Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Story of Philosophy chronicles the ideas of the great thinkers, the economic and intellectual environments which influenced them, and the personal traits and adventures out of which each philosophy grew.

The Coast of Utopia

by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard’s magnificent trilogy, The Coast of Utopia , was the most keenly awaited and successful drama of 2007. Now “Stoppard’s crowning achievement” (David Cote, Time Out New York ) has been collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author, and includes the definitive text used during Lincoln Center’s recent celebrated run. The Coast of Utopia comprises three sequential plays that chronicle the... (more)

Essential Philosophy : Everything You Need to Understand the World's Greatest ThinkersJames Mannion

Essential Philosophy : Everything You Need to Understand the World's Greatest Thinkers

by James Mannion

The Subtlety of Emotions

by Aharon Ben-Ze?ev

Why do we cry at the movies? What is the best way to manage destructive feelings such as jealousy? Although emotions pervade our lives, their nature, causes, and effects have only recently been studied by social scientists and philosophers. Despite growing scientific interest in the subject, empirical findings have not yet caught up with our intuitive knowledge. In this book Aaron Ben-Ze'ev carries out what he... (more)

Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Lives of the Left)

Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Lives of the Left)

by Annie Cohen-Solal

The internationally acclaimed biography of Sartre in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth. The first volume in the Lives of the Left series, Annie Cohen-Solal's Sartre is a remarkable achievement. "A sensation" upon its initial publication in France, as the New York Times reported, Sartre was subsequently translated into sixteen languages and went on to become an international bestseller,... (more)

Causation and Explanation (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy)

Causation and Explanation (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy)

This collection of original essays on the topics of causation and explanation offers readers a state-of-the-art view of current work in these areas. The book is notable for its interdisciplinary character, and the essays, by distinguished authors and important rising scholars, will be of interest to a wide readership, including philosophers, computer scientists, and economists. Students and scholars alike will... (more)

The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World

The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World

by Lawrence Goldstone, Nancy Bazelon Goldstone

The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious tome discovered in 1912 by the English book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich, has puzzled scholars for a century. A small six inches by nine inches, but over two hundred pages long, with odd illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women, it is written in so indecipherable a language and contains so complicated a code that mathematicians, book collectors,... (more)

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (Representation and the Mind)

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (Representation and the Mind)

Cora Diamond has played a leading role in the reception and elaboration of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Diamond's contribution to Wittgenstein scholarship is distinguished by her striking and widely discussed suggestions about continuity between Wittgenstein's early and later writings. Her work in ethics, in important respects shaped by her study of Wittgenstein, has been similarly influential. The essays in this... (more)

From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution (Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution (Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2007. Although we now know that ontogeny (individual development) does not actually recapitulate phylogeny (evolutionary transformation), contrary to Ernst Haeckel's famous dictum, the relationship between embryological development and evolution remains the subject of intense scientific interest. In the 1990s a new field, evolutionary developmental biology (or Evo-Devo),... (more)

Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (A Bradford Book)

Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (A Bradford Book)

by Nikolas Kompridis

In Critique and Disclosure , Nikolas Kompridis argues provocatively for a richer and more time-responsive critical theory. He calls for a shift in the normative and critical emphasis of critical theory from the narrow concern with rules and procedures of Jürgen Habermas's model to a change-enabling disclosure of possibility and the enlargement of meaning. Kompridis contrasts two visions of critical theory's role... (more)

Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

by Gillian Rose

Writing with rare power and insight, one of England's most distinguished thinkers and scholars takes readers on an extraordinary journey through the soul, plumbing her own life in an attempt to illuminate the deepest issues of all human life: love, family, friendship, sexuality, illness, and death.

Subjectivity and Selfhood

Investigating the First-Person Perspective

by Dan Zahavi

What is a self? Does it exist in reality or is it a mere social construct—or is it perhaps a neurologically induced illusion? The legitimacy of the concept of the self has been questioned by both neuroscientists and philosophers in recent years. Countering this, in Subjectivity and Selfhood , Dan Zahavi argues that the notion of self is crucial for a proper understanding of consciousness. He investigates the... (more)

Disorders of Volition (Bradford Books)

Science tries to understand human action from two perspectives, the cognitive and the volitional. The volitional approach, in contrast to the more dominant "outside-in" studies of cognition, looks at actions from the inside out, examining how actions are formed and informed by internal conditions. In Disorders of Volition , scholars from a range of disciplines seek to advance our understanding of the processes... (more)

Situating Semantics: Essays on the Philosophy of John Perry (Bradford Books)

Situating Semantics: Essays on the Philosophy of John Perry (Bradford Books)

John Perry, Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, is one of a handful of contemporary analytic philosophers to combine the focused approach of most current work in analytic philosophy with the more expansive systems-building of earlier analytic philosophers and contemporary philosophers in other disciplines. Perry, like W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davison, David Lewis, and Hilary... (more)

Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context (Bradford Books)

Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context (Bradford Books)

Recent scientific findings about human decision making would seem to threaten the traditional concept of the individual conscious will. The will is threatened from "below" by the discovery that our apparently spontaneous actions are actually controlled and initiated from below the level of our conscious awareness, and from "above" by the recognition that we adapt our actions according to social dynamics of which... (more)

Technology as Experience

by John McCarthy

In Technology as Experience , John McCarthy and Peter Wright argue that any account of what is often called the user experience must take into consideration the emotional, intellectual, and sensual aspects of our interactions with technology. We don't just use technology, they point out; we live with it. They offer a new approach to understanding human-computer interaction through examining the felt experience of... (more)

Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy (Bradford Books)

Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy (Bradford Books)

by Steven D. Hales

The grand and sweeping claims of many relativists might seem to amount to the argument that everything is relative—except the thesis of relativism. In this book, Steven Hales defends relativism, but in a more circumscribed form that applies specifically to philosophical propositions. His claim is that philosophical propositions are relatively true—true in some perspectives and false in others. Hales defends this... (more)

Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (Jean Nicod Lectures)

Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (Jean Nicod Lectures)

by Ray Jackendoff

Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture represents a breakthrough in developing an integrated theory of human cognition. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of cognitive scientists, including linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Jackendoff argues that linguistics has become isolated from the other cognitive... (more)

Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge

Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge

Winning entry, Professional Cover/Jacket Category, in the 2009 New England Book Show sponsored by Bookbuilders of Boston. A central debate in contemporary philosophy of perception concerns the disjunctive theory of perceptual experience. Until the 1960s, philosophers of perception generally assumed that a veridical perception (a perceptual experience that presents the world as it really is) and a... (more)

Laws of Seeing

by Wolfgang Metzger

This classic work in vision science, written by a leading figure in Germany's Gestalt movement in psychology and first published in 1936, addresses topics that remain of major interest to vision researchers today. Wolfgang Metzger's main argument, drawn from Gestalt theory, is that the objects we perceive in visual experience are not the objects themselves but perceptual effigies of those objects constructed by... (more)

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The Story Of Philosophy

by Will Durant