"Descartes' attempt to ground the possibility of human knowledge in the existence of God was judged to be a complete failure by his contemporaries, and this remains the universal opinion of philosophers to this day, despite the fact that three and a half centuries of secular epistemology–which attempts to ground the possibility of knowledge either in the unaided human intellect or in natural processes–has failed to do any better. Furth ...
Philosophy is the quest for a life that is fully alive. Drawing on the insights of philosophers through the ages, The Way of Philosophy clarifies what it means to live life intensely. It exposes the shallowness of conventional wisdom by asking such questions as –Can science know everything? –Should we do it if it feels good? –Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? –Is life about creating ourselves? –Is love supposed to be selfless? – ...
In The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood, Chris Altieri contends that the forma mentis of the founders of the political society often viewed–by its members and by those external to it–as the non plus ultra of modernity, i.e., the United States of America, is really steeped in the more ancient tradition of thinking that began in Athens and continued through the Christian centuries. Engaging the twentieth-c ...
The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins–where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future–the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on e ...
Twelve scholars take us on a journey through twelve books that have defined the methodologies and orthodoxies of key disciplines within the university curriculum. These books have not only been formative for their respective disciplines, but have reshaped the university and continue to reframe our understanding of education. Each chapter places a Great Book in its historical context, summarizes the key ideas, and assesses the influence of the te ...
The Perfection of Freedom seeks to respond to the impoverished conventional notion of freedom through a recovery of an understanding rich with possibilities yet all but forgotten in contemporary thought. This understanding, developed in different but complementary ways in the German thinkers Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, connects freedom, not exclusively with power and possibility, but rather most fundamentally with completion, wholeness, and ...
Immanuel Kant was one of the most significant philosophers of the modern age. Historical Dictionary of Kant and Kantianism, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on key terms of Kant’s philosophy, Kant’s major works and cover his most important predecessors and successors, concentrating especially on the re ...
Dedicated as few men have been to the life of reason, Bertrand Russell has always been concerned with the basic questions to which religion also addresses itself – questions about man's place in the universe and the nature of the good life, questions that involve life after death, morality, freedom, education, and sexual ethics. He brings to his treatment of these questions the same courage, scrupulous logic, and lofty wisdom for which his ...
Our reasoning evolved not for finding the truth, but for social bonding and convincing. The best logical methods humans have created provide no path to truth, unless something is assumed as true from the start. Other than that, we only have methods for attempting to measure uncertainty. This book highlights the consequences of these facts for scientific practice, and suggests how to correct the mistakes we still make. But even our best methods t ...
