Issue: Philosophy

The Courage to Be

The eminent philosopher and theologian examines religion in light of science and philosophy in modern society.

Originally published more than fifty years ago, The Courage to Be has become a classic of twentieth-century religious and philosophical thought. The great Christian existentialist thinker Paul Tillich describes the dilemma of modern man and points a way to the conquest of the prob-lem of anxiety. This edition includes a new introduction by Harvey Cox that situates the book within the theological conversation into which it first appeared and conveys its continued rele-vance in the current century.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us.

We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens?

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Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

What does it mean to be human? How is knowledge possible? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the centre of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions — that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal and that reason is disembodied and universal — that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science.

Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of the mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. This book re-examines the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality and the self; it rethinks a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosophy. Lakoff and Johnson reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors.

Philosophy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosophy as it has never been seen before.

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Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them

Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us), and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern life has thrust the world’s tribes into a shared space, creating conflicts of interest and clashes of values, along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground.

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