Recommendations based on "The Conquest of Happiness (Routledge Classics)"

Product Description 'I'll stop doing it as soon as I understand what I'm doing.' Somewhere between a historical account and work of philosophy, Socrates' Defence details the final plea of Plato's beloved mentor. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Plato (474 BC-347 BC). Plato's works available in Penguin Classics are Republic, The Last Days of Socrates, The Laws, Phaedrus, Protagoras and Meno, Timaeus and Critias, Theaetetus, Early Socratic Dialogues, The Symposium and Gorgias. About the Author Plato (474 BC-347 BC). Plato's works available in Penguin Classics are Republic, The Last Days of Socrates, The Laws, Phaedrus, Protagoras and Meno, Timaeus and Critias, Theaetetus, Early Socratic Dialogues, The Symposium and Gorgias.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. The Father of Existentialism, Kierkegaard transformed philosophy with his conviction that we must all create our own nature; in this great work of religious anxiety, he argues that a true understanding of God can only be attained by making a personal 'leap of faith'.

Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues offers a balanced and comprehensive survey to the main currents in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Gathering 49 readings on a variety of topics―science and pseudoscience; rationality, objectivity, and values in science; laws of nature; models of explanation, among others―this anthology introduces students to the often challenging problems examined by major thinkers in the field. Combine this with thoughtful and thorough apparatus, and Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues is the most flexible and comprehensive collection ever created for undergraduate courses.

The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"Like the "funny, brilliant, bawdy" (The New Yorker) "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" this book’s many stories―some funny, others intensely moving―display Richard P. Feynman’s unquenchable thirst for adventure and unparalleled ability to recount important moments from his life.Here we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked on the atomic bomb at nearby Los Alamos. We listen to the fascinating narrative of the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986 and relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster’s cause through an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. In "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century lets us see the man behind the genius.

Kurt Godel, the greatest logician of our time, startled the world of mathematics in 1931 with his Theorem of Undecidability, which showed that some statements in mathematics are inherently "undecidable." His work on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of number theory, and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum theory brought him further worldwide fame. In this introductory volume, Raymond Smullyan, himself a well-known logician, guides the reader through the fascinating world of Godel's incompleteness theorems. The level of presentation is suitable for anyone with a basic acquaintance with mathematical logic. As a clear, concise introduction to a difficult but essential subject, the book will appeal to mathematicians, philosophers, and computer scientists.

The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. —Werner Heisenberg That God would choose to play dice with the world is something I cannot believe.—Albert Einstein Nothing exists until it is measured. —Neils Bohr The remarkable story of a startling scientific idea that ignited a battle among the greatest minds of the twentieth century and profoundly influenced intellectual inquiry in fields ranging from physics to literary criticism, anthropology and journalism In 1927, the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg challenged centuries of scientific understanding when he introduced what came to be known as “the uncertainty principle.” Building on his own radical innovations in quantum theory, Heisenberg proved that in many physical measurements, you can obtain one bit of information only at the price of losing another. Heisenberg’s principle implied that scientific quantities/concepts do not have absolute, independent meaning, but acquire meaning only in terms of the experiments used to measure them. This proposition, undermining the cherished belief that science could reveal the physical world with limitless detail and precision, placed Heisenberg in direct opposition to the revered Albert Einstein. The eminent scientist Niels Bohr, Heisenberg’s mentor and Einstein’s long-time friend, found himself caught between the two. Uncertaintychronicles the birth and evolution of one of the most significant findings in the history of science, and portrays the clash of ideas and personalities it provoked. Einstein was emotionally as well as intellectually determined to prove the uncertainty principle false. Heisenberg represented a new generation of physicists who believed that quantum theory overthrew the old certainties; confident of his reasoning, Heisenberg dismissed Einstein’s objections. Bohr understood that Heisenberg was correct, but he also recognized the vital necessity of gaining Einstein’s support as the world faced the shocking implications of Heisenberg’s principle.

" . . . a great read. It is masterfully presented, and is an ideal text both for advanced undergraduates and graduate students." —International Journal of African Historical Studies" . . . a detailed, critical guide to fifty years of African philosophy . . . " —Teaching Philosophy"Masolo offers an expansive and lucidly panoramic view of the origin and developments in African philosophy." —Africa Today"The excellence of this book lies in the wealth of perspectives that it brings to the discussion on what constitutes philosophy, rationality, and meaningful reflection. It is both thought provoking and illuminating." —EthicsA Kenyan philosopher surveys themes and debates in African philosophy over the last five decades. Masolo's purview includes Francophone and Anglophone philosophers in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions.

"[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense."--Edward W. Said

Conceived originally as a serious presentation of the development of philosophy for Catholic seminary students, Frederick Copleston's nine-volume A History Of Philosophy has journeyed far beyond the modest purpose of its author to universal acclaim as the best history of philosophy in English. Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit of immense erudition who once tangled with A. J. Ayer in a fabled debate about the existence of God and the possibility of metaphysics, knew that seminary students were fed a woefully inadequate diet of theses and proofs, and that their familiarity with most of history's great thinkers was reduced to simplistic caricatures. Copleston set out to redress the wrong by writing a complete history of Western philosophy, one crackling with incident and intellectual excitement -- and one that gives full place to each thinker, presenting his thought in a beautifully rounded manner and showing his links to those who went before and to those who came after him. The result of Copleston's prodigious labors is a history of philosophy that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. Thought magazine summed up the general agreement among scholars and students alike when it reviewed Copleston's A History of Philosophy as "broad-minded and objective, comprehensive and scholarly, unified and well proportioned... We cannot recommend [it] too highly."

Ever since Newton created dynamics, there has been controversy about its foundations. Are space and time absolute? Do they form a rigid but invisible framework and container of the universe? Or are space, time, and motion relative? If so, does Newton's 'framework' arise through the influence of the universe at large, as Ernst Mach suggested? Einstein's aim when creating his general theory of relativity was to demonstrate this and thereby implement 'Mach's Principle'. However, it is widely believed that he achieved only partial success. This question of whether motion is absolute or relative has been a central issues in philosophy; the nature of time has perennial interest. Current attempts to create a quantum description of the whole universe keep these issues at the cutting edge of modern research. Written by the world's leading expert on Mach's Principle, The Discovery of Dynamics is a highly original account of the development of notions about space, time, and motion. Widely praised in its hardback version, it is one of the fullest and most readable accounts of the astronomical studies that culminated in Kepler's laws of planetary motion and of the creation of dynamics by Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton. Originally published as Absolute or Relative Motion?, Vol. 1: The Discovery of Dynamics (Cambridge), The Discovery of Dynamics provides the technical background to Barbour's recently published The End of Time, in which he argues that time disappears from the description of the quantum universe.