Reference Books

Critical Path

R. Buckminster Fuller

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, philosopher, mathematician, and dogged individualist. Perhaps best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term "Spaceship Earth," his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought.

Critical Path is Fuller's master work--the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern--as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation—at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.

Philosophy for Dummies

Tom Morris

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Total reviews: 91 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

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Philosophy at its best is an activity more than a body of knowledge. In an ancient sense, done right, it is a healing art. It’s intellectual self-defense. It’s a form of therapy. But it’s also much more. Philosophy is map-making for the soul, cartography for the human journey. It’s an important navigational tool for life that too many modern people try to do without.

Philosophy For Dummies is for anyone who has ever entertained a question about life and this world. In a conversational tone, the book's author – a modern-day scholar and lecturer – brings the greatest wisdom of the past into the challenges that we face now. This refreshingly different guide explains philosophical fundamentals and explores some of the strangest and deepest questions ever posed to human beings, such as

• How do we know anything?
• What does the word good mean?
• Are we ever really free?
• Do human beings have souls?
• Is there life after death?
• Is there a God?
• Is happiness really possible in our world?

This book is chock full of all those questions you may have long wanted to think about and talk with someone about, but have never had the time or opportunity to tackle head on. Philosophy For Dummies invites you to discuss the issues you find in the guide, share perspectives, and compare thoughts and feelings with someone you respect. You'll find lots of material to mull over with your friends or spouse, including thoughts on

• When to doubt, and when to doubt our doubts
• The universal demand for evidence and proof
• The four dimensions of human experience
• Arguments for materialism
• Fear of the process of dying
• Prayers and small miracles
• Moral justification for allowing evil

The ancient philosopher Socrates (fifth century, B.C.) thought that, when it comes to the Ultimate Questions, we all start off as dummies. But if we are humbly aware of how little we actually know, then we can really begin to learn. Philosophy For Dummies will put you on the path to wising up as you steer through the experience called life.

Cultivating Communities of Practice

Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, William M. Snyder

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the time our ancestors lived in caves to that day in the late '80s when Chrysler sanctioned unofficial "tech clubs" to promote the flow of information between teams working on different vehicle platforms, bands of like-minded individuals had been gathering in a wide variety of settings to recount their experiences and share their expertise. Few paid much attention until a number of possible benefits to business were identified, but many are watching more closely now that definitive links have been established. In Cultivating Communities of Practice, consultants Etienne C. Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder take the concept to another level by describing how these groups might be purposely developed as a key driver of organizational performance in the knowledge age. Building on a 1998 book by Wenger that framed the theory for an academic audience, Cultivating Communities of Practice targets practitioners with pragmatic advice based on the accumulating track records of firms such as the World Bank, Shell Oil, and McKinsey & Company. Starting with a detailed explanation of what these groups really are and why they can prove so useful in managing knowledge within an organization, the authors discuss development from initial design through subsequent evolution. They also address the potential "dark side"--arrogance, cliquishness, rigidity, and fragmentation among participants, for example--as well as measurement issues and the challenges inherent in initiating these groups company-wide. --Howard Rothman

Archetypes of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy

Douglas J. Soccio

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

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Featuring Douglas J. Soccio's lucid and conversational prose and a well-chosen, reader-friendly array of succinct excerpts from canonical primary sources, ARCHETYPES OF WISDOM brings philosophy to life for its readers through the examination of many paradigmatic philosophies and philosophers. Very much a student-focused book that speaks out of Soccio's non-condescending desire to speak to students where they "are" and not where they "should be," ARCHETYPES OF WISDOM includes numerous pedagogical illustrations and features (Philosophical Queries, a Marginal Glossary, Chapter Summaries, End-of-Chapter Questions for Reflection, to name a few) to make this often-times daunting subject the approachable and engaging subject it ought to be. The Sixth Edition represents a careful revision, with all changes made by Soccio to enhance and refresh the book's reader-praised search-for-wisdom motif. In particular, this edition features new coverage of Lao-Tzu; expanded, chapter-length treatment of Kierkegaard; and an engaging introduction to the complex landscape of philosophy in the twentieth century focusing on the two archetypal thinkers of this time period: Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Soccio's lauded prose is also enhanced in this Sixth Edition by the text's new full-color design. The text is supported by an unmatched array of teaching and learning resources that include CengageNOW-a powerful online tutorial and course management system, and dynamic easy-to-use lecture and class preparation tools exclusive to Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning.

