Reference Books - Page 2

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Philio-Reference for a non-philosopher 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 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.

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.

The Secret Doctrine : The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (Volumes 1 and 2)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

This is only the Index 1 out of 5 stars.
17 of 18 people found this review helpful.

Be certain that you realize what you are purchasing when you buy this item. This is NOT "The Secret Doctrine"; it is only the INDEX for those volumes. The other reviews had led me to believe this was "The Secret Doctrine" itself; but it is not. You must already have volumes 1 and/or 2 of "The Secret Doctrine" for this index to be of any use.

Exhaustive, penetrating, and wholly satisfying! 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 18 people found this review helpful.

Not suggested for anyone with a short attention span. This is a massive accomplishment bringing the A to Z of occultism under one literary umbrella. An astonishing find.

there she go; here we are! 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 18 people found this review helpful.

These volumes are a great testament in spiritual literature. They expound on the mysteries of the universe and man--their nature and evolution. All this gives rise to explaining how spiritual laws function. She says in the preface that the truths contained in the volumes are the essence of all world religions; her job being one of rescuing these truths from "degradation." Blavatsky was an early leader of the theosophist movement. In this work, she goes stanza by stanza using the "occult" (spiritual) teachings of the book of Dzyan. Of course, what makes these volumes come to life is her commentaries. As one current spiritual writer has already noted, she was a prophet of the current trend toward the emerging spirituality which is lighting up our planet. Well-travelled and well-connected with diversity, Blavatsky identifies the basic tenet of spiritual literature: we are all one! This is definitely for the intrepid. Anyway, go HB! Phillip Paris, Orlando, Florida, USA; parispg@aol.com

Editorial Review:

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1895 edition by the Theosophical Publishing Society, London. Third and revised edition.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy New Edition

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Offering clear and reliable guidance to the ideas of philosophers from antiquity to the present day and to the major philosophical systems around the globe, he Oxford Companion to Philosophy is the definitive philosophical reference work for readers at all levels. For ten years the original volume has served as a stimulating introduction for general readers and as an indispensable guide for students and scholars. A distinguished international assembly of 249 philosophers contributed almost 2,000 entries, and many of these have now been considerably revised and updated in this major new edition; to these are added over 300 brand-new pieces on a fascinating range of current topics such as animal consciousness, cloning, corporate responsibility, the family, globalization, terrorism .
Here is, indeed, a world of thought, with entries on idealism and empiricism, epicureanism and stoicism, passion and emotion, deism and pantheism. The contributors represent a veritable who's who of modern philosophy, including such eminent figures as Isaiah Berlin, Sissela Bok, Ronald Dworkin, John Searle, Michael Walzer, and W. V. Quine. We meet the great thinkers--from Aristotle and Plato, to Augustine and Aquinas, to Descartes and Kant, to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, right up to contemporary thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Luce Iragaray, and Noam Chomsky. There are short entries on key concepts such as personal identity and the mind-body problem, major doctrines from utilitarianism to Marxism, schools of thought such as the Heidelberg School or the Vienna Circle, and contentious public issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and welfare. In addition, the book offers short explanations of philosophical terms (qualia, supervenience, iff), puzzles (the Achilles paradox, the prisoner's dilemma), and curiosities (the philosopher's stone, slime). Almost every entry is accompanied by suggestions for further reading, and the book includes both a chronological chart of the history of philosophy and a gallery of portraits of eighty eminent philosophers.
An indispensable guide and a constant source of stimulation and enlightenment, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy will appeal to everyone interested in abstract thought, the eternal questions, and the foundations of human understanding.

Might is Right or the Survival of the Fittest

Ragnar Redbeard

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Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

