Public Philosophy

In 2017, seven-year-old Ava in South Carolina wrote a letter to Tyshaun, an eight-year-old boy from Washington, DC. She asked him to be her pen pal; Ava thought they could help each other. The kids had a tragic connection - both were traumatized by gun violence. Ava’s best friend had been killed in a campus shooting at her elementary school, and Tyshaun’s father had been shot to death outside of the boy’s elementary school. Ava’s and Tyshaun’s stories are extraordinary, but not unique.

The work of academics can matter and be influential on a public level, but the path to becoming a public intellectual, influential policy advisor, valued community resource, or go-to person on an issue is not one that most scholars are trained for. The Public Professor offers scholars ways to use their ideas, research, and knowledge to change the world.

This is the first comprehensive study of the history and evolution of American indecent exposure laws. The study informs a critical analysis of the role of courts as custos morum, or custodian of the morals. It contains a detailed constitutional analysis of legal management of morality. The laws are a cornerstone of government regulation of morals, with roots tracing back to seventeenth century English and American cases, laws, and regulations. The state interests protected by indecent exposure laws focus on deterring public behaviors contrary to prevailing moral order and protecting the ...

In closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power, MacDonald shows how bad ideas get started and then acquire a life of their own. Her reports trace the transformation of influential opinion-makers and large philanthropic foundations from confident advocates of individual responsibility, opportunity, and learning into apologists for the welfare state.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 150 countries pledged to eradicate hunger by 2030. But with only a few years left, we’re far from reaching that goal. Instead, hunger is on the rise—America itself recently experienced levels of food insecurity not seen since the Great Depression. How could the richest nation in the world have so many people going hungry? In The New Breadline, aid worker and activist Jean-Martin Bauer unravels this paradox.

Within the last few decades, several obesity-reducing low carbohydrate diets have come to the public's attention. What few realize is that these are all the grandchildren in thought to William Banting, an undertaker who, in 1864, wrote one short book that launched the first incredibly popular diet for obesity. Banting was immortalized by having his name enter the English language as a verb. Three examples include an Irishman, Captain Boycott, whose name entered the language in the 1860s.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and author of the classic The First Three Minutes, Weinberg shares his views on some of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of physics and the universe. But he does not seclude science behind disciplinary walls or shy away from politics, taking on what he sees as the folly of manned spaceflight, the harms of inequality, and the importance of public goods. His point of view is rationalist, realist, reductionist, and devoutly secularist.

While politicians, entrepreneurs, and even school children could tell you that sustainability is an important and nearly universal value, many of them, and many of us, may struggle to define the term, let alone trace its history. What is sustainability? Is it always about the environment? What science do we need to fully grasp what it requires? What does sustainability mean for business? How can governments plan for a sustainable future?

Horace Mann was the founder of the free public school movement in Massachusetts then America and, by inference, the whole world. This was his great mission, which he accomplished.

What was a Buddhist monk doing at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos lecturing the world's leaders on mindfulness? Why do many successful corporations have a chief happiness officer? What can the chemical composition of your brain tell a potential employer about you? In the past decade, governments and corporations have become increasingly interested in measuring the way people feel: the Happiness index, Gross National Happiness, well-being and positive psychology have come to dominate the way we live our lives.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and number one international best-selling author of The World Is Flat, an essential and entertaining field guide to thriving in the 21st century. We all sense it - something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your children. You can't miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are speeding up - and it is dizzying.

The first principle is life; the second, maintenance of life. The thing of greatest human interest and importance, therefore, is the production and distribution of food, the manufacture of necessities; Or what we call Business. Religion, education, art, politics, are all secondary to it, since we live because of our work; and without life we should need neither salvation, learning, homes, literature, nor any-thing else. Business is nothing more than food-getting; incidentally, it means founding a home, a family, assisting in building a school, a road, a street, and finally, appreciation of ...

One of the greatest American achievements in the 20th century was the creation of public schools and universal education, an ideal now deeply at risk. Cornell University professor Noliwe Rooks provides a critical account of the making and unmaking of public education in Cutting School, the first book to foreground how vast racial and economic divides are part and parcel of the push to privatize our education system.

The latest and most bitterly contested battle in the culture war is the controversy over Darwin and intelligent design. But much of what you've heard about it is wrong. Jonathan Wells, a battle-hardened veteran with doctorates in biology and theology, sets the record straight.

Princeton's McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George and USC's Graduate Director of Philosophy Christopher Tollefsen are experts in the field of bioethics. In Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, these esteemed scholars combine the latest scientific breakthroughs with the soundest tenets of philosophy to shed new light on a vital yet controversial issue of our day.

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what we need to do now to rediscover America and rise to this moment.

Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today's democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society's benefit, Just Giving reveals how such generosity not only isn't the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice.

Publicada en 1940 y considerada una obra maestra, La vida privada y pública de Sócrates consagró a René Kraus como biógrafo de excepción. René Kraus realiza impagables descripciones del filósofo, de algunos de sus célebres contemporáneos y del ambiente de la ciudad y la época, subrayando la tesis que subyace en esta obra: que los seres excepcionales, incluso cuando son incomprendidos y maltratados en vida, terminan imponiendo su elevado ejemplo moral y proporcionan a la humanidad un horizonte de civilización.

Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces listeners to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves.

#1 best-selling author and popular radio and television host Glenn Beck considers the hot-button issue of education in the US, exposing the weaknesses of the Common Core school curriculum and examining why liberal solutions fail. As he did with the issue of gun control in his thoughtful and succinct #1 best seller Control, Glenn Beck uncovers the politically motivated truth behind the continual failures of the American educational system and offers real, tangible solutions for change.