Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Consciousness & Thought

Learn how to succeed in business with the millennia-old Stoic mindset. An overview of Stoic principles alongside strategies to lead with clarity and control. Nothing great is easy, as Epictetus said. But it is achievable. The Stoic Leader brings together the five principles of Stoicism to...

Goswami's basic premise is that quantum physics is not only the future of science, but is also the key to understanding consciousness, life, death, God, psychology, and the meaning of life. Quantum physics is an antidote to the moral sterility and mechanistic approach of scientific materialism and is the best and clearest approach to understanding our universe. In short, quantum physics is indeed the theory of everything. 

Without any of the sugarcoating often found in the modern hyper-positive self-help genres, Robert Pantano attempts to provide the value of motivation and personal development through unwavering philosophical honesty. Studying and pulling from ideas in Stoicism, Existentialism, Nihilism...

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. 

Inspired by Sri Atmananda (Krishna Menon), the Direct Path is a "pathless path". It simply articulates the being of you and the world as loving, open, clear awareness. If this truth is realized as your experience, then nothing need be done. The path disappears, and life is lived in sweetness and celebration! But if there are still questions or doubts, the Direct Path contains unique and powerful resources that stabilize this truth as your everyday reality. 

Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories, while also outlining the amazing pace of discoveries in neuroscience. Covering areas such as the construction of self in the brain, mechanisms of attention, the neural correlates of consciousness, and the physiology of altered states of consciousness, Susan Blackmore highlights our latest findings.

We are all living an existence that none of us chose and none of us truly understand. Naturally, everything can—at times—feel strange, chaotic, and overwhelming. The Art of Living an Absurd Existence helps us find peace with this; it instructs us on how to embrace and appreciate the mystery...

In this French bestseller, leading thinker and philosopher Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B—the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble—and reveals what they say about us.

Lovers know that love is both vast and intense. This would seem to make it resistant to philosophical or rational analysis. Yet love's vastness and intensity are what carry it into all spheres of our lives—ethical, political, spiritual, physical. As a result, considerations of what it means to...

Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence—rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should—they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm.

Postmodernism has become the buzzword of contemporary society over the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this highly engaging introduction, the mysteries of this most elusive of concepts are unraveled, casting a critical light upon the way we live now, from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct. The key postmodernist ideas are explored and challenged, as they figure in the theory, philosophy, politics, ethics, and artwork of the period, and it is shown how they have interacted within a postmodernist culture. 

Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

Martin Heidegger, considered by some to be the greatest charlatan ever to claim the title of "philosopher", by some as an apologist for Nazism, and by others as an acknowledged leader in continental philosophy, is probably the most divisive thinker of the 20th century. In the second edition of this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Michael Inwood focuses on Heidegger's most important work, Being and Time, to explore its major themes of existence in the world, inauthenticity, guilt, destiny, truth, and the nature of time.

In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book's heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.

Philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature. Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, Noë argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeated with the aesthetic. Indeed, human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art is the truest way of understanding ourselves. All this suggests that human nature is not a natural phenomenon. 

How does the brain work? How different is a human brain from other creatures' brains? Is the human brain still evolving? In this fascinating book, Michael O'Shea provides a non-technical introduction to the main issues and findings in current brain research, and gives a sense of how neuroscience addresses questions about the relationship between the brain and the mind. 

Have you ever done nondual inquiry and said to yourself, "I understand it intellectually, but I don't feel it. It's not my experience!" If so, The Direct Path, inspired by Sri Atmananda (Krishna Menon), could be for you. This book is the "missing manual" to the direct path. Direct-path inquiry is presented from beginning to end and beyond in a user-friendly way. The core of this book is a set of 40 experiments designed to help dissolve the most common nondual sticking points, from simple to subtle. 

We, Western minds, have forgotten who we are, despite having never once stopped being who we are. We've lost touch with the impersonal, Daimonic forces that give us direction and the sacrificial nature of our existence. No longer do we realize that our lives aren't, have never been, and will never be about ourselves. Consequently, we've lost our ability to sense the immanent context that couches our lives in meaning and purpose. Our alienation from our own inborn nature and role has led to a tragic schism: a divorce between essence and narrative, being and action.

Today, anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, the most diagnosed and medicated of all psychological disorders. But anxiety isn't always or only a medical condition. Indeed, many philosophers argue that anxiety is a normal, even essential, part of being human, and that coming to terms with this fact is potentially transformative. In Anxiety, Samir Chopra explores valuable insights about anxiety offered by ancient and modern philosophies. Blending memoir and philosophy, he also tells how serious anxiety has affected his own life—and how philosophy has helped him cope with it.

Are our lives meaningful, or meaningless? Is our inevitable death a bad thing? Would immortality be an improvement? Would it be better to hasten our deaths by suicide? Many people ask these big questions—and some people are plagued by them. Analytic philosophers have said relatively little about these important questions. The Human Predicament invites listeners to take a clear-eyed and unfettered view of the human condition.