What Is Life?: with "Mind and Matter" and "Autobiographical Sketches"

Erwin Schrodinger

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman, but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a 'beautiful and important book' by 'a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions'. It appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Schrodinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life, and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions. Brought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches, published and translated here for the first time. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable additon to the shelves of scientist and layman alike.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy

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Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Philio-Reference for a non-philosopher 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I lack training in philosophy but often read nonfiction criticism that requires a bit of philosophical background. This book provides that background without sending my tired eyes to the much longer entries in the eight volume _Encyclopedia of Philosophy_. From the Dictionary's depth and breadth of concise entries, with references to related and equally concise entires, I can usually learn enough to answer my immediate question. The entries also point me to where I should dig if I want deeper background. This Dictionary now permanently resides beside my reading chair.

Editorial Review:

Widely acclaimed as the most authoritative and accessible one-volume dictionary available in English (and now with translations into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Italian, and Spanish underway) this second edition offers an even richer, more comprehensive, and more up-to-date survey of ideas and thinkers written by an international team of 436 contributors. Includes the most comprehensive entries on major philosophers, 400 new entries including over 50 on preeminent contemporary philosophers, extensive coverage of rapidly developing fields such as the philosophy of mind and applied ethics, more entries on non-Western philosophy than any comparable volume, and increased coverage of Continental philosophy.

Philosophy Made Simple

Richard H. Popkin, Avrum Stroll

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Lucid and Able Survey of Philosophy 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Do not interpret the "Made Simple" part of the title to mean "over-simplified" or "simplistic." This book is a lucid and able survey of philosophy at an intermediate level. The seven sections cover ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, the theory of knowledge, logic, and contemporary philosophy. (The only major topic missing is esthetics.) In doing philosophy one is engaging in a serious, long-range conversation with past and present thinkers in an attempt to understand ourselves and the nature of the world in which we live. With this book as a foundation, one could go on to read advanced texts in philosophy and the technical literature. For instance, one could study Samuel Alexander's magnum opus Space, Time, and Deity, and not get lost in the thickets of thought. I highly recommend Philosophy Made Simple as a sturdy foundation for building your own philosophy.

Editorial Review:

For almost four decades, Made Simple books have set the standard for continuing education and home study. In answer to the changing needsof today's marketplace, the Made Simple series for the '90s presents a thoroughly up-to-the-minute portfolio of skills, information, and experience, with revised and updated editions of bestselling titles, plus a whole range of new subjects from personal finance to office management to desktop publishing.

B & W illustrations throughout

The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

Richard Tarnas

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Total reviews: 57 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Nice Survey and More Importantly, Critique of the Western Mind 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Tarnas begins with Plato, working backward and forward from him. Plato's Forms, in particular, set the stage for the rest of the book, in my view. According to Plato, there are transcendent Forms for 'Man', 'Tree', 'Woman', for example, that the soul was exposed to before birth and remembers later in life. These Forms are timeless, trancendent and most, Beautiful.
Aristotle, the tenth in line from Pythagoras, quickly relegates Plato's Forms to the particular, noting their birth, maturation and decay within the object with no recourse to a transcendent realm.
The important thing is, in the greek rationalism of both Plato and Aristotle, the world is knowable and is a Cosmos, an ordered whole that can be readily understood by the human mind.
The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle move to the Arabics during the Dark Ages, until the medieval times, when the Arabics courteously return the two behemoths to western civilization where St. Augustine applies Platonic thought to theology, while St. Thomas Aquinas later does the same with Aristotle.
Somewhere in the mix, Ockham applies his razor to the idea of the Forms, being the first to deny a Form's transcendent or immanent reality, but rather positing that the Form is a construct of the human mind. Party pooper.
Modern science, which has divested the world of anything human,where the universe now contains no spirit or transcendent form, sets it's sights on a disenchanted universe that is now viewed as being mechanistic at best, lifeless at worst.
Man is taken, by way of Copernicus, then Kepler and Galileo, from being the absolute center of the Ptolemaic universe, to being a nondescript inhabitant on a planet moving about a sun, which is one of potentially millions of such stars in the now vast space of the experienced world.
During the Enlightenment, man having eaten the soul of the Cosmos and stolen it's intelligence and claimed it for himself, suddenly turns the lense on himself thorugh Descartes and Kant.
Not only is the Cosmos dead and lifeless and altogether inhuman, but man is incapable of perceiving said Cosmos in an objective way. Man inherently attaches Reality to the universe by viewing the world through the apriori lenses of time, space, cause and effect and so on.
So now, we have a dead and lifeless vast impersonal universe inhabited by man, who, due to his psychological makeup, can never understand said world objectively.
Nietzsche sounds the death knell. He says God is dead, but really, it is man, glourious understanding, at one with the world, man who is crucified. Nietzsche pronounces the birth of the modern era, where not by intelligence, which has been discounted, not by religion, which is suffering cognitive disonance due to the emerging scientific worldview (Darwinism, Atomism, the everexpanding nothingness peered at through ever stronger telescopic lenses), but sheer Will that will decide who is right.
Finally on to the postmodern picture. History has been dominated by white european males. Not only is the universe (and man) unknowable, but we don't even know the proper questions to ask. Language is a prison, seeking to encapsulate experience and reduce Reality to the constructs of the human mind. Western man, through the prevailing dichotomy of his science and religion, has raped women, the environment, destroyed the ozone, produced the atomic bomb, and on and on. No one has hold of the Truth. Truth is provincial, localized and relative, dependent upon a contingent human being. No world view has precedence over another. There is no prevailing meta-narrative that can capture global humanity and unite it.

