The Proper Study Of Mankind

Author: Isaiah Berlin
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446496953
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 706

Book Description
‘He becomes everyman’s guide to everything exciting in the history of ideas’ New York Review of Books Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, and one of the finest writers. The Proper Study Of Mankind selects some of his best essays in which his insights both illuminate the past and offer a key to the burning issues of today. The full (and enormous) range of his work is represented here, from the exposition of his most distinctive doctrine - pluralism - to studies of Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Churchill and Roosevelt. In these pages he encapsulates the principal movements that characterise the modern age: romanticism, historicism, Fascism, relativism, irrationalism and nationalism. His ideas are always tied to the people who conceived them, so that abstractions are brought alive. EDITED BY HENRY HARDY AND ROGER HAUSHEER AND WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY ANDREW MARR

An Essay on Man

Author: Alexander Pope
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72

Book Description

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Author: Isaiah Berlin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400846633
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.

The Proper Study of Religion After Jonathan Z. Smith

Author: Sam D. Gill
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197527221
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
In The Proper Study of Religion, Sam Gill charts an innovative course of development for the academic study of religion by engaging the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith, Gill's teacher and mentor for fifty years. Building on Smith's foundational legacy through creative encounters, Gill explores an extensive range of absorbing topics including: comparison as essential to academic technique and to human knowledge itself; play, philosophically understood, as a coredynamic of Smith's entire program; the relationship of academic document-based studies to the sensory-rich real world of religions; and self-moving as providing a biological and philosophical foundation on which to develop and expand upon a proper academic study of religion.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684853949
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Explores neurological disorders and their effects upon the minds and lives of those affected with an entertaining voice.

Hardy

Author: Roger Ebbatson
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description

Proper Studies

Author: Aldous Huxley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English essays
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description

Essay on Man and Other Poems

Author: Alexander Pope
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486125904
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113

Book Description
In addition to the acclaimed title poem, this collection includes "The Rape of the Lock," "Ode on Solitude," "The Dying Christian to His Soul," "An Essay on Criticism," "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and many others.

The Scent of Time

Author: Byung-Chul Han
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509516085
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.

Power in Ideas

Author: Kirsten Adams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108952658
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
This Element develops an analytical framework for understanding the role of ideas in political life and communication. Power in Ideas argues that the empirical study of ideas should combine interpretive approaches to derive meaning and understand influence with quantitative analysis to help determine the reach, spread, and impact of ideas. This Element illustrates this approach through three case studies: the idea of reparations in Ta-Nehisi Coates's “The Case for Reparations,” the idea of free expression in Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook policy speech at Georgetown University, and the idea of universal basic income in Andrew Yang's “Freedom Dividend.” Power in Ideas traces the landscapes and spheres within which these ideas emerged and were articulated, the ways they were encoded in discourse, the fields they traveled across, and how they became powerful.