear have inspired Western notions of justice–and the extent to which they still riddle its trials today. He explains, for example, how the jury emerged in medieval England from trials by fire and water, in which validations of vengeance were presumed to be divinely supervised, and how delusions identical to those that once sent witches to the stake were revived as accusations of Satanic child abuse during the 1980s. Lifting the lid on a particularly bizarre niche of legal history, Kadri tells how European lawyers once prosecuted animals, objects, and corpses–and argues that the same instinctive urge to punish is still apparent when a child or mentally ill defendant is accused of sufficiently heinous crimes. But Kadri’s history is about aspiration as well as ignorance. He shows how principles such as the right to silence and the right to confront witnesses, hallmarks of due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, were derived from the Bible by twelfth-century monks. He tells of show trials from Tudor England to Stalin’s Soviet Union, but contends that “no-trials,” in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, are just as repugnant to Western traditions of justice and fairness. With governments everywhere eroding legal protections in the name of an indefinite war on terror, Kadri’s analysis could hardly be timelier. At once encyclopedic and entertaining, comprehensive and colorful, The Trial rewards curiosity and an appreciation of the absurd but tackles as well questions that are profound. Who has the right to judge, and why? What did past civilizations hope to achieve through scapegoats and sacrifices–and to what extent are defendants still made to bear the sins of society at large? Kadri addresses such themes through scores of meticulously researched stories, all told with the verve and wit that won him one of Britain’s most prestigious travel-writing awards–and in doing so, he has created a masterpiece of popular history.

The New Adventures of Socrates

The New Adventures of Socrates PDF Author: Manny Rayner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780244948788
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Plato's dialogues, updated for the age of social media and short attention spans. Socrates hangs out with his old gang - Plato, Glaucon, Thrasymachus and the rest - but also meets new characters including Madonna, George W. Bush, Richard Dawkins, Hamlet and an extremely well-meaning robot. Don't count on it teaching you any philosophy, but it might make you laugh if you have a sufficiently warped sense of humor.

Big Ideas for Curious Minds

Big Ideas for Curious Minds PDF Author: The School of Life
Publisher: School of Life
ISBN: 9781999747145
Category : Philosophers
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Introduces twenty-five of history's leading figures in philosophy, including Buddha, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and how their philosophical ideas continue to matter in today's world.