Existential Rednecks is a book composed of three short novellas that must be read together. It’s a story of love and transformation. You’ll meet true rednecks who were interested mainly in sex and moonshine, but who morph into benevolent lovers of literature. You’ll also discover a mind-reading sprite, a human lie detector, slightly kinky septuagenarians and pilgrim who speaks to fish, trees and an invisible dog. You’ll laugh, weep, and never look at pink dogwoods again without thinking ra...

Are we free, whether we know it or not? Or is our sense of freedom merely an illusion? Rudolf Steiner tackles this age-old problem in a new way. He shows that by taking account of our own activity of thinking, we can know the reasons for our actions. And if these reasons are taken from our world of ideals, then our actions are free, because we alone determine them. But this freedom cannot be settled for us by philosophical argument. It is not simply granted to us. If we want to become free...

Philosophical wisdom and practical advice for overcoming the problems of middle ageHow can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost youth? How can you accept the failings of the past, the sense of futility in the tasks that consume the present, and the prospect of death that blights the future? In this self-help book with a difference, Kieran Setiya confronts the inevitable challenges of a...

The key to intelligence is to be able to overcome the prejudices of the society we live in and thus free our minds to think beyond what society assumes to be correct and beyond what it deems to be 'acceptable.' Pearls of Wosdom, like the other books in the series, offers a selection of opinion pieces illustrating how intelligent thinking has almost nothing to do with political-correctness! Please note that the Wosdom books can be read in any order. Warning: Contains material some may find ...

Edith Stein's doctoral dissertation under Husserl, with index.Early in Edith Stein's philosophical output stands her doctoral dissertation defended in 1916 at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. On the Problem of Empathy is the fruit of several years' work with the founder of phenomenology and the director of the dissertation itself, Edmund Husserl.Stein follows the reflections of Husserl in volume 2 of his Ideas, but in several respects adopts an independent stance of her own. Her work ...

In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe. Can it really be...

The Autonomy of Reason reflects Wolff’s determination to get out of Kant’s system what is good and to get out of Kant’s system for good. Readers will certainly benefit from Wolff’s two decades of intense study of Kant. Wolff does not see his task as one of either historical exegesis or philosophical criticism. In the place of both Wolff proposes a “philosophical reconstruction” of the text.

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.”- Socrates.Two centuries before the Stoics lived The Sophists, star philosophers who roamed Athens during the fifth century B.C. commanding large fees for speaking and private lessons. They offered practical education, speculation on the nature of the universe and knowledge in the art of life and politics. The most famous were Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Thrasymachus, Callicles, Lycophron, Antiphon...

Is a person's decision to kill himself always wrong? Is his thinking irrational? Who has the right to stop him?This is a continuation and expansion of David Hume's essay with the same name.A modern-language version of David Hume's essay follows. A link is provided to the original essay.

Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants makes philosophy fun, tactile, and popular. Moral thinking is simple, Ruwen Ogien argues, and as inherent as the senses. In our daily experiences, in the situations we confront and in the scenes we witness, we develop an understanding of right and wrong as sophisticated as the moral outlook of the world's most gifted philosophers. By drawing on this knowledge to navigate life's most perplexing problems, ethics becomes second nature.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most problematic text. There appears to be no thematic connection between its four Parts and numerous sections. To make it even worse, the book contains a number of thematic contradictions. The standard approach has been a method of selective reading, that is, most critics select a few brilliant passages for edification and ignore the rest. This approach has turned Nietzsche's text into a collection of disjointed fragments. Going against this ...

Fusing street scenes (from Budapest to New York City) with family history (African American and Jewish), Sean Thomas Dougherty uses both traditional and experimental forms to explore issues of identity and family. Deeply rooted in music and performance, Dougherty’s poetry resists easy categorization, revealing the complexity of our lives and times.Sean Thomas Dougherty lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the BFA program for creative writing at Penn Sta...