Starting from S&øren Kierkegaard's insight that fully accepting the human condition requires one to live with the persistent temptation to escape from it, Ronald Hall finds similar concerns reflected in the work of two modern-day philosophers, Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum, who equally find in a philosophy of love and marriage the key to understanding how humans may achieve happiness in the acceptance of their humanity. All three thinkers follow a &"logic of paradox&" in showing how success in the human quest to be human depends crucially on the struggle humans experience with the ever-present opportunities to pursue alternative paths. What Kierkegaard called &"living existentially&" can be achieved only after confronting and refusing the possibilities of living in &"aesthetic,&" &"ethical,&" or even &"religious&" denial of one's true humanity. By creating this dialogue between the nineteenth-century Danish thinker and two eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Hall reveals the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard's thought to our own age and its cogency as an interpretation of the human predicament.
Starting from S&øren Kierkegaard's insight that fully accepting the human condition requires one to live with the persistent temptation to escape from it, Ronald Hall finds similar concerns reflected in the work of two modern-day philosophers, Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum, who equally find in a philosophy of love and marriage the key to understanding how humans may achieve happiness in the acceptance of their humanity. All three thinkers follow a &"logic of paradox&" in showing how success in the human quest to be human depends crucially on the struggle humans experience with the ever-present opportunities to pursue alternative paths. What Kierkegaard called &"living existentially&" can be achieved only after confronting and refusing the possibilities of living in &"aesthetic,&" &"ethical,&" or even &"religious&" denial of one's true humanity. By creating this dialogue between the nineteenth-century Danish thinker and two eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Hall reveals the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard's thought to our own age and its cogency as an interpretation of the human predicament.
Comic, elegaic, and always formally intricate, using political allegory and painterly landscape, philosophic story and dramatic monologue, these poems describe a moment when something marvelous and unforeseen alters the course of a single day, a year, or an entire life.
What if you could be smarter, stronger, and have a better memory just by taking a pill? What if we could alter our genes to cure Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s? What if we could halt or even reverse the human aging process? What if we could communicate with each othersimply by thinking about it? These questions were once the stuff of science fiction. Today, advances in biotechnology have shown that they’re plausible, even likely to be accomplished in the near future. In labs around the world, researchers looking for ways to help the sick and injured have stumbled onto techniques that enhance healthy animals—making them stronger, faster, smarter, and longer-lived—in some cases, even connecting their minds to robots and computers across the Internet. Now science is on the verge of applying this knowledge to healthy men and women, allowing us to alter humanity in ways we’d previously only dreamed possible. The same research that could cure Alzheimer’s is leading to drugs and genetic techniques that could boost human intelligence. The techniques being developed to stave off heart disease and cancer have the potential to slow or even reverse human aging. And brain implants that restore motion to the paralyzed and sight to the blind are already allowing a small set of patients to control robots and computers simply by thinking about it. Not everyone welcomes this scientific progress. Cries of “against nature” arise from skeptics even as scientists break new ground at an astounding pace. Across the political spectrum, the debate roils: Should we embrace the power to alter our minds and bodies, or should we restrict it? Distilling the most radical accomplishments being made in labs worldwide, including gene therapy, genetic engineering, stem cell research, life extension, brain-computer interfaces, and cloning,More Than Humanoffers an exciting tour of the impact biotechnology will have on our lives. Throughout this remarkable trip, author Ramez Naam shares an impassioned vision for the future with revealing insight into the ethical dilemmas posed by twenty-first-century science. Encouraging us to celebrate rather than fear these innovations, Naam incisively separates fact from myth, arguing that these much-maligned technologies have the power to transform the human race for the better, so long as individuals and families are left free to decide how and if to use them. If you’ve ever wondered about the boundaries of humanity,More Than Humanoffers a vision of a world where we use our knowledge to improve ourselves, unhindered by the fear of change.
Two Choices: Angel or Exile. Lincoln or Phoenix. The wrong choice could cost not only her life, but her eternity. It starts with a whisper: "It's time for you to know who you are..." On her 17th birthday, everything will change for Violet Eden. The boy she loves will betray her. Her enemy will save her. She will have to decide just how much she's willing to sacrifice. A centuries old war between fallen angels and the protectors of humanity chooses a new fighter. It's a battle Violet doesn't want, but she lives her life by two rules: don't run and don't quit. If angels seek vengeance and humans are the warriors, you could do a lot worse than betting on Violet Eden. LINCOLN: He's been Violet's one anchor, her running partner and kickboxing trainer. Only he never told her he's Grigori—part human, part angel—and that he was training her for an ancient battle between Angels and Exiles. PHOENIX: No one knows where his loyalties lie, yet he's the only one there to pick up the pieces and protect her after Lincoln's lies. In a world of dark and light, he is all shades of gray. The Embrace Series: Embrace (Book 1) Entice (Book 2) Emblaze (Book 3) Endless (Book 4) Empower (Book 5) Praise for Embrace: In her YA paranormal romance debut, Jessica Shirvington combines "the badass-action of Vampire Academy, the complex love triangles of Twilight, and the angel mythology of Fallen, taken one step further." —Book Couture "Shirvington's debut is smart, edgy and addictive—and sure to leave readers clamoring for the rest of the series."— Kirkus Reviews, STARRED "One of the best YA novels we've seen in a while. Get ready for a confident, kick-butt, well-defined heroine." — RT Book Reviews
To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles&—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.
Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another", but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.
A New York Times Bestseller and winner of the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "Game-changing." —Sy Montgomery, New York Times Book Review Mama’s Last Hug is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it—from dogs “adopting” the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones—show that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. Frans de Waal opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected.
