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Displaying records 1 through 10 of 388 |
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Price: $16.00
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Sale: $3.53
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Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Louis Menand
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Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Dewey Decimal Number: 973.9
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Publication Date: 2002-04-10
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Reading Level: 568
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Description: If past is prologue, then The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand may suggest an intellectual course for the United States in the 21st century. At least Menand, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, thinks so. This enthralling study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey shows how these four men developed a philosophy of pragmatism following the Civil War, a period Menand likens to post-cold-war times. Together, "they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world." Despite this potentially forbidding theme, The Metaphysical Club is not a dry tome for academics. Instead, it is a quadruple biography, a wonderfully told story of ideas that advances by turning these thinkers into characters and bringing them to life. Menand links them through the Metaphysical Club, a conversational club formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872. It lasted but a few months, and references to it appear only in Peirce's writings (its real significance seems rather limited), though Holmes and James were both members. (Dewey was much younger than these three, and more an heir than a contemporary.) It is difficult to describe in a sentence or two what they accomplished, though Menand takes a stab at it: "They helped put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril." Academic freedom and cultural pluralism are just two of their legacies, and they are linchpins of democracy in a nonideological age, says Menand. A book like this is necessarily idiosyncratic, yet at the same time this one is sweeping. It presents an accessible survey of intellectual life from roughly the end of the Civil War to the start of the cold war. Dozens of figures receive fascinating thumbnail sketches, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin to Jane Addams and Eugene Debs. The result is a grand portrait of an age that will appeal to anyone with even a modest interest in the history of philosophy and ideas. --John Miller
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Price: $13.95
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Sale: $6.99
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Alain De Botton
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Publisher: Vintage
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Dewey Decimal Number: 910.01
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Publication Date: 2004-05-11
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Reading Level: 272
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Description: Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow.
Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don’t leave home without it.
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Price: $14.95
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Sale: $7.74
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Alain De Botton
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Publisher: Vintage
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Dewey Decimal Number: 305.5
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Publication Date: 2005-05-10
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Reading Level: 320
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Description: Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns his attention to the insatiable quest for status, a quest that has less to do with material comfort than with love. To demonstrate his thesis, de Botton ranges through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins.
Whether it’s assessing the class-consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, Status Anxiety is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful.
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Price: $16.00
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Sale: $6.90
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Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Richard Rorty
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Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Dewey Decimal Number: 191
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Publication Date: 2000-01-01
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Reading Level: 320
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Description: A superb introduction to one of today's leading and most provocative thinkers.
Since Plato most philosophy has aimed at true knowledge, penetrating beneath appearances to an underlying reality. Against this tradition, Richard Rorty convincingly argues, pragmatism offers a new philosophy of hope. One of the most controversial figures in recent philosophical and wider literary and cultural debate, Rorty brings together an original collection of his most recent philosophical and cultural writings. He explains in a fascinating memoir how he began to move away from Plato towards William James and Dewey, culminating in his own version of pragmatism. What ultimately matters, Rorty suggests, is not whether our ideas correspond to some fundamental reality but whether they help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.
Aimed at a general audience, this volume offers a stimulating summary of Rorty's central philosophical beliefs, as well as some challenging insights into contemporary culture, justice, education, and love.
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Price: $30.95
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Sale: $27.85
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Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Thomas M. Alexander::John Dewey
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Publisher: Indiana University Press
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Dewey Decimal Number: 191
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Publication Date: 1998-07
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Reading Level: 417
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Description: In addition to being one of the greatest technical philosophers of the twentieth century, John Dewey (1859-1952) was an educational innovator, a Progressive Era reformer, and one of America's last great public intellectuals. Dewey's insights into the problems of public education, immigration, the prospects for democratic government, and the relation of religious faith to science are as fresh today as when they were first published. His penetrating treatments of the nature and function of philosophy, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life, and the role of inquiry in human experience are of increasing relevance at the turn of the 21st century.Based on the award-winning 37-volume critical edition of Dewey's work, "The Essential Dewey" presents for the first time a collection of Dewey's writings that is both manageable and comprehensive. The volume includes essays and book chapters that exhibit Dewey's intellectual development over time; the selection represents his mature thinking on every major issue to which he turned his attention. Eleven part divisions cover: Dewey in Context; Reconstructing Philosophy; Evolutionary Naturalism; Pragmatic Metaphysics; Habit, Conduct, and Language; Meaning, Truth, and Inquiry; Valuation and Ethics; The Aims of Education; The Individual, the Community, and Democracy; Pragmatism and Culture: Science and Technology, Art and Religion; and, Interpretations and Critiques. Taken as a whole, this collection provides unique access to Dewey's understanding of the problems and prospects of human existence and of the philosophical enterprise.
