The Courage to Love: Surviving and Thriving in Your Relationship
The Courage to Love: Surviving and Thriving in Your Relationship

Author: Colm O'Connor

Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd

Published: 2013-03-08

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0717158179

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Dr Colm O'Connor, a clinical psychologist and couples therapist, has for over twenty years explored the emotional lives of couples and researched hundreds of cases of couples in distress. Looking beneath the surface of everyday complaints, The Courage to Love reveals those insights and shows how we seek solutions to life's most essential questions in close relationships. It answers common questions that we often ask such as: 'Why do we constantly argue about trivial things?' 'Why do we have to win an argument at all?' 'Why is it that we often forget what it is we end up fighting about?' 'How is it that love can deteriorate into abuse?' In answering these kinds of questions, Dr O'Connor shows what is ultimately at stake for people in winning an argument, starting a fight, proving a point, triumphing in divorce, or abusing a lover, and presents a range of solutions that are not about how to control relationships but how to inhabit them. Painting a dramatic portrait of love as a heroic response to human vulnerability, The Courage to Love shines new light on how relationship breakdown happens and provides a guide for getting back on track.

The Theology of Fear in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae
The Theology of Fear in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae

Author: Nathan Luis Cartagena

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-05-23

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1666953822

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The Theology of Fear in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae excavates and explores Thomas Aquinas’s comparatively expansive theology of fear that he develops in the Summa theologiae. Whereas many classify fear under a single category (e.g., an emotion, passion, or sentiment), Thomas specifies seven major categories of fear, including the passion and gift of fear. And while many classify courage as the lone virtue indexed to fear, Thomas argues that courage and perseverance perfect it, adding that a Spirit-empowered gift of courage also perfects human fears so that human beings may attain and remain in blessedness. A work in retrieval theology designed for Thomas and non-Thomas scholars operating within the interactions of theology and psychology, this book argues that understanding this theology’s motivations, internal coherence, and merits is necessary for understanding Thomas’s instruction for beginners in the Christian religion and its ongoing relevance for today.

Irrevocable
Irrevocable

Author: Alphonso Lingis

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 022655709X

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A lyrical and personal philosophical inquiry into the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Alphonso Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things. Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses? Lingis’s investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.

Thinking about the Emotions
Thinking about the Emotions

Author: Alix Cohen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0198766858

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Leading philosophers offer a rich survey of the development of our understanding of the emotions, discussing major thinkers from antiquity to the 20th century. Thinking about the Emotions is a fascinating and illuminating study of how philosophers have grappled with this intriguing part of our nature as beings who feel as well as think and act.

Passions
Passions

Author: Giacomo Leopardi

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0300186339

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Revenge—Revenge is so sweet one often wishes to be insulted so as to be able to take revenge, and I don’t mean just by an old enemy, but anyone, or even (especially when in a really bad mood) by a friend.—from Passions The extraordinary quality of Giacomo Leopardi’s writing and the innovative nature of his thought were never fully recognized in his lifetime. Zibaldone, his 4,500-page intellectual diary—a vast collection of thoughts on philosophy, civilization, literary criticism, linguistics, humankind and its vanities, and other varied topics—remained unpublished until more than a half-century after his death. But shortly before he died, Leopardi began to organize a small, thematic collection of his writings in an attempt to give structure and system to his philosophical musings. Now freshly translated into English by master translator, novelist, and critic Tim Parks, Leopardi’s Passions presents 164 entries reflecting the full breadth of human passion. The volume offers a fascinating introduction to Leopardi’s arguments and insights, as well as a glimpse of the concerns of thinkers to come, among them Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Wittgenstein, Gadda, and Beckett.

A Virtue for Courageous Minds
A Virtue for Courageous Minds

Author: Aurelian Craiutu

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0691171343

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Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, A Virtue for Courageous Minds examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. Aurelian Craiutu begins with classical thinkers who extolled the virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. He then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. Craiutu looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Madame de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. He traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and he explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. Craiutu demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and he challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, A Virtue for Courageous Minds reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today.

Passion in Philosophy
Passion in Philosophy

Author: Randolph Wheeler

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1498534686

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Among the first and foremost of American continental philosophers, Alphonso Lingis refines his own thought through a topic usually deemed unworthy of philosophical examination—passion. Lingis criticizes traditional scientific accounts of the emotions as dividing or disrupting our lives and argues for passion as a unifying force, a concept which invites philosophical exploration. The book’s structure is twofold. First, it offers an examination of Lingis’s most recent developments through the topic of passion with essays from some of the most established commentators on the work of Lingis. Second, it offers a substantial retrospective on Lingis’s thought in relation to some of the major figures in continental philosophy, namely Levinas, Kant, Heidegger, Butler, Foucault, and Nietzsche, all interweaving the theme of passion. Written to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of Lingis’s birth, these essays show how Lingis’s thought has not only endured over so many productive decades but also remains vital and even continues to grow.

Essays on Neuroscience and Political Theory
Essays on Neuroscience and Political Theory

Author: F. Vander Valk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1136344039

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The past 20 years have seen increasingly bold claims emanating from the field of neuroscience. Advances in medical imaging, brain modelling, and interdisciplinary cognitive science have forced us to reconsider the nature of social, cultural, and political activities. This collection of essays is the first to explore the relationship between neuroscience and political theory, with a view to examining what connections can be made and which claims represent a bridge too far. The book is divided into three parts: Part I: places neuroscience as a social and political practice into historical context Part II: weaves together the insights from contemporary neuroscience with the wisdom of major figures in the history of political thought Part III: considers how neuroscience can inform contemporary debates about a range of issues in political theory This work brings together scholars who are sceptical about the possibility of integrating neuroscience and political theory with proponents of a neuroscience-informed approach to thinking about political and social life. The result is a timely and wide-ranging collection of essays about the role that our brain might play in the life of the body politic. It should be essential reading for all those with an interest in the cutting edge of political theory.

The Ethics of Courage
The Ethics of Courage

Author: Jacques M. Chevalier

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-12-19

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 3031327438

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This two-volume work examines far-reaching debates on the concept of courage from Greek antiquity to the Christian and mediaeval periods, as well as the modern era. Volume 1 explains how competing accounts of epistêmê, rational wisdom, and truth dominated classical antiquity. Early Christian and mediaeval thinkers, in contrast, favoured fortitude founded on faith and fear of God over philosophical reasoning left to its own devices. Volume 2 turns to theories of courage from the early modern period to the present. It shows how the twin laws of polis and physis are at the heart of post-medieval thought. Courage is found at the crossroads of love and dread, freedom and fate, happiness and suffering, as well as power and submission to the ruling order. The later influence of evolutionism, existentialism, and the social and natural sciences on moral philosophy is also addressed at some length. The protection of people's best interests, the passions and powers of the human will, and the rule of active energy in all aspects of life supplant courage formerly viewed through the lens of reason or faith, or a combination of the two. These new ideas, paradoxically, herald the end of the ethics of courage. They also undermine the courage of ethical thinking. Courage is no longer an end in itself, nor is it a means to happiness "at the end." Regardless of what Gandhi, Tillich, and Foucault have to say about the topic, late modernity and the global age witness a marked loss of interest in courage as an idea worthy of conceptual investigation. Debates about the moral implications of courage give way to the value-free science of resilience, which studies how people can recover from past trauma and find wellness, primarily in the realm of physis.