Admirable Evasions

Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594037884
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 71

Book Description
In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind. Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

Summary of Theodore Dalrymple's Admirable Evasions

Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 22

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The claim that we have greater insight into human nature than ever before is common. But it is a bold man who claims that he has greater insight than Montaigne or Shakespeare. #2 The first psychological scheme to provide the common man with the illusion of much expanded self-understanding was psychoanalysis. Then came behaviorism, after which there was cybernetics. Now, neuroscientific imaging and a little light neurochemistry persuade us that we are about to solve the mystery of human existence. #3 Freud was a brilliant man, but his career as a scientist was not. He was a liar who falsified evidence, a plagiarist who did not acknowledge his sources, and a self-aggrandizing mythologist who manipulated people. #4 The human mind is not straightforward, and we do not always know the reasons for our thoughts and actions. We can, however, recognize that we can think and direct our thought, and that we can check the accuracy of our thoughts for veracity, decency, and consistency.

Life at the Bottom

Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 161578019X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
A searing account of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does, written by a British psychiatrist.

Spoilt Rotten

Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publisher: Gibson Square Books
ISBN: 9781906142254
Category : Children
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In this perceptive and witty book, Theodore Dalrymple unmasks the hidden sentimentality that is suffocating public life. Under themultiple guises of raising children well, caring for the underprivileged, assisting the less able and doing good generally, we are achieving quite the opposite. Dalrymple takes the reader on both an entertaining and at times shocking journey through social, political, popular and literary issues as diverse as child tantrums, aggression, educational reform, honour killings, sexual abuse, public emotions and the role of suffering, and shows the perverse results when we abandon logic in favour of the cult of feeling.

Wrath

Author: Peter W. Wood
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641772204
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Anger now dominates American politics. It wasn’t always so. “Happy Days Are Here Again” was FDR’s campaign song in 1932. By contrast, candidate Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign song was Mary J. Blige’s “Work That” (“Let ‘em get mad / They gonna hate anyway”). Both the left and right now summon anger as the main way to motivate their supporters. Post-election, both sides became even more indignant. The left accuses the right of “insurrection.” The right accuses the left of fraud. This is a book about how we got here—about how America changed from a nation that could be roused to anger but preferred self-control, to a nation permanently dialed to eleven. Peter W. Wood, an anthropologist, has rewritten his 2007 book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America, which predicted the new era of political wrath. In his new book, he explains how American culture beginning in the 1950s made a performance art out of anger; how and why we brought anger into our music, movies, and personal lives; and how, having step by step relinquished our old inhibitions on feeling and expressing anger, we turned anger into a way of wielding political power. But the “angri-culture,” as he calls it, doesn’t promise happy days again. It promises revenge. And a crisis that could destroy our republic.

Farewell Fear

Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publisher: World Encounter Institute/New English Review Press
ISBN: 9780985439477
Category : English essays
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Farewell Fear is a collection of Theodore Dalrymple's finest essays written for New English Review between 2009 and 2012. His first such collection was Anything Goes (2011). Once encountered, Theodore Dalrymple has become for many of us a shared treasure-the cultured, often mordantly funny social commentator who was for many years a psychiatrist at a British prison. This collection of recent essays captures Dalrymple at his best, ruminating at one moment about why poisoners tend to be more interesting than other kinds of murderers and at another why Tony Blair's mind reminds him of an Escher drawing. No one else writes so engagingly and so candidly about the world as it is, not as the politically correct would have it be. -- Dr. Charles Murray author of Coming Apart and The Bell Curve

Good and Evil in the Garden of Art

Author: Anthony Daniels
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780985905248
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In this book of essays Anthony Daniels tackles the complex relation between good and bad art on the one hand and good and bad ideas on the other. In several essays he contrasts authors or artists whom he considers good with those he considers bad, and tries to explain why his opinion is not merely a matter of individual taste but is based upon reason as well as taste. He argues that judgment and discrimination (between good and bad, beautiful and ugly) are intrinsic to any conceivable human existence, indeed to thought itself, and that the pretense that they are avoidable, that one can indefinitely suspend judgment, are merely a means by which bad or false judgments are smuggled into public life.

Under the 82nd Airborne

Author: Deborah Eisenberg
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374280681
Category : Short stories
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description

Around the World in the Cinemas of Paris

Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735705507
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
"Everywhere is interesting, especially if inhabited." Paris is the best city for seeing films from anywhere and everywhere in the world. You can travel around the globe in the cinemas of Paris. This is precisely what Theodore Dalrymple did. Here are his reflections - historical, cultural, philosophical - on the 33 films that he saw, often combined with his own reminiscences of the various countries he had visited himself. The universal and the particular are inextricably combined in this highly original and amusing book. Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor and psychiatrist who has written many books, including Life at the Bottom, Admirable Evasions and Embargo and Other Stories.

Neither Trumpets Nor Violins

Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publisher: World Encounter Institute/New English Review Press
ISBN: 9781943003570
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
New English Review Press once again takes on the great ideas of our time in this sequel to The Terror of Existence by Theodore Dalrymple and Kenneth Francis. This volume adds another interesting mind to the mix: the philosopher Samuel Hux. Together these thinkers take on some of the most prominent philosophers influencing our age, pointing out strengths and weaknesses in their works, worldviews. and characters. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Machiavelli, Plato, Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell are covered as are the less well-known Trumbull Stickney and Jonathan Edwards. If you liked The Terror of Existence, you'll love Neither Trumpets Nor Violins. It's food for the mind.