#175 - Ayn Rand - For the New Intellectual

Author or Editor: Ayn Rand
Publisher: Signet
Published: 1968
Pages: 110
Size: 1.83MB

This book is intended for those who wish to assume the responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals. It contains the main philosophical passages from my novels and presents the outline of a new philosophical system.

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#116 - Alan Thomas - Bernard Williams: Contemporary Philosophy in Focus

Author or Editor: Alan Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007
Pages: 221
Size: 1.08MB

At the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the most influential philosophers in Anglo-American philosophy. His contribution to philosophy was very wide-ranging, from metaphysics and epistemology to moral, social, and political philosophy. In the history of philosophy, he made contributions to ancient philosophy, to scholarship on Descartes and to a wide range of other historical subjects.

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#103 - Knud Haakonssen - The Cambridge Companion to ADAM SMITH

Author or Editor: Knud Haakonssen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006
Pages: 394
Size: 1.7MB

Adam Smith is best known as the founder of scientific economics and as an early proponent of the modern market economy. Political economy, however, was only one part of Smith’s comprehensive intellectual system. Consisting of a theory of mind and its functions in language, arts, science, and social intercourse, Smith’s system was a towering contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment. His ideas on social intercourse, in fact, also served as the basis for a moral theory that provided both historical and theoretical accounts of law, politics, and economics. This companion volume provides an up-to-date examination of all aspects of Smith’s thought.

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#85 - Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Author or Editor: Alvin Toffler
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1980
Pages: 654

To begin with, many of today's changes are not independent of one another. Nor are they random. For example, the crack-up of the nuclear family, the global energy crisis, the spread of cults and cable television, the rise of flextime and new fringe-benefit packages, the emergence of separatist movements from Quebec to Corsica, may all seem like isolated events. Yet precisely the reverse is true. These and many other seemingly unrelated events or trends are niter-connected. They are, in fact, parts of a much larger phenomenon: the death of industrialism and the rise of a new civilization.

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#81 - Noam Chomsky - New Horizons in the Study

Author or Editor: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000
Pages: 230

Chomsky’s position on the world intellectual scene is unique. He was the leading figure in the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s, and he has dominated the field of linguistics ever since. His theory of generative grammar, in a number of different forms, has been a guide and inspiration for many linguists around the world and the point of comparison for almost everyone. You may not agree with Chomsky’s work, but it would be both short-sighted and unscholarly to ignore it.

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#78 - Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Author or Editor: Alvin Toffler
Publisher: Bantam Book
Published: 1971
Pages: 362

This is a book about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by change. It is about the ways in which we adapt—or fail to adapt—to the future. Much has been written about the future. Yet, for the most part, books about the world to come sound a harsh metallic note. These pages, by contrast, concern themselves with the "soft" or human side of tomorrow. Moreover, they concern themselves with the steps by which we are likely to reach tomorrow. They deal with common, everyday matters—the products we buy and discard, the places we leave behind, the corporations we inhabit, the people who pass at an ever faster clip through our lives. The future of friendship and family life is probed. Strange new subcultures and life styles are investigated, along with an array of other subjects from politics and playgrounds to skydiving and sex.

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#41 - Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

Author or Editor: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1989
Pages: 236

Our genes made us. We animals exist for their preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines. The world of the selfish gene is one of savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit. But what of the acts of apparent altruism found in nature-the bees who commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, or the birds who risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk? Do they contravene the fundamental law of gene selfishness? By no means: Dawkins shows that the selfish gene is also the subtle gene. And he holds out the hope that our species-alone on earth-has the power to rebel against the designs of the selfish gene.

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#22 - Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy

Author or Editor: Terry Pinkard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002
Pages: 382

In the second half of the eighteenth century, German philosophy came for a while to dominate European philosophy. It changed the way in which not only Europeans, but people all over the world, conceived of themselves and thought about nature, religion, human history, politics, and the structure of the human mind. In this rich and wide-ranging book, Terry Pinkard interweaves the story of “Germany” – changing during this period from a loose collection of principalities to a newly emerged nation with a distinctive culture – with an examination of the currents and complexities of its developing philosophical thought.

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#21 - Anthony O'Hear - Beyond Evolution

Author or Editor: Anthony O'Hear
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003
Pages: 162

The aim of this book is to examine the extent to which evolutionary accounts of human experience are adequate. In examining this question, I focus on human knowledge, on morality, and on our sense of beauty. I suggest that our current activities in each area certainly derive in important ways from our biological nature, but that once having emerged they cannot usefully be analysed in biological or evolutionary terms. I also attempt to indicate the significance of human community and of our cultural inheritance in the identity and rationality of each one of us. At the same time, I attempt to vindicate the traditional view that each human being is possessed of a rationality which means that he or she can transcend what is given in biology and culture. We are prisoners neither of our genes nor of the ideas we encounter as we each make our personal and individual way through life.

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