“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”  — Marcus Aurelius We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn’t be this way. There is a formula for success that’s been followed by the icons of history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations,... more...

Director and producer Tim Burton impresses audiences with stunning visuals, sinister fantasy worlds, and characters whose personalities are strange and yet familiar. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dalí, Washington Irving, and Dr. Seuss, Burton's creations frequently elicit both alarm and wonder. Whether crafting an offbeat animated feature, a box-office hit, a collection of short fiction, or an... more...

More than half a century after the defeat of Nazism and fascism, the far right is again challenging the liberal order of Western democracies. Radical movements are feeding on anxiety about economic globalization, affirmative action, and third-world immigration, flashpoint issues to many traditional groups in multicultural societies. A curious mixture of Aristocratic paganism, anti-Semitic demonology, Eastern philosophies and the occult... more...

Some things are funny--jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed--but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem... more...

This unique and comprehensive book reveals the Taoist secret of circulating Chi, the generative life force, through the acupuncture meridians of the body. Illustrated with detailed diagrams that aid the development of a powerful energetic flow, for psychological and spiritual health and balance.

Thinking from A-Z is a lively and incisive introduction to critical thinking by the bestselling author of Philosophy: The Basics. The alphabetically-arranged entries cover a wide range of reasoning techniques, fallacies, rhetorical tricks and psychological obstacles to clear thought. The new entries in this updated edition include: catch-22, contraries, counterexample, domino effect, exception that proves the rule, Ockham's Razor, paradox, Socratic... more...

The Earth Charter is a declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society, with ecological integrity as a major theme. This book provides a series of analyses of ecological integrity as it relates to the Earth Charter, social movements and international law for human rights. It is shown how the Earth Charter project began as a United Nations initiative, but it was carried... more...

Few phenomena are as formative of our experience of the visual world as displays of suffering. But what does it mean to have an ethical experience of disturbing or traumatizing images? What kind of ethical proposition does an image of pain mobilize? How may the spectator learn from and make use of the painful image as a source of ethical reflection? Engaging with a wide range of visual media--from painting, theatre, and sculpture, to photography,... more...

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Paradoxes are arguments that lead from apparently true premises, via apparently uncontroversial reasoning, to a false or even contradictory conclusion. Paradoxes threaten our basic understanding of central concepts such as space, time, motion, infinity, truth, knowledge, and belief. In this volume Roy T Cook provides a sophisticated, yet accessible and entertaining, introduction to the study of paradoxes, one that includes a detailed examination of a... more...