Showing titles in Society

Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome's greatest politicians, speakers, and lawyers, Cicero was also reputedly one of antiquity's funniest people. After he was elected commander-in-chief and head of state, his enemies even started calling him "the stand-up Consul". How to Tell a Joke provides a lively new translation of Cicero's essential writing on humor alongside that of the later Roman orator and educator Quintilian.  

Steven Pinker's 12-part guide to thinking better 'A paean to human potential' The Telegraph Cognitive scientist Professor Steven Pinker has spent his life thinking about thinking, and now he wants us to join him. With the aid of his critical thinking toolkit, he hopes to help us make smarter...

The Sane Society is a continuation and extension of the brilliant psychiatric concepts Erich Fromm first formulated in Escape from Freedom; it is also, in many ways, an answer to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Fromm examines man’s escape into over conformity and the danger of robotism in contemporary industrial society: Modern humanity has, he maintains, been alienated from the world of their own creation. Here Fromm offers a complete and systematic exploration of his “humanistic psychoanalysis.”

Stepping back from the world has always been part of human life. We're social animals but sometimes we want to be alone. That impulse is as old as civilisation but has never been more urgent. Today, mindfulness and meditation are everywhere, and wellness tourism is booming. Whether it's a yoga break, an app or something more like boot camp, retreat is a feature of our lives now. 

A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks...

As our civilization careens towards a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. Our dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other and at odds with the natural world, has passed its expiration date. Yet another world is possible. Award-winning author Jeremy Lent investigates humanity's age-old questions - who am I? why am I? how should I live? - from a fresh perspective.

Need a rental person who does nothing? Shoji Morimoto provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. After an old boss told him that he contributed nothing and that it made no difference whether he showed up to work or not, he wondered if a person who ‘does nothing’ could...

Brought to you by Penguin. A vital exploration of gender politics from a highly influential intellectual who has been described as 'the philosopher of #MeToo' Male entitlement takes many forms. To sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, bodily autonomy, knowledge, power, even care. In this...

Il n'est pas anodin que les grandes figures sociologiques du XXe siècle, Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss ou Bourdieu, aient été formées initialement à la philosophie. D'abord timidement, puis farouchement, la sociologie, ou encore l'anthropologie et l'ethnographie, prennent au cours du siècle leur indépendance face à la paternité philosophique pour créer la nouvelle dénomination des sciences sociales.

We are stuck in 'Infinite Browsing Mode' - swiping through endless dating profiles without committing to a single partner, jumping from place to place searching for the next big thing, refusing to make any decision that might close us off from an even better choice we imagine is around the corner. This culture of restlessness and indecision, Davis argues, is causing tension in the lives of young people today. In Dedicated, Davis examines this quagmire, as well as the counterculture of committers who have made it to the other side.

Anger is all around us, from divisive social media arguments and heightened political divides to road rage and personal spats; from Black Lives Matter and climate justice movements to Trump, incels and white supremacists. When it materialises, it seems to cry out for recognition and response. It affects our bodies and can transition into violence. It can be inherited through the generations; it can manifest in criminal acts. What should we do with it, and can it ever be put to good use?

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." Published in 1886, Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil shattered the foundations of...

The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself...

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Neitzsche in just one hour. Philosophy has always been dangerous for philosophers; Friedrich Nietzsche made it dangerous for everyone. His ideas presaged a collective madness which was to ravage Europe throughout the...

Amoral, inmisericorde, despiadada y, sobre todo, muy instructiva, esta incisiva obra concentra tres mil años de historia del poder en cuarenta y ocho leyes claras y concisas. Robert Greene detalla las leyes del poder en su esencia más cruda, sintetizando el pensamiento de Maquiavelo, Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz y otros grandes teóricos y estrategas.

Critique of Judgement was published in 1790 and is divided into two parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement. Our ‘judgements of taste’, as Kant describes our aesthetic judgements, have both a personal and a universal function: personal, because we have a subjective aesthetic response to the ‘agreeable’, the ‘beautiful’, the ‘sublime’ and the ‘good’; but also there is a ‘universal’ aspect because our aesthetic response has a ’disinterested’ element. This brings under Kant’s spotlight, for example, the concept of beauty and the perception of beauty. 

The book is one of the most influential ethical treatises of all time. Written in 350 BC, it identifies happiness as life's goal. How do we achieve this goal? Not through the satisfactions that come from pleasure, wealth, or fame. According to Aristotle, the true path to happiness lies in contemplation of philosophic truth. This is the only action through which humans can exercise their distinctively unique trait: the ability to reason.

હિન્દ સ્વરાજ અથવા ભારતીય ગૃહ નિયમ એ મોહનદાસ કે.ગાંધીએ 1909 માં લખેલ પુસ્તક છે. તેમાં તે સ્વરાજ, આધુનિક સંસ્કૃતિ...

"Everything is sad," wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the "tears of things"? In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key "negative affects"—both eternal and emergent—associated with climate change, environmental destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth something so obvious that it has gone largely unnoticed: the question of how we should feel about climate change.

Our education is concerned with the accumulation of knowledge. Very few of us are capable of living a life without the influence of specialists. What is the point of going to a university, getting a degree and disappearing into the vast structure of society? Q: How shall we approach the idea of study? If you express from something already accumulated it is a deadly bore, but if you are all the time watching, not only yourself but the world, you are learning.