A Theory Of Jerks And Other Philosophical Misadventures

Author : Eric Schwitzgebel
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2019-11-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262355360

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A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures by Eric Schwitzgebel Pdf

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation). A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun.

Author : Eric Schwitzgebel
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2019-11-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262043090

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A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures by Eric Schwitzgebel Pdf

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation). A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun.

Author : Eric Schwitzgebel
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262539593

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A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures by Eric Schwitzgebel Pdf

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation). A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun.

Author : Eric Schwitzgebel
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2011-01-28
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262295086

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Perplexities of Consciousness by Eric Schwitzgebel Pdf

A philosopher argues that we know little about our own inner lives. Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mental imagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience. Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience.

Author : David Livingstone Smith
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2021-10-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780674545564

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Making Monsters by David Livingstone Smith Pdf

A leading scholar explores what it means to dehumanize othersÑand how and why we do it. ÒI wouldnÕt have accepted that they were human beings. You would see an infant whoÕs just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it.Ó So a Hutu man explained to an incredulous researcher, when asked to recall how he felt slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Such statements are shocking, yet we recognize them; we hear their echoes in accounts of genocides, massacres, and pogroms throughout history. How do some people come to believe that their enemies are monsters, and therefore easy to kill? In Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isnÕt. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: we believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphorÑdehumanization really does happen in our minds. Turning to an abundance of historical examples, Smith explores the relationship between dehumanization and racism, the psychology of hierarchy, what it means to regard others as human beings, and why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed. Meticulous but highly readable, Making Monsters suggests that the process of dehumanization is deeply seated in our psychology. It is precisely because we are all human that we are vulnerable to the manipulations of those trading in the politics of demonization and violence.

Author : Mark L. Johnson,Don M. Tucker
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2021-08-17
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262046213

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Out of the Cave by Mark L. Johnson,Don M. Tucker Pdf

From a philosopher and a neuropsychologist, a radical rethinking of certain traditional views about human cognition and behavior. Plato's Allegory of the Cave trapped us in the illusion that mind is separate from body and from the natural and physical world. Knowledge had to be eternal and absolute. Recent scientific advances, however, show that our bodies shape mind, thought, and language in a deep and pervasive way. In Out of the Cave, Mark Johnson and Don Tucker--a philosopher and a neuropsychologist--propose a radical rethinking of certain traditional views about human cognition and behavior. They argue for a theory of knowing as embodied, embedded, enactive, and emotionally based. Knowing is an ongoing process--shaped by our deepest biological and cultural values. Johnson and Tucker describe a natural philosophy of mind that is emerging through the convergence of biology, psychology, computer science, and philosophy, and they explain recent research showing that all of our higher-level cognitive activities are rooted in our bodies through processes of perception, motive control of action, and feeling. This developing natural philosophy of mind offers a psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific account that is at once scientifically valid and subjectively meaningful--allowing us to know both ourselves and the world.

Author : Ralph Jason Pred
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2005-02-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0262264188

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Onflow by Ralph Jason Pred Pdf

Understanding consciousness by taking the stream of consciousness seriously; a general characterization of experience and a detailed description of experience from within, drawing on theories of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, John Searle, and Gerald Edelman. In Onflow, Ralph Pred supplies an account of the nature of consciousness that grapples with "the raw unverbalized stream of experience." Unlike other recent philosophical accounts of consciousness, Pred's analysis deals with the elusive and commonly neglected continuities in the stream of consciousness. Pred offers a general characterization and analysis of experience as well as a highly detailed interpretation of experience from within. Determined to make "conceptual contact" with the immediacy of actual experience, Pred carries forward the radical empiricism pioneered by William James (who coined the term "stream of consciousness") and draws on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. To help readers apprehend the formation of conscious thoughts, the intertwining of perception and action, and the working of consciousness in onflowing experience, Pred applies methods of analysis developed in John Searle's theory of intentionality to James's views, thereby showing how intentional states are embedded in the stream of consciousness. Then, calling on Whitehead's treatment of lived moments as acts of experience, Pred provides an account of consciousness that at once deals with conscious thoughts as they emerge from and function in embodied, socialized experience and illustrates how language distorts our understanding of experience and subjectivity. Finally, he details striking parallels between this account and Gerald Edelman's biological theory of consciousness, and, in contrasting the two, argues for a revitalized version of the experiental monism originally formulated by James.

Author : David Livingstone Smith
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2020-05-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780190923020

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On Inhumanity by David Livingstone Smith Pdf

The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again--that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche--deeper than prejudice itself--leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. An award-winning author and philosopher, Smith takes an unflinching look at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures. When governments or other groups stand to gain by exploiting this innate propensity, and know just how to manipulate words and images to trigger it, there is no limit to the violence and hatred that can result. Drawing on numerous historical and contemporary cases and recent psychological research, On Inhumanity is the first accessible guide to the phenomenon of dehumanization. Smith walks readers through the psychology of dehumanization, revealing its underlying role in both notorious and lesser-known episodes of violence from history and current events. In particular, he considers the uncomfortable kinship between racism and dehumanization, where beliefs involving race are so often precursors to dehumanization and the horrors that flow from it. On Inhumanity is bracing and vital reading in a world lurching towards authoritarian political regimes, resurgent white nationalism, refugee crises that breed nativist hostility, and fast-spreading racist rhetoric. The book will open your eyes to the pervasive dangers of dehumanization and the prejudices that can too easily take root within us, and resist them before they spread into the wider world.

