Just Thinking About Philosophy

Just Thinking About Philosophy

Author: Shell Abegglen

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2016-03-31

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 1524600822

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Washed up on warm beaches around the world is a creature called the Bluebottle Jellyfish, or Man O' War, a small harmless looking mass of blue jelly with a rather painful stinging response to human touch and curiosity. Having been warned about the Bluebottle Jellyfish, I have stayed away from it. However, I have ignored the warnings about the stinging response to the human mind from the jelly mass of philosophers and how their philosophical ideas will befuddle your thinking. Eventually my curiosity overcame my reluctance to go near it, and now after considerable study, I have put together a succinctly canned overall historical look at philosophy and the lives of the great philosophers. It is written as an introduction to philosophy, as opposed to being hit upside the head with a plethora of complex books on comprehensive philosophical knowledge designed for a much longer period of study. Therefore this introduction to Philosophy is a fun quick intellectual look for those who have been stung with a mild curiosity for this subject, but neither has the time nor the inclination to get deeply involved in the many complicated avenues of the esoteric discipline of philosophy.


Ultimate Questions

Ultimate Questions

Author: Nils Ch Rauhut

Publisher: Longman Publishing Group

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780321412980

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Part of the Penguin Academic Series, this inexpensive ($25.00 net) and brief text examines the main problems in contemporary philosophy and uses more than 100 "Food for Thought" exercises that promote learning by helping students become true active learners of philosophy. Vivid and engaging examples further enhance this up-to-date examination of the main problems in contemporary philosophy. It is written for professors teaching a problems-oriented course.


Empty Ideas

Empty Ideas

Author: Peter Unger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 019069601X

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During the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers generally agreed that, by contrast with science, philosophy should offer no substantial thoughts about the general nature of concrete reality. Instead, philosophers offered conceptual truths. It is widely assumed that, since 1970, things have changed greatly. This book argues that's an illusion that prevails because of the failure to differentiate between "concretely substantial" and "concretely empty" ideas.


Thinking to Some Purpose

Thinking to Some Purpose

Author: Susan Stebbing

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1000597474

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"I am convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance. Our failures in thinking are in part due to faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise. It is the aim of this book to make a small effort in this direction." - Susan Stebbing, from the Preface Despite huge advances in education, knowledge and communication, it can often seem we are neither well-trained nor well practised in the art of clear thinking. Our powers of reasoning and argument are less confident that they should be, we frequently ignore evidence and we are all too often swayed by rhetoric rather than reason. But what can you do to think and argue better? First published in 1939 but unavailable for many years, Susan Stebbing's Thinking to Some Purpose is a classic first-aid manual of how to think clearly, and remains astonishingly fresh and insightful. Written against a background of the rise of dictatorships and the collapse of democracy in Europe, it is packed with useful tips and insights. Stebbing offers shrewd advice on how to think critically and clearly, how to spot illogical statements and slipshod thinking, and how to rely on reason rather than emotion. At a time when we are again faced with serious threats to democracy and freedom of thought, Stebbing’s advice remains as urgent and important as ever. This Routledge edition of Thinking to Some Purpose includes a new Foreword by Nigel Warburton and a helpful Introduction by Peter West, who places Susan Stebbing’s classic book in historical and philosophical context.


The Power of Critical Thinking

The Power of Critical Thinking

Author: Lewis Vaughn

Publisher:

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 9780199018680

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This comprehensive and engaging introduction to the essential components of critical analysis uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine how psychological and social factors can impede clear thinking and lead to faulty reasoning. Emphasizing the importance of critical thinking to personaldevelopment and success, The Power of Critical Thinking provides students with the skills they need to engage meaningfully with the world around them - both inside and outside of the classroom.


Evil in Modern Thought

Evil in Modern Thought

Author: Susan Neiman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0691168504

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Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.


Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

Author: John Rawls

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0674042565

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Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls's lectures on various historical figures reflect his developing and changing views on the history of liberalism and democracy. With its careful analyses of the doctrine of the social contract, utilitarianism, and socialism, this volume has a critical place in the traditions it expounds.


Bob Dylan and Philosophy

Bob Dylan and Philosophy

Author: Carl J. Porter

Publisher: Open Court

Published: 2011-05-24

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 081269760X

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The legions of Bob Dylan fans know that Dylan is not just a great composer, writer, and performer, but a great thinker as well. In Bob Dylan and Philosophy, eighteen philosophers analyze Dylan’s ethical positions, political commitments, views on gender and sexuality, and his complicated and controversial attitudes toward religion. All phases of Dylan’s output are covered, from his early acoustic folk ballads and anthem-like protest songs to his controversial switch to electric guitar to his sometimes puzzling, often profound music of the 1970s and beyond. The book examines different aspects of Dylan’s creative thought through a philosophical lens, including personal identity, negative and positive freedom, enlightenment and postmodernism in his social criticism, and the morality of bootlegging. An engaging introduction to deep philosophical truths, the book provides Dylan fans with an opportunity to learn about philosophy while impressing fans of philosophy with the deeper implications of his intellectual achievements.


Thinking About God

Thinking About God

Author: Gregory E. Ganssle

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2010-06-18

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0830877487

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What is God like? What can God do? What can God know? How does God communicate? Philosopher Gregory E. Ganssle appeals to philosophy for some answers to these questions in this introduction to thinking clearly and carefully about God.


A Philosophy of Madness

A Philosophy of Madness

Author: Wouter Kusters

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 769

ISBN-13: 0262044285

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The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.