Product Description: What happened to the European mind between 1605, when an audience watching Macbeth at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration of the natural order that ghosts could burst from the ground, and 1649, when a large crowd, perhaps including some who had seen Macbeth forty-four years earlier, could stand and watch the execution of a king? Or consider the difference between a magus casting a star chart and the day in 1639, when Jonathan Horrock and William Crabtree watched the transit of Venus across the face of the sun from their attic, successfully testing its course against Kepler's Tables of Planetary Motion, in a classic case of confirming a scientific theory by empirical testing...read more

Product Description: Webster's paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running English-to-Manx thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of King Henry VI, Part II by William Shakespeare was edited for three audiences...read more

A central bond, a cherished value, a unique relationship, a profound human need, a type of love. What is the nature of friendship, and what is its significance in our lives? How has friendship changed since the ancient Greeks began to analyze it, and how has modern technology altered its very definition? In this fascinating exploration of friendship through the ages, one of the most thought-provoking philosophers of our time tracks historical ideas of friendship, gathers a diversity of friendship stories from the annals of myth and literature, and provides unexpected insights into our friends, ourselves, and the role of friendships in an ethical life.   A. C. Grayling roves the rich traditions of friendship in literature, culture, art, and philosophy, bringing into his discussion familiar pairs as well as unfamiliar—Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Huck Finn and Jim. Grayling lays out major philosophical interpretations of friendship, then offers his own take, drawing on personal experiences and an acute awareness of vast cultural shifts that have occurred. With penetrating insight he addresses internet-based friendship, contemporary mixed gender friendships, how friendships may supersede family relationships, one’s duty within friendship, the idea of friendship to humanity, and many other topics of universal interest.

Product Description: Is it ever right to target civilians in a time of war? Or do the ends sometimes justify the means? The twentieth century - the age of 'total war' - marked the first time that civilian populations came to be seen as legitimate military targets...read more

Product Description: In Towards the Light, A.C. Grayling tells the story of the long and difficult battle for freedom in the West, from the Reformation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the battle for the vote to the struggle for the right to freedom of conscience...read more

Product Description: Examining all the arguments for and against religion and religious belief--across the range of reasons and motives that people have for being religious and how they stand up to scrutiny--The God Argument is a landmark book in the ongoing debate about the place of religion and secularism in our world...read more

Product Description: Contemporary education is held captive by an obsession with assessment. The culture of ‘teaching-to-the-test' and ‘spoon-feeding' has distorted the purpose of teaching and destroyed the joy of free enquiry. This book offers practical advice on how to use philosophy as the cornerstone of a new approach to teaching and learning, with the central aim of developing students' capacity for deeper, freer thought...read more

Few, if any, thinkers and writers today would have the imagination, the breadth of knowledge, and the literary skill to conceive of a powerful secular alternative to the Bible. But that is exactly what A. C. Grayling has done, creating a nonreligious Bible drawn from the wealth of secular literature and philosophy in both Western and Eastern traditions, using the same techniques of editing, redaction, and adaptation that produced the holy books of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions. The Good Book consciously takes its design and presentation from the Bible, in the beauty of its language and its arrangement into short chapters and verses, offering to the nonreligious seeker all the wisdom, insight, solace, inspiration, and perspective of various secular humanist traditions. Organized in twelve main sections, The Good Book opens with meditations on the origin and progress of the world and human life in it, then devotes attention to the question of how life should be lived, how we relate to one another, and how vicissitudes are to be faced and joys appreciated. Inspired by the work of Herodotus and Lucretius, Confucius and Mencius, Seneca and Cicero, Montaigne, Bacon, and so many others, The Good Book will fulfill its audacious purpose in every way.

Ideas can, and do, change the world. Just as Marxism, existentialism, and feminism shaped the last century, so fundamentalism, globalization, and bioethics are transforming our world now. In Ideas that Matter, renowned philosopher A.C. Grayling provides a personal dictionary of the ideas that will shape our world in the decades to come. With customary wit, fire, and erudition, Grayling ranges across the gamut of essential theories, movements, and philosophies—from animal rights to neurophilosophy to war crimes—provoking and elucidating throughout.Ideas are the cogs that drive history, and in explaining the most complex and influential ones in laymen's terms, Ideas that Matter will help every engaged citizen better understand it.

Product Description: Few, if any, thinkers and writers today would have the imagination, the breadth of knowledge, and the literary skill to conceive of a powerful secular alternative to the Bible. But that is exactly what A. C. Grayling has done, creating a nonreligious Bible drawn from the wealth of secular literature and philosophy in both Western and Eastern traditions, using the same techniques of editing, redaction, and adaptation that produced the holy books of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions...read more

Product Description: The Good Book is a book of insight, inspiration, wisdom, solace and commentary on the human condition drawn from the great humanist traditions of thought and literature of the world. Its princi-pal concern is how life - the good life - should be lived...read more

Product Description: In his acclaimed columns in the London Times and Prospect, A. C. Grayling often responds to provocative questions posed by editors and readers. These questions serve as the basis for the essays in Thinking of Answers, among them searching examinations of the following: - Are human beings especially prone to self-deception? - If beauty existed only in the eye of the beholder, would that make it an unimportant quality? - Are human rights political? - Can ethics be derived from evolution by natural selection? - If both sides in a conflict passionately believe theirs is a just cause, does this mean the idea of justice is empty? - Does being happy make us good? And does being good make us happy? As in his previous books on philosophy for the general public, including Meditations for the Humanist and Life, Sex and Ideas, rather than presenting a set of categorical answers, Grayling offers suggestions for how to think about every aspect of the question at hand and arrive at one's own conclusion...read more

Product Description: Scepticism as a philosophical term is as old as the Greeks but has more recently been advanced by Montaigne, Descartes and Hume. To these, what little we know that seems certain is based on observation and habit as opposed to any logical or scientific necessity...read more

Product Description: A.C. Grayling is one of Britain's leading thinkers, highly regarded as a public philosopher of distinction as well as in academic circles for his scholarly work on Descartes, Berkeley, Russell and Wittgenstein, his writings on the problem of scepticism, his widely used Introduction to Philosophical Logic and (as editor) his two volume Philosophy and (as chief editor) the Continuum Encyclopaedia of British Philosophy...read more

Product Description: In a series of bold, unsparing polemics, A C Grayling exposes the dangerous unreason he sees at the heart of religious faith and highlights the urgent need we have to reject it in all its forms, without compromise. In its place he argues for a set of values based on reason, reflection, and sympathy, taking his cue from the great ethical tradition of Western philosophy...read more

Product Description: Grace is a professor of natural science and a ruthless atheist; her son Tom is a barrister who abandons the law to pursue his faith, causing mother and son to collide disastrously. Grace unfolds into a brilliantly considered exploration of the complex issues of faith and religion, and a devastatingly powerful family drama...read more

Product Description: In the early years of the twenty-first century, ideas first proposed over two hundred years ago could not be more compelling. The Enlightenment of the seventeenth century in response to upheaval and uncertainty laid the foundation stone for modern society...read more

Product Description: 'Grief and loneliness, depression, despair and failure - those things¿ are the common human lot at least at times in all our lives'. Yet it is philosophy which, while not providing an answer to these problems, can enable us to prepare for them, and create strategies with which to deal with them...read more

Product Description: Duty or Pleasure? This was the legendary choice which faced Hercules and which pre-eminent philosopher A.C. Grayling uses as the starting point of this masterful book.He shows us how much more people can understand about themselves and their world by reflecting on today's moral challenges...read more