Humanist philosophy Books

First published in 1964, this is a short collection of both literary and philosophical essays. Whilst two essays consider Greek literature written at the point at which the Athenian empire was breaking apart, another group explore the background from...

As one of America's "public intellectuals," John Dewey was engaged in a lifelong struggle to understand the human mind and the nature of human inquiry. According to Thomas C. Dalton, the successful pursuit of this mission demanded that Dewey become more...

Georg Luk�cs wrote that "there is autonomy and 'autonomy.' The one is a moment of life itself, the elevation of its richness and contradictory unity; the other is a rigidification, a barren self-seclusion, a self-imposed banishment from the...

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) is widely regarded as the greatest and most significant English-speaking philosopher and often seen as having had the most influence on the way philosophy is practiced today in the West. His reputation is...

Humility is a vital aspect of political discussion, social media and self-help, whilst recent empirical research has linked humility to improved well-being, open-mindedness and increased accuracy in assessing persuasive messages. It is also a topic...

Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So re-examines the prevailing critical consensus that Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist writer. While more difficult elements of his work have often been the subject of scholarly attention,...

This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of...

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What...

As humanity becomes increasingly interconnected through globalization, the question of whether community is possible within culturally diverse societies has returned as a principal concern for contemporary thought. Lorenzo Simpson charges that the...

On Humanism is a timely and powerfully argued philosophical defence of humanism and an impassioned plea that we turn to ourselves, not religion, if we want to answer Socrates' age old question: what is the best kind of life to lead?

What is knowledge? What are the sources of knowledge? What is the value of knowledge? What can we know? Arguing About Knowledge offers a fresh and engaging perspective on the theory of knowledge. This comprehensive and imaginative selection of readings...

Understanding Humanism is an easy-to-read and informative overview of the beliefs, practices, and values of humanism as a non-religious worldview. This short and lively book explores humanism both as a broad historical tradition of thought and as a...

So begins A Simpler Way, an exploration of a radically different world view that will reshape how we think about organizing all human endeavor. Margaret J. Wheatley and coauthor Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the question: ''How could we organize human...

The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity's animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities. But, as the...

Beginning with the view that human consciousness is essentially embodied and that the way we consciously experience the world is structured by our bodily dynamics and surroundings, the book argues that emotions are a fundamental manifestation of our...

Repression receives little attention in philosophical literature. This study of cases of repression that inhibit an agent's deliberative access to his reasons argues that an agent cannot correctly deliberate about a reason to overcome repression as if he...

This collection is devoted to Gilbert Ryle's philosophy of mind and language. It features essays from prominent scholars on the topics of category mistakes, hypotheticals, dispositions, emotion, thinking, perception, and the task-achievement distinction.

The Things We Do and Why We Do Them argues against the common assumption that there is a kind of thing called "action" which all reason-giving explanation of action are geared towards. Sandis explains why all theories concerned with the form which any...

This book seeks to set humanism on a new footing. No longer Enlightenment intuitions of an autonomous, disconnected, and rational self but a philosophy oriented towards the relationship between self and other. With this, it seeks to provide an escape...

Southgate draws on ideas within history, philosophy, literature, psychology, and theology to explore two traditions: contentment with our situation as it is, and the aspiration to transcend it. He discusses the possibility ofescape from intellectual...

Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind aims to reassess the work of Wittgenstein in terms of its importance to contemporary debates surrounding the philosophy of mind.The first part of this study examines Wittgenstein in the context of current...

In this book, Ellis argues that moral and political objectives are not independent of one other, and so must be pursued in tandem. Social humanism is a moral and political philosophy that does just this. As a political philosophy, it justifies the...

We frequently hear that we live in an age of anxiety, from 'therapy culture', the Atkins diet and child anti-depressants to gun culture and weapons of mass destruction. While Hollywood regularly cashes in on teenage anxiety through its Scream franchise,...

A first in English, this book engages with the ways in which Hegel and Sartre answer the difficult questions: What is it to be human? What place do we have in the world? How should we live? What can we be?

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as...

In this volume, distinguished neurologist Jason W. Brown extends the microgenetic theory of the mind by offering a new approach to the problem of time and free will. Brown bases his work on a unitary process model of brain...

A volume devoted explicitly to the subtle and multidimensional phenomenon of background knowing that has to be recognized as an important element of the triad mind-body-world. The essays are inspired by seminal works on the topic by Searle and Dreyfus,...

Engaging with current research in the philosophy of emotions, both analytic and continental, the author argues that reductionist accounts of emotions leave us in a state of poverty regarding our understanding of our world and of ourselves.

Exploring Hegel's philosophical psychology to uncover viable remedies to the chief dilemmas plaguing contemporary philosophy of mind, Hegel and Mind exposes why mind cannot be an epistemological foundation nor reduced to discursive consciousness nor...

This book explores the nexus between gender, ageing and culture in dancers practicing a variety of genres. It challenges existing cultural norms which equate ageing with bodily decline and draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to explore...

This volume contains a set of state-of-the-art essays by younger philosophers on various topics in the philosophy of action. Some of the essays are about the metaphysics of action and agency; some consider the nature of autonomy and free agency; some...