Thinking Politically

Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.

In this fascinating explication of the animal behavior of the human species, Hannah Holmes explores our plumage, our mating habits, our social lives and our development.

Since 2015, there has been a spectacular boom in a nearly two-hundred-year-old delusion - the idea that we all live on a flat plane, under a solid dome, ringed by an impossible wall of ice. It is the ultimate in conspiracy theories, a wholesale rejection of everything we know to be true about the world in which we live. Where did this idea come from? Weill draws a straight line from today's conspiratorial moment back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s, showing the human impulses behind divergences in belief. Faced with a complicated world out of our individual control, we naturally seek patterns to explain the inexplicable. The only difference between then and now? Social media. And, powered by Facebook and YouTube algorithms, the Flat Earth movement is growing.

Timothy Snyder's New York Times bestseller On Tyranny uses the darkest moments in twentieth-century history, from Nazism to Communism, to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism.

A compact and accessible edition of Hume's political and moral writings with essays by a distinguished set of contributors A key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume was a major influence on thinkers ranging from Kant and Schopenhauer to Einstein and Popper, and his writings continue to be deeply relevant today. With four essays by leading Hume scholars exploring his complex intellectual legacy, this volume presents an overview of Hume's moral, political, and social philosophy. Editors Angela Coventry and Andrew Valls bring together a selection of writings from Hume's most important works, with contributors placing them in their appropriate context and offering a lively discourse on the relevance of Hume's thought to contemporary subjects like reason's dependence on emotion and the importance of social convention in political and economic behavior. Perfect for classroom use, this volume is an invaluable companion for anyone studying an important thinker who advanced the development of moral philosophy, economics, cognitive science, and many other fields of the Western tradition.

Free Will, also known as Freedom of the Will, is appraised as the one of the greatest works ever produced in America. The mid-eighteenth-century New England philosophical theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) defines the will by importing terms from John Locke. Edwards states the Arminian nature of free will, suspects the need for such free will, and finally defends Calvinist free will and objects to the Arminian one.

Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation.

This book considers how social justice and authentic freedom of speech could be better tackled through hypertextual writing. Unilinear writing produces an artificial understanding of justice, freedom of speech and hermeneutics. In contrast, hypertextual writing promises an optimistic future which involves less judgment, more empathy and the embracing of difference, so vital in our post-truth culture. The author argues that hypertextual writing is set to have a marked impact on fields like jurisprudence, social sciences and education. Rethinking Ethics Through Hypertext reconciles traditional theories of ethics by re-framing them through hypertextual techniques, bringing together contrasting and contradictory ethical views. It presents compelling insights for scholars of moral philosophy, social justice, hermeneutics and education.