Author : Samuel Todes
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2001-04-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262264914

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Body and World by Samuel Todes Pdf

Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency towards idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body; front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth; and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality; problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy.

Author : Lloyd C. Douglas
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 723 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2012-05-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780544050020

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The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas Pdf

More than 6 million copies sold! The classic Christian novel of the crucifixion and one Roman soldier’s transformation through faith. At the height of his popularity, Lloyd C. Douglas was receiving an average of one hundred letters a week from fans. One of those fans, a department store clerk in Ohio named Hazel McCann, wrote to Douglas asking what he thought had happened to Christ’s garments after the crucifixion. Douglas immediately began working on The Robe, sending each chapter to Hazel as he finished it. It is to her that Douglas dedicated this book. A Roman soldier wins Christ’s robe as a gambling prize. He then sets forth on a quest to find the truth about the Nazarene—a quest that reaches to the very roots and heart of Christianity. Here is the fascinating story of this young Roman soldier, Marcellus, who was in charge at the crucifixion of Jesus. After he won Christ’s robe in a game of dice on Calvary, he experienced a slow and overpowering change in his life. Through the pages of this great book, the reader sees how a pagan Roman was eventually converted to Christ. Set against the vividly drawn background of ancient Rome, this is a timeless story of adventure, faith, and romance, a tale of spiritual longing and ultimate redemption . . .

Author : Mark Wilson
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 696 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2006-01-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191533440

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Wandering Significance by Mark Wilson Pdf

Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. Words such as colour, shape, solidity exemplify the commonplace conceptual tools we employ to describe and order the world around us. But the world's goods are complex in their behaviors and we often overlook the subtle adjustments that our evaluative terms undergo as their usage becomes gradually adapted to different forms of supportive circumstance. Wilson not only explains how these surprising strategies of hidden management operate, but also tells the astonishing story of how faulty schemes and great metaphysical systems sometimes spring from a simple failure to recognize the innocent wanderings to which our descriptive words are heir. Wilson combines traditional philosophical concerns about human conceptual thinking with illuminating data derived from a large variety of fields including physics and applied mathematics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. Wandering Significance offers abundant new insights and perspectives for philosophers of language, mind, and science, and will also reward the interest of psychologists, linguists, and anyone curious about the mysterious ways in which useful language obtains its practical applicability.

Author : John Kennedy Toole
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2007-12-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780802197627

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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Pdf

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).

Author : Jonathan Phillips
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 519 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2019-08-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780300247060

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The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin by Jonathan Phillips Pdf

An engaging biography that offers a new perspective on one of the most influential figures of the Crusades In 1187, Saladin marched triumphantly into Jerusalem, ending decades of struggle against the Christians and reclaiming the holy city for Islam. Four years later he fought off the armies of the Third Crusade, which were commanded by Europe's leading monarchs. A fierce warrior and savvy diplomat, Saladin's unparalleled courtesy, justice, generosity, and mercy were revered by both his fellow Muslims and his Christian rivals such as Richard the Lionheart. Combining thorough research with vivid storytelling, Jonathan Phillips offers a fresh and captivating look at the triumphs, failures, and contradictions of one of the Crusades' most unique figures. Bringing the vibrant world of the twelfth century to life, this book also explores Saladin's complicated legacy, examining the ways Saladin has been invoked in the modern age by Arab and Muslim leaders ranging from Nasser in Egypt, Asad in Syria, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq to Osama bin Laden, as well as his huge appeal across popular culture in books, drama, and music.

Author : Wendy Northcutt
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2001-12-01
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9781101218969

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The Darwin Awards II by Wendy Northcutt Pdf

The hilarious New York Times bestselling phenomenon and the perfect funny gift! The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection brings together a fresh collection of the hapless, the heedless, and the just plain foolhardy among us. Salute the owner of an equipment training school who demonstrates the dangers of driving a forklift by failing to survive the filming of his own safety video. Gawk at the couple who go to sleep on a sloping roof. Witness the shepherd who leaves his rifle unsecured—only to be accidentally shot by one of his own flock. With over one hundred Darwin Award Winners, Honorable Mentions, and debunked Urban Legends, plus science and safety tips for avoiding the scythe of natural selection, The Darwin Awards II proves once again how uncommon common sense can be.

Author : Edward Everett Hale
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1885
Category : Children
ISBN : NYPL:33433066337365

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Stories of Invention by Edward Everett Hale Pdf