Showing results for "James" in Movements

From the 17th to 18th centuries, bold thinkers cast off the authority of ancient traditions and embraced reason as the primary tool for understanding the world. These rationalists, or early modern philosophers, included René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—visionaries whose answers to profound questions remain relevant today. Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and the Rationalists covers the key philosophers of this period in 12 fascinating half-hour lectures, presented by award-winning teacher James D. Reid, Professor of Philosophy at Metropolitan State University.

Education is in bad shape in America and beyond today. It’s obvious. Everyone perceives it. Something is going badly wrong in our schools. Our children aren’t learning as they should be. Their mastery of core academic curriculum like reading, writing, history, mathematics, science, and civics has declined to crisis levels and shows no signs of improvement. Meanwhile, they’re all learning to be activists, turning their backs on their nations, societies, and even their parents and religions.

Theres no arguing that we live in turbulent times. In a world which often seems to be spinning out of control, New York Times best-selling author James Arthur Ray, takes an aggressive stance suggesting there are three fundamental dilemmas that have brought us to this fascinating, often frustrating, fulcrum in history.

More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces listeners to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.

In this illuminating overview, Professor Garrett Thomson surveys the field, considering the work and influence of 29 major thinkers representing logical atomism and logical positivism (including Russell and Wittgenstein), analytic philosophy (including Quine, Davidson, Rawls), phenomenology and existentialism (including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre), hermeneutics (including Gadamer and Habermas) and post-structuralism (including Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze). Also examined are some recent thinkers including Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor.

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept - the mind - emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die", wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always", and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out.

William James (1842 - 1910) was a psychologist and a philosopher of note. For James, pragmatism meant an emphasis on radical empiricism and the concept that the meaning of any idea is valid only in terms of its experiential and practical consequences. He tests competing systems of thought in the marketplace of actual experience to determine their validity. The intent is to see whether a particular philosophical theory or way of looking at the world makes an actual difference in individual conduct.

American psychologist William James (1842-1910) was also a philosopher of considerable repute and borrowed the theory of pragmatism first put forward by Charles Peirce to help form his own interpretation of the philosophy. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking is based on the notion that the meaning of any idea is valid only if it works both experientially and practically. The book consists of a series of eight lectures, delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December of 1906, and at Columbia University in January 1907.

Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered "yes" in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

What is Stoicism? Why has it become so popular among today's business elite? How can you use it to achieve your dreams? When you listen to Thomas Beckett's Stoicism: Ultimate Handbook to Stoic Philosophy, Wisdom, and Way of Life, you'll discover the history of this ancient philosophy, its relationship to God, and how it can improve your life.

Stoicisms ancient teachings are the very best playbook for adversity. Unlike many religious and new age thinking methods, Stoic principles provide a clear road map on exactly “How” to think, not simply “What” to think. Thus giving its practitioners a way to better deal with the misfortunes and hardships they face. However, this is only half of the battle. If you truly want to make the most of these principles, then you need to give yourself a leg up to begin with, which requires adopting a more progressive approach towards success.

In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a compelling introduction to James's life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology -and an inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous - can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living.

Self Reliance is an essay written in 1841 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas. This essay is an analysis into the nature of the aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded. He stresses that anyone is capable of achieving happiness simply if they change their mindset. Emerson focuses on seemingly insignificant details explaining how life is "learning and forgetting and learning again".

In Spring Training (for the Rest of Your Life), memoirist and intellectual historian John Kaag introduces listeners to the forefathers of American philosophy: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who created the field of transcendentalism, and William James, the father of American psychology who also invented the philosophical school known as pragmatism.

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James is a unique work in American philosophy. This collection of lectures James himself delivered at the dawn of the twentieth century has been a landmark in the development of the philosophical movement of pragmatism.

Life is short, and it can be sweet. Contemplating death is looking into a mirror that allows us to see these simple facts clearly, as if for the first time. We have every reason to believe that we have but one life to live - and no good reasons to believe otherwise - and death marks the termination of each life. Examining this reality opens doors to understanding ourselves, each other, connection, love, and life itself in an entirely new way.

In his book Pragmatism, William James attacked the transcendental, rationalist tradition in philosophy and tried to clear the ground for the doctrine he called radical empiricism. The book caused an uproar; it was greeted with praise, hostility, and ridicule. Determined to clarify the pragmatic conception of truth, James collected nine essays he had written on this subject before he wrote Pragmatism and six written later in response to criticisms of that volume by Bertrand Russell and others. He published the collection under the title "The Meaning of Truth" in 1909, the year before his death.

Philosophy takes us by surprise. It challenges us, awakens us and opens our minds. In an increasingly opinionated world, philosophy encourages us to look within and think for ourselves. In doing so, we can find solutions to even our most confusing dilemmas. Let Fabrice Midal teach you to trust your own thoughts, as he guides us through the inspirational ideas of 40 writers, artists, thinkers and seers from Baudelaire to Wittgenstein, Emily Dickinson to Toni Morrison, Pablo Picasso to James Baldwin.

Western Society is in confusion, the industrial world is teetering on collapse, and it looks like things could get worse. Agrarian blogger, historian, and "plain" preacher Michael Bunker has been living off of the grid for many years, and he has some advice for those living in the industrial/consumerist economy... living an off off-grid life is achievable. It has been done for thousands of years, and it can be done today...