Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Philosophy

In popular imagination, Tolkien is a Luddite, but recent scholarship has identified Tolkien's extensive modern sympathies. Tolkien, Philosopher of War contributes to this growing literature. His is a modern critique of Enlightenment thinking, specifically those philosophies that wrest the initiative from God in divinizing man. His worry is apocalyptic politics—political movements that take Christ's word out of the realm of grace and make it a platform for political action.

Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today's democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society's benefit, Just Giving reveals how such generosity not only isn't the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice.

When we think about whether we are good people leading a good life, we usually think about actions. Bad people do bad things that hurt others. Good people do good things that help others, and they avoid doing bad things. Simple. But while our actions certainly have consequences, today our inactions have far greater and far graver consequences. Bad actions can result in the suffering of a few or several dozen others; inaction can result in the extreme misery of thousands.

When Thomas Aquinas addressed the best arguments against God in his masterwork, the Summa Theologica, he listed only two. The first was the problem of evil: How can God—who is perfectly good—exist alongside that which is against Him? His second: Is God needed to explain the world? Patrick Flynn presents the best arguments for God while also addressing the strongest objections. This book is destined to become the apologetic gold standard for defending classical theism against atheistic naturalism.

As this book argues, every era since Marx's death has reinvented him to fit its needs. There is not one Marx forever and for all time. There are a thousand Marxes. As Thomas Nail contends, one of the most significant contributions of Marx's work is that it treats theory itself as a historical practice. Reading Marx is not just an interpretative activity, but a creative one. As our historical conditions change, so do the kinds of questions we pose and the kinds of answers we find in Marx's writing.

The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism. What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that listeners overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving "the West" as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.

The Creative Self delves into the hegemony of neoliberal self-optimization and turns to psychoanalysis in search of an alternative. In paired chapters, Mari Ruti and Gail M. Newman examine the works of the psychoanalysts Marion Milner and Donald W. Winnicott.

In this very short introduction, Tim Bayne introduces the field of philosophy of religion and engages with some of the most burning questions philosophers discuss.

First published in 1925, Buddha's Teachings was originally edited by Japanese scholars of Buddhism before WWII and distributed widely throughout Japan. The first English edition was published in 1934.

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity? The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates.

How can we think more deeply about our travels? This was the question that inspired Emily Thomas's journey into the philosophy of travel. Part philosophical ramble, part travelogue, The Meaning of Travel begins in the Age of Discovery, when philosophers first started taking travel seriously. It meanders forward to consider Montaigne on otherness, John Locke on cannibals, and Henry Thoreau on wilderness.

The Erich Fromm Reader exhibits the true genius of an original thinker in seeing the connections between overlapping knowledge from many different fields. Here, interdisciplinarity is not only a lip service but the impact of Erich Fromm's unique social psychological notion.

Contrary to popular belief, not all scientists are materialists fervently discounting the spiritual. Science, Being, & Becoming shares interviews with some of the world's foremost scientists who recount their own transpersonal, metaphysical, and mystical experiences and how those experiences transformed them and their scientific work. This groundbreaking book makes it evident that the long-standing divide between science and spirituality has not served us well and in fact continues to have significant adverse consequences for us all.

The subtle arts of management and leadership have been developed over thousands of years by the Chinese. The Book of Leadership and Strategy represents the Taoist culmination of this long tradition and is one of the most prestigious works of ancient Chinese thought. Collected here are insightful teachings on the challenges of leadership on all levels, from organizational management to political statecraft. The translator, Thomas Cleary, has chosen and arranged these teachings to emphasize the most valuable lessons of Taoist wisdom for modern Western listeners.

Plato is perhaps the most significant philosopher who has ever lived, and The Republic, composed in Athens in about 375 BC, is widely regarded as his most famous dialogue. Its discussion of the perfect city and the perfect mind laid the foundations for Western culture and, for over 2,000 years, has been the cornerstone of Western philosophy.

How can we remember certain events from our childhood as if they happened yesterday and then forget we did last week? Why does our memory seem to work well at some times but not at others? What happens when it goes wrong? Can memory be improved or manipulated by psychological techniques, or even 'brain implants'? How does memory grow and change as we age? And what of so-called 'recovered' memories? This Very Short Introduction brings together the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to address these important questions around the science of memory.

Leading-edge empirical observations are increasingly difficult to reconcile with "scientific" materialism, with analytic idealism—the notion that reality, while equally amenable to scientific inquiry, is fundamentally mental—a leading contender to replace it. In this book, the broad body of empirical evidence and reasoning in favor of analytic idealism is reviewed in an accessible manner. The resulting argument anticipates a historically imminent transition to a scientific worldview that regards mind, not matter, as the ground of all reality.

The Left seems to be dying a slow death. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action. Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution, the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist, and civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time.

We are all living an existence that none of us chose and none of us truly understand. Naturally, everything can—at times—feel strange, chaotic, and overwhelming. The Art of Living an Absurd Existence helps us find peace with this; it instructs us on how to embrace and appreciate the mystery; and it breaks us free from reductive ways of thinking so that we can embark on our own absurd journey with openness and wonder.

Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reach far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself.