Showing titles in Society

Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, where he grew up; the village of Santiniketan, where he was raised by his grandparents as much as by his parents; Calcutta, where he first studied economics and was active in student movements and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged 19. Sen brilliantly recreates the atmosphere in each of these.

In this short accessible book, leading democratic theorist Jason Brennan guides listeners through the evolution of the concept of democracy and actual democratic practice over time to help them understand the foundations of this longstanding and yet newly fragile political system. In his wide-ranging tour of the concept, Brennan will examine what democracy meant to the Greeks who first developed the concept before examining how it changed throughout European and later Western history.

Drawing on fascinating examples from diverse social contexts, Don't Take It Personally introduces a general framework to better understand the deeper connection between seemingly disparate phenomena, from racial profiling and hate crimes to "secret Santa" gifting.

For most of human history nature was held to be sacred and our God or gods were believed to be present everywhere in nature. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in the 17th century, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience: it was also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote our individual selves in unhealthy and destructive ways. Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert the looming environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour.

¿Qué causas pueden sustentar a la escritura? ¿Tiene sentido seguir escribiendo en el mundo contemporáneo? Para responder, recurre a una cita E. L. Doctorow: "[La ficción] enseña las leyes de la comunidad y distribuye el sufrimiento". A partir de ella construye distintos argumentos a favor de la producción de ficciones y su consumo. La literatura nos ayuda a aceptar la diferencia: nos ejercita en el conocimiento de otros mundos e individuos y nos acerca al sufrimiento ajeno.

As head of TED for the past 20 years, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world's most significant thinkers sharing their boldest ideas across every imaginable discipline. Yet there's a single theme that stands out in his mind as the essential connecting thread: generosity. It may seem simple, but generosity has played a key role in building the tools, knowledge, and institutions that have allowed civilisation to flourish. Now, in our unsettled modern world, beset by disruption and division, Anderson believes our collective future depends on reconnecting to this vital human trait.

Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, this classic text is an enquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. With remarkable lucidity and deft use of allegory, Plato arrives at a depiction of a state bound by harmony and ruled by philosopher kings.

Your intellectual freedom is at stake, threatened by everything from academia and Big Tech to the media and government. Fortunately, you have a way to take back personal control, and it’s a solution founded upon ancient philosophy. In Restoring Reason, philosopher Dr. Travis Corcoran demonstrates how the liberal arts provide us with a skillset to evaluate knowledge and draw our own conclusions for clarity, confidence, and freedom.

Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face? Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries, and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not impossible extreme, might be extinction? To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world: climate change, technology, and justice.

Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa - das Gespenst des Kommunismus. Mit diesen Worten beginnt ein Text, der die Welt veränderte! Er endet mit dem bekannten Aufruf: "Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt euch!"

Ser humano es un arte. No es una ciencia. Si fuera una ciencia, tendríamos definiciones aceptadas, teorías confirmadas, respuestas unívocas, protocolos y manuales para la vida. Pero no los tenemos. Ser humano es un arte. Un arte que cada individuo—con todos los deseos, incertidumbres, dudas, miedos y derrotas que son inherentes a nuestra existencia—tiene que dominar. Sólo así podremos alcanzar nuestra humanidad, la cual nos permitirá vivir en la verdad, crear belleza, ser justos, tener compasión.

Opposites and borders are never as clear as we think. With a novelist's eye for the unexpected, author Hari Kunzru takes listeners into the gray zone between life and death, public and private, black and white, and more. Along the way he meets philosophers and punk musicians, New Age gurus and space explorers, and together they investigate liminal spaces around the world. Into the Zone: Audio Essays includes a new foreword and afterword providing bookends to a series of brilliantly crafted intersections on history and the evolution of identity.

Self-Reliance is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prominent American philosopher and essayist from the 19th century. Published in 1841, the essay explores the concept of individualism and the importance of trusting one's own instincts and beliefs. Emerson advocates for the rejection of conformity and societal expectations, encouraging readers to rely on their own intuition and inner convictions. The essay is a powerful call to embrace self-reliance as a means of personal growth and fulfillment, promoting the idea that true wisdom arises from individual experience and authenticity.

Philosopher Nick Riggle explores the beauty of being alive by investigating the things we say to inspire ourselves and each other: seize the day, treat yourself, you only live once. These clichés are at best vague, at worst stupid. They imply that you should do something wild with your life because your life is precious, a little like saying you should go swimming with your grandfather’s watch because it is irreplaceable.

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years.

John Biguenet explora distintos aspectos que circundan ese elemento tan inasible que es el silencio, desde el silencio comercializado (las salas VIP de los aeropuertos que nos permiten "escapar" del ruido) hasta el silencio aterrador (las cámaras anecoicas donde solo escuchamos el fluir de la sangre por nuestras venas o el latir de nuestro corazón), y nos permite descubrir que no existe "el" silencio, sino distintas formas de silencio.

Introduction by Zecharia Sitchin. Freer explores the archaeological, astronomical and genetic evidence for our being a half-alien, genetically engineered species. He presents the mind-boggling ramifications of this new paradigm which correct and resolve the Creationist-Evolutionary conflict, afford a generic definition of human nature, and the potential to rethink the planet. We are about to step out of racial adolescence into stellar society. Timothy Leary wrote, "Breaking the Godspell is a stimulating, startling, engrossing, thought-provoking work. The author, Neil Freer, is a major ...

Most books about public speaking don’t tell you what to do when you open your mouth and nothing comes out. And they don’t tell you how to get over the anxiety about performance that most people naturally have. They don’t tell you what to do in the moments when you are made, as a woman, to feel small. They don’t tell you how to own the room. This book does.

In this rousing and deeply empathetic book, Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Antiracism Research and Policy Center, shows that when it comes to racism, neutrality is not an option: until we become part of the solution, we can only be part of the problem. Using his extraordinary gifts as a teacher and storyteller, Kendi helps us recognise that everyone is, at times, complicit in racism whether they realise it or not, and by describing with moving humility his own journey from racism to antiracism, he shows us how instead to be a force for good.

La moda è uno strano incantesimo: ogni volta che ci vestiamo trasformiamo una qualunque forma o un qualunque colore del mondo che ci circonda nella nostra stessa pelle. È questa strana magia che fa di essa assieme l’arte più potente e più metafisica. Per parlarne è quindi necessario far coincidere la creazione e la filosofia. È quello che fanno Alessandro Michele ed Emanuele Coccia in questo trattato senza pari sull’alchimia delle forme della vita di tutte e tutti noi.