One would think that in our liberal, enlightened times a book dating from the Victorian Age would be viewed as a quaint curiosity. Not so Dr. Ragnar Redbeard's notorious Might Is Right or the Survivial of the Fittest. It is hated and denounced as much today as when it first made the rounds of the Victorian Age's elite and influential, which explains why the book is often featured on banned-book lists. Perhaps a 1905 ad for Might Is Right will give offer some insight: This is a pitiless and appalling book by an author of extraordinary virility and rugged primeval force, whose sense perceptions borders on the supernatural. Ten years ago private typewritten copies of this startling work sold in London and Berlin for $150. Since then the most powerful living minds have absorbed its teachings with satisfaction, but in guarded silence. Unquestionably it is the most pregnant and remarkable publication that has appeared in Christendom for 15 centuries. From its pages [Theodore] Roosevelt’s celebrated philosophy of ‘Strenuousness,’ ‘Race Suicide’ and ‘the Big Stick’ has been distilled and—diluted. Prince Bismarck, Paul Kruger and President McKinley read it in manuscript before they died; and it has given nerve and decisiveness to the world-shaking aggressive activity of men like Cecil Rhodes, Von Buelow, Chamberlain, Elihu Root, Kaiser William, Abdul Hamid and Von Phleve. It has also had its effect on General Castro, Admiral Togo, Senator Tillman, Grand Duke Sergius, Lord Kitchener, General Trepoff, and their ablest adversaries. Indeed it has influenced public opinion throughout the whole world by changing the thoughts and opinions of national leaders and editors in the most wonderful way. It positively alters the course of mens lives. It has affected the destinies of nations, races, religions. It has annihilated many popular Ideals hitherto believed sacred and impregnable. Nevertheless it is written as interestingly as any romance. Dr. Russell Wallace and Count Tolstoi criticize it in frank despair: and Bernard Shaw has written a drama (“Man & Superman”) with Redbeard’s thought as his theme: — and its power over the more intelligent followers of Marx, Lasalle, Jaures, Hearst, Bebel, Bernstein, is beyond calculation. In fact this book is a veritable religious and political earthquake, marking the complete collapse of a false and depressing philosophy that has held sway for nearly 2,000 years. The thought in this book is positively startling. It thrills across the empires and republics like the wakening trump of a Warrior Archangel. It out Darwins Darwin; it out Spencers Spencer; and, compared to some of its splendid chapters the writings of Machiavelli are as the babble of a babe. ‘Nothing is true’ it declares, ‘nothing is permanent; all things are open to you; the world is to the Strong; struggle is forever; they may take who have the power; they can keep who CAN.’ The author proclaims himself a Messiah of Evolution; — a re-incarnate Odin, whose mission it is to journey from nation to nation, and city to city, teaching and preaching the ancient, true, heroic and masculine Evangel of valor and gold. You cannot buy ‘Might Is Right’ in more than half a dozen book stores of the world; nevertheless it has been translated into four modern languages; and over 120,000 copies have been sold in this country and in Europe. Orders are received from the most distant nations of the earth. You never saw anything like it before in all your life. It condenses centuries of experience and whole libraries of current futilities and idolatries into half a dozen splendid epigrams, that ‘once read can never be forgotten.’ This is an unprecedented book — an extraordinary book — and YOU should read it — then read it again, and lend it to your friends. Get its meaning into your nature, and (if your spirit is not broken) it will do to you what it has done to others; it will open your eyes; it will make a new man of you; it wi

Qigong Empowerment: A Guide to Medical, Taoist, Buddhist, Wushu Energy Cultivation

Shou-Yu Liang, Wen-Ching Wu

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Best Qigong book in English Language 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I train with Master Wen-Ching Wu and i have trained a little with Grandmaster Liang, and I have not been able to find ANY books that come close to surpassing the ones that they have written. Together they have an incredibly vast knowledge of martial arts and Qigong and share it quite willingly in their fantastic books and teachings.

Editorial Review:

Qigong Empowerment is the most unique and complete volume ever written in the English language on Qigong (Chi Kung), the attainment of energy. It is a volume that you can refer to over and over again for all your energy studies. This book includes all the major energy training schools in ancient China: 1. Medical Qigong theories and training methods to strengthen the organs and to rejuvenate overall health. 2. Taoist Qigong cultivation and training outline, from the basic to the most profound methods, to foster Essence, Qi, and Spirit. 3. Buddhist Qigong empowering methods to develop the Esoteric Abilities of the Body, Speech, and Mind. 4. Emitting, Absorbing, and Healing Qigong to develop your healing ability. 5. Wushu (martial arts) Iron Shirt, Iron Palm, Iron Fist Qigong for developing your ultimate physical potential.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom

Peter Kingsley

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Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I really want to like this book 3 out of 5 stars.
16 of 22 people found this review helpful.

But i can't give it more than 3 stars. Why? first, as the reviewer below states, Peter Kingsley throws out an awful lot of assumptions without any backup. No guided footnotes, no back story, just a jumble at the back of the book for people to sift through. Combined with his sensationalist style a-la The Davinci Code (not sure which came first), it's awful and insulting. Perhaps because of this style, he ends up wasting our time as he thinks things through for himself in parts without just giving us the information to think through ourselves - as if we're incapable of doing so...i really wonder how he can be a university professor since he talks to us like we're in high school. He does this while also telling us how great it is that the ancient Greeks did no such thing - they wrote simply but with deep meaning, and let the reader figure it out (i guess he's not as clever as they were? or does he think we aren't?) Oh, right -- throughout the book he explains that scholars are stupid and only he and a few others really understand how to explain what's going on! Yes, that's why!

