According to an ancient and still popular view -- sometimes known as 'eudaimonism' -- a person's well-being, or quality of life, is ultimately determined by his or her level of happiness. According to this view, the happier a person is, the better off he is. The doctrine is controversial in part because the nature of happiness is controversial. In What Is This Thing Called Happiness? Fred Feldman presents a study of the nature and value of happiness. Part One contains critical dis...

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

This book presents and defends a novel theory of distributive justice, according to which political economic distributive justice reigns in a state if the government of that state ensures that citizens receive the benefits and burdens they deserve from it. The book starts with a more precise characterization of the target of this inquiry - political economic distributive justice. It then proceeds to explicate the concept of desert, evaluate proposed ways of justifying desert claims, formul...

What is death? Do people survive death? What do we mean when we say that someone is "dying"? Presenting a clear and engaging discussion of the classic philosophical questions surrounding death, this book studies the great metaphysical and moral problems of death. In the first part, Feldman shows that a definition of life is necessary before death can be defined. After exploring several of the most plausible accounts of the nature of life and demonstrating their failure, he goes on to propo...

A story ultimately without a time and ultimately without a place. It's a memoir of families across generations of peace and of war, of homes that become lost and hopes that are kept, and a belief in a future that's better than the present.The book is a compelling and exhilarating experience exploring the threads of times now long gone and the memories that arose from them to generate the stories that lived on. In each family, a fundamental life event spawns ripples...

The foundational text of libertarian thought, named one of the 100 Most Influential Books since World War II (Times Literary Supplement)First published in response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia has since become one of the defining texts in classic libertarian thought. Challenging and ultimately rejecting liberal, socialist, and conservative agendas, Nozick boldly asserts that the rights of ...

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Bullshit, the case for worrying less about the rich and more about the poorEconomic inequality is one of the most divisive issues of our time. Yet few would argue that inequality is a greater evil than poverty. The poor suffer because they don't have enough, not because others have more, and some have far too much. So why do many people appear to be more distressed by the rich than by the poor...

A pithy and clear guide to the process of creating and evaluating theory in the social sciences. Using a simple model of theory creation and assessment--and applying it in depth to foundational and still-relevant social and economic theorists such as Durkheim, Marx and Parsons--Neil Smelser shows the way to a better understanding of what social theory is supposed to accomplish and how it can be read critically.First appearing in 1971 as a monograph drawn from his undergraduate clas...

This step-by-step approach to untangling the complexities of ethics from the bestselling … Demystified brand is a trusted companion to a college (346,000 students annually) course or as a self-teaching guide for readers studying on their own.About the BookThis easy-to-use guide from the popular Demystified series makes learning about ethics simple by walking readers step-by-step through the fundamentals of the subject. Each chapter concludes with a self-te...

This book seeks to reclaim Capital from the myth of internal inconsistency, a myth that serves to justify the censorship of Marx's critique of political economy and present-day research based upon it. Andrew Kliman shows that the alleged inconsistencies are actually caused by misinterpretation. By modifying the standard interpretation of Marx's value theory in two simple ways, the recent 'temporal single-system interpretation' eliminates all of the alleged inconsistencies. Written especial...

Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1998 'for his contributions in welfare economics'. Although his primary academic appointments have been mostly in economics, Sen is also an important and influential social theorist and philosopher. His work on social choice theory is seminal, and his writings on poverty, famine, and development, as well his contributions to moral and political philosophy, are important and influential. Sen's views about the nature and primac...