But dear reader, there is hope. There is hope from the beginning pages of this book through to the epilogue. Tarnas wisely weaves a thread throughout that offers a glimpse into a potential new birth for mankind. Tarnas points out history seems to be coming to a culmination, something is definitely on the horizon for all of us.

I leave it to you, to read this wonderful book, to discover what possibilities (if not facts) lie ahead for humanity.

The book is well worth the read.

Editorial Review:

"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

One World: The Ethics of Globalization, Second Edition (The Terry Lectures Series)

Peter Singer

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Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

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One of the world's most influential philosophers here considers the ethical issues surrounding globalization, showing how a global ethic rather than a nationalistic approach can provide illuminating answers to important problems. In a new preface, Peter Singer discusses how the recent Iraq war and its aftermath have changed the prospects for the ethical approach he advocates. Q: What was your original idea for the book? A: When people talk about globalization, they usually mean the lowering of barriers to free trade and the flow of investment. And they usually don't see these as ethical questions. I wanted to bring together several different issues that are also part of living in a more globalized world and show that they are, at their core, ethical questions. So as well as trade issues, I cover climate change, intervention across national borders to protect human rights, and aid from rich nations to poor ones. Q: Have world events in the past three years further shaped that idea and your arguments? A: Definitely. The attacks on 9/11 showed that even the mightiest power the world has never known is vulnerable to being attacked. But more significantly, the crisis over Iraq posed a choice between taking the path of international cooperation, and that of unilateral action. It was also a choice between the rule of law and the rule of force. Unfortunately, the United States made the wrong choice. Q: What do you hope the book will accomplish? A: I hope it will contribute to people seeing these questions as ethical issues and to looking at ethics from a more global-and therefore less national-perspective.

Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language

Robert J. Gula

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Clear, Concise, and Focused. 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I used to debate in college and recollect many a common place logical fallacy; although, in the course of the last year I have found myself going online more and more in order to reread the various forms in which "nonsense" takes in the public square. This caused me to pick up three non-textbook works on the subject last week. Even though the late Mr. Gula's book has a non-scholarly title it is very erudite endeavor. He dissects every form of diversion, confusion of cause and effect, oversimplication, ambiguity, and erroneous comparisons and contrasts in these pages. Specific terms are placed in bold print and allow readers to adjust and intensify their concentration accordingly. Further, he makes use of everyday, non-mathematical language which can be easily understood by laymen. I found it an enjoyable read and this is one of those rare works I will use as a reference. It was written in 1979 and some of the examples, as so many of them are political, are rather dated but one still has no difficulty grasping their meaning. I wish more people were familiar with logic...it would make the world a far better place.

Editorial Review:

Nonsense is the best compilation and study of verbal logical fallacies available anywhere. It is a handbook of the myriad ways we go about being illogical--how we deceive others and ourselves, how we think and argue in ways that are disorderly, disorganized, or irrelevant. Nonsense is also a short course in nonmathematical logical thinking, especially important for students of philosophy and economics. A book of remarkable scholarship, Nonsense is unexpectedly relaxed, informal, and accessible.