In the Critique of Judgement, Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime. He discusses the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation, and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our jud..
In this revealing and witty account, Paul Bloom examines the science behind pleasures, curious desires, attractions and tastes, exploring one of the most fascinating and fundamental engines of human behaviour. Drawing on insights from child development, philosophy, neuroscience and behavioural economics, How Pleasure Works shows how certain universal habits of the human mind explain what..
The central work of one of the West's greatest philosophers, The Republic of Plato is a masterpiece of insight and feeling, the finest of the Socratic dialogues, and one of the great books of Western culture. This new translation captures the dramatic realism, poetic beauty, intellectual vitality, and emotional power of Plato at the height of his powers. Deftly weaving three main strands of argume..
Do you ever think you’re the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy? Or does your colleague’s abrasive manner rub you the wrong way?You are not alone. After a disastrous meeting with a highly successful entrepreneur, who was genuinely convinced he was ‘surrounded by idiots’, communication expert and bestsel..
A brand-new book from the award-winning SUNDAY TIMES journalist Brian Appleyard. Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with..
If reason is what makes us human, then why do we humans often behave so irrationally? Taking us from desert ants to Aristotle, cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber explore how our 'flawed superpower' of reason works, how it doesn't, and how it evolved to help us develop as social beings...
Logic of Sense is one of Deleuze's seminal works. First published in 1969, shortly after Difference and Repetition, it prefigures the hybrid style and methods he would use in his later writing with Felix Guattari. In an early review Michel Foucault wrote that Logic of Sense 'should be read as the boldest and most insolent of metaphysical treatises'.The book is divided into 34 '..
In The March of Unreason, Dick Taverne expresses his concern that irrationality is on the rise in Western society, and argues that public opinion is increasingly dominated by unreflecting prejudice and an unwillingness to engage with factual evidence. Discussing topics such as genetically modified crops and foods, organic farming, the MMR vaccine, environmentalism, the precautionary principle..
A scientific exploration of some of humanity's most puzzling questions: What is love? Why do we fall in (and out) of love? And why would we have evolved to feel something so weird, with so many downsides?Whether you live for Valentine's Day or are the type to forget your wedding anniversary, love is, quite simply, part of being human. In The Science of Love, renowned evolutionary anthropologi..
In the bible, two major phases of spiritual revelation have occurred over about the last four millennia: The age of the father and the age of the son of God, recorded as the old testament and the New testament respectively. The old testament was the message for the Age of the Father and it proclaimed the inexorable justice of God...
What Philosophers Think is a collection of interviews with some of the world's leading philosophers and intellectuals evolution, free will, technology, politics, faith, determination, language, freedom, God, sex, consciousness, and music. These interviews reveal the core ideas and viewpoints of these great thinkers and how they apply them the largest questions in life. Inside you'll find lively, p..