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Price: $17.50
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Sale: $11.50
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Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Richard Rorty
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Publisher: Harvard University Press
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Dewey Decimal Number: 144
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Publication Date: 1999-09-01
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Reading Level: 172
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Description: There are many shameful incidents in America's past: the institution of slavery, genocidal assaults on the indigenous peoples of this continent, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and so on. What should our response to such acts be? Should we regard the nation as irredeemably tainted by sin and spend our time cataloging its evils, or should we acknowledge its shortcomings and make a conscious effort to turn it into a better nation? Philosopher Richard Rorty believes that there is hope for America, but that today's Left is not meeting the challenge. He contrasts the cultural, academic Left's focus on our heritage of shame (which, he admits, has to the extent that it makes hatred intolerable had the positive effect of making America a more civil society) with the politically engaged reformist Left of the early part of this century. "The distinction between the old strategy and the new is important," he writes. "The choice between them makes the difference between what Todd Gitlin calls common dreams and what Arthur Schlesinger calls disuniting Americans. To take pride in being black or gay is an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster." Not everyone, to be sure, is going to agree with Rorty's ideas. But his approach to civic life, which is pragmatic in the tradition of John Dewey and visionary in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is bound to provoke increased discussion of what it is to be a citizen, and his call for a renewed awareness of the history of American reformist activism can only be applauded.
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Price: $16.00
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Sale: $8.83
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Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Hannah Arendt::Jerome Kohn
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Publisher: Penguin Classics
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Dewey Decimal Number: 909.82
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Publication Date: 2006-09-26
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Reading Level: 320
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Description: Arendt describes the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill once more the vital essence of these concepts.
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Price: $24.00
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Sale: $5.90
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Manufacturer: Pantheon
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Alain de Botton
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Publisher: Pantheon
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Dewey Decimal Number: 305
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Publication Date: 2004-05-25
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Reading Level: 320
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Description: “Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted. . . . The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first.”
This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether we’re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety.
Alain de Botton, best-selling author of The Consolations of Philosophy and The Art of Travel, asks—with lucidity and charm—where our worries about status come from and what, if anything, we can do to surmount them. With the help of philosophers, artists and writers, he examines the origins of status anxiety (ranging from the consequences of the French Revolution to our secret dismay at the success of our friends) before revealing ingenious ways in which people have been able to overcome their worries in the search for happiness. We learn about sandal-less philosophers and topless bohemians, about the benefits of putting skulls on our sideboards, and about looking at ancient ruins.
The result is a book that isn’t just highly entertaining and thought-provoking, but that is genuinely wise and helpful, too.
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Price: $16.95
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Sale: $8.69
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Louis Menand
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Publisher: Vintage
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Edition: 1st
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Dewey Decimal Number: 144.3
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Publication Date: 1997-10-07
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Reading Level: 560
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Description: Pragmatism has been called America's only major contribution to philosophy. But since its birth was announced a century ago in 1898 by William James, pragmatism has played a vital role in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets.
Now the major texts of American pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty and Cornel West, have been brought together and reprinted unabridged. From the first generation of pragmatists, including the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, to the leading figures in the contemporary pragmatist revival, including the philosopher Hilary Putnam, the jurist Richard Posner, and the literary critic Richard Poirier, all the contributors to this volume are remarkable for the wit and vigor of their prose and the mind-clearing force of their ideas. Edited and with an Introduction by Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader will provide both the general reader and the student of American culture with excitement and pleasure.
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Price: $21.95
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Sale: $17.22
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Manufacturer: University of Wisconsin Press
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Cornel West
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Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
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Dewey Decimal Number: 144.30973
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Publication Date: 1989-04-15
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Reading Level: 292
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Description: Taking Emerson as his starting point, Cornel West’s basic task in this ambitious enterprise is to chart the emergence, development, decline, and recent resurgence of American pragmatism. John Dewey is the central figure in West’s pantheon of pragmatists, but he treats as well such varied mid-century representatives of the tradition as Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W. E. B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling. West’s "genealogy" is, ultimately, a very personal work, for it is imbued throughout with the author’s conviction that a thorough reexamination of American pragmatism may help inspire and instruct contemporary efforts to remake and reform American society and culture.
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Displaying records 1 through 10 of 388
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