But even with all that, i was getting into this book in spite of myself, as he brought out a lot of interesting facts about the Phocaeans and Parmeneides. But when he literally pulled this one out of his a**--he said that some scholars actually believe the harmony of the spheres heard by Pythagoras was the sound of a snake hiss--i had to just laugh. Now, it's true that a large portion of people don't actually hear overtones, but there are many of us who do - and you don't mistake the sound for a hissing snake. Furthermore, to say such a thing totally dismisses all of Pythagoras's teachings about harmony and the overtone series, which wouldn't exist if all that were the case. But saying they sounded like "pipes" as Parmeneides and Pythagoras in fact did would be a better bet. I guess Peter likes to take what those dumb scholars said if they fit his own agenda. Indeed, Peter Kingsley apparently dismisses the actual word for pipes USED by the ancients, to bring hissing snakes into his theories. To twist something so simple around like that just made me lose respect for him. Sorry Peter. I wanted to like you because it's obvious you're a great student of this stuff, but you owe us a little more than that.

In the end, what we learn that is so important is actually nothing new - that the great philosophers, mathematicians, etc. in ancient Greece were mystics, and that Plato shut the door on that. Well, that has been an acknowleged fact for a long long time. The sad thing is, that this book has some interesting information about the mysticism practiced. But it's couched in paragraphs and paragraphs of an angry tone about how there's a conspiracy (yes he uses that word) to keep people from knowing it. Too bad - but i guess it's because, if you take all the unnecessary stuff out, it would've been a much thinner book.

Editorial Review:

A set of ancient inscriptions on marble found 40 years ago in southern Italy, recording details so bewildering that scholars have kept silent about them ... Sensational new information about a group of ancient philosophers who were so intensely practical that, two and a half thousand years ago, they shaped our existence and the world we live in ... These are just two ingredients of this extraordinary book, which uncovers an astonishing reality right at the origins of the Western world. Written by a highly-acclaimed contemporary historian and expert in the field, it provides dramatic new evidence about one of the most important of ancient philosophers, Parmenides-and revolutionizes our un-derstanding of the history of religion, of the origins of philosophy, and of Western culture as a whole.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy, Third Edition

Ph.D., Jay Stevenson

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A guide for the perplexed 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Philosophy is the attempt to enhance the traits we deem desirable and suppress the traits we deem unwanted (a matter of judgment) by getting better acquainted with the world around us (a matter of reality). An improvement in the world around us inevitably follows.Test

To qualify as a philosophical theory, the practitioner of philosophy - the philosopher - must, therefore meet a few tests:

1. To clearly define and enumerate the traits he seeks to enhance (or suppress) and to lucidly and unambiguously describe his ideal of the world

2. Not to fail the tests of every scientific theory (internal and external consistency, falsifiability, possessed of explanatory and predictive powers, etc.)

These are mutually exclusive demands. Reality - even merely the intersubjective sort - does not yield to value judgments. Ideals, by definition, are unreal. Consequently, philosophy uneasily treads the ever-thinning lines separating it, on the one hand, from physics and, on the other hand, from religion.

The history of philosophy is the tale of attempts - mostly botched - to square this obstinate circle. In their desperate struggle to find meaning, philosophers resorted to increasingly arcane vocabularies and obscure systems of thought. It did nothing to endear it to the man (and reader) in the post-Socratic agora.

Enter "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy (Third Edition)" by Jay Stevenson, Ph.D. (Alpha Books).

It is a delightful and structured excursion into the terrain more convolutedly trodden by "Sophie's World". It is a vade mecum in the true sense of the word. It gently holds you by the hand and unflinchingly introduces you to the one intellectual giant after another.

The author knows how intimidating philosophy can be. He, therefore, avoids professional jargon. He talks to the reader, rather than talk at him. The text is peppered with brief insets titled "philoso-facts", "wisdom at work" (how to apply what you have learned), "reality check" (where philosophers disagree with each other and with reality), and "lexicon". Two appendices comprise a glossary and further reading.

The book is an amazing feat. It covers all the major schools of thoughts and philosophers in c. 350 eminently readable pages. New chapters provide extended coverage of the latest developments in post-structuralism and post-modernism.

If this book does not make you fall in love with this tortured discipline - nothing will. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

Editorial Review:

Thousands of years of wisdom, in one updated guide.

Socrates’s admonition that “the unexamined life is not worth living” still resonates with many people, and this guide is a great introduction to that mental exercise. The author skillfully covers the subject both historically and topically and brings the reader all the way up to the present, with insights into 21st-century philosophical thought.

• Essential philosophers and philosophies, from ancient times right up to today
• New information on such topics as Eastern philosophy, women philosophers, postmodernism, and critical theory
• The relevance of philosophy to a variety of other subjects and to today’s world

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940

Walter Benjamin

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Editorial Review:

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written word.

This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.

Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.

Nietzsche And Philosophy (European Perspectives)

Gilles Deleuze

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation, Nietzsche and Philosophy has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought.