Essential Squashed Philosophers

45 Classics of Philosophy, in their own words, but abridged into readable little epitomes. Newly expanded edition with extensive footnotes, translations, cross-references and index.

45 Classics of Philosophy, in their own words, abridged into readable little epitomes. Including: The Ancient Greeks, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Aristotle, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, St Augustine, Severinus Boethius, Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, George Berkeley, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraf, Auguste Comte, G.W.F Hegel, Marx And Engels, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry D Thoreau, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, Jean-Paul Sartre.

LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC is the classic work of philosophy by Alfred Jules Ayer published in 1936 when Ayer was 26 (though it was in fact completed by age 25). This book defines, explains, and argues for the verification principle of logical positivism, as it relates to the use of objectives and methods in determining truths and probabilities. And whether or not one agrees that emperical evidence is the only basis for proof, there is no denying that this is a brilliant book in how it explains in what ways the principle of verifiability may be applied to the problems of philosophy itself.

Some of the world's specialists provide in this handbook essays about what kinds of things there are, in what ways they exist, and how they relate to each other. They give the word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness.

In a world of rising tensions between Russia and the United States, the Middle East and Europe, Sunnis and Shiites, Islamism and liberalism, Turkey is at the epicentre. And at the heart of Turkey is its right-wing populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. Since 2002, Erdo?an has consolidated his hold on domestic politics while using military and diplomatic means to solidify Turkey as a regional power. His crackdown has been brutal and consistent - scores of journalists arrested, academics officially banned from leaving the country, university deans fired and many of the highest-ranking military officers arrested. In some senses, the nefarious and failed 2016 coup has given Erdo?an the licence to make good on his repeated promise to bring order and stability under a 'strongman'. Here, leading Turkish expert Soner Cagaptay will look at Erdo?an's roots in Turkish history, what he believes in and how he has cemented his rule, as well as what this means for the world. The book will also unpick the 'threats' Erdogan has worked to combat - from the liberal Turks to the Gulen movement, from coup plotters to Kurdish nationalists - all of which have culminated in the crisis of modern Turkey.

Kathrin Koslicki offers an analysis of ordinary materials objects, those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. She focuses particularly on the question of how the parts of such objects are related to the wholes which they compose. Many philosophers today find themselves in the grip of an exceedingly deflationary conception of what it means to be an object. According to this conception, any plurality of objects, no matter how disparate or gerrymandered, itself composes an object, even if the objects in question fail to exhibit interesting similarities, internal unity, cohesion, or causl interaction amongst each other. This commitment to initially counterintuitive objects follows from the belief that no principled set of criteria is available by means of which to distinguish intuitively gerrymandered objects from commonsensical ones; the project of this book is to persuade the reader that systematic principles can be found by means of which composition can be restricted, and hence that we need not embrace this deflationary approach to the question of what it means to be an object. To this end, a more full-blooded neo-Aristotelian account of parthood and composition is developed according to which objects are structured wholes: it is integral to the existence and identity of an object, on this conception, that its parts exhibit a certain manner of arrangement. This structure-based conception of parthood and composition is explored in detail, along with some of its historical precursors as well as some of its contemporary competitors.

There's a set of books which you're just supposed to know about, at least if you live in The West and fancy the idea of being thought 'educated'. There's the Bible, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Walter Scott and Machiavelli. Dr Jekyll, Tiny Tim, Starbuck, Socrates, Mr. Scrooge, Raskolnikov, Einstein and Enkidu. The Brontes and Boswell, Wordsworth, Newton Confucius and Don Quixote. Here they all are. 100 of the most quoted, most known, works of all time, in the original author's own words, but squashed up into nice little abridgements you can read in an hour or so. Little versions which smell and sound just like the originals. And ... with The Hundred Books it becomes possible to read the whole thing as a single narrative, to discover a Pisgah View of the written history of the great grand thing of how We got where We are now, in way that's just impossible for ordinary mortals. Read the lot, you'll love it, and you'll never, ever, be bored in an airport again.

Great Philosophers tells the story of Western philosophy through the thought of its main protagonists, the great philosophers. The narrative begins with the Presocratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides and ends in recent times, as each philosopher wrestles with the problems and solutions of his or her predecessors. Along the way, Jeffrey Reid provides an engaging introduction to many of the principal ideas of luminaries such as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Sartre. Great Philosophers not only provides an ideal introduction to philosophical thought, but also an original understanding of the discipline of philosophy itself. The book aims not only to recount an important tradition, but also to reveal something about how it has affected who we are.