C. S. Peirce was an authentic American genius who developed a tough-minded pragmatism and a sweeping philosophy of evolutionary love. William James, a trained physician, carefully studied human experience, including the highest reaches of consciousness. Peirce and James established a rich, sensible, and pragmatic American approach to philosophy’s traditional problems. The World of Philosophy series is a dramatic presentation, in understandable language, of the concerns, questions, interests, and overall outlook of the world’s great philosophers and philosophical traditions. Special emphasis on clear and relevant explanations gives you a new arsenal of insights toward living a better life.

William James, Charles Peirce, and American Pragmatism Lib/E (World of Philosophy)

Biographies & Memoirs

Campbell, Prof James

Professionals & Academics

Knowledge Products

Jean Paul Getty and John Templeton are great examples of “bargain hunters” or “contrarians,” who seek to find promising stocks that are out of favor or fashion—and therefore undervalued. Slightly different are those who study cycles and waves to determine regular and (hopefully) predictable patterns of favor and disfavor in the market. The Secrets of the Great Investors series is a collection of presentations that explain, in understandable language, the strategies, tactics, and principles that have produced great wealth, and how you can improve your financial future. History's greatest investors used powerful investing philosophies to produce superior results, and you can learn from their successes and mistakes.

Bargain Hunters, Contrarians, Cycles and Waves Lib/E (Secrets of the Great Investors)

Lowe, Janet

Fisher, Ken

Socrates Lib/E (World of Philosophy)

Smith, Nicholas

Brickhouse, Professor of Philosophy Thomas C

For Kierkegaard, truth is a subjective reality which we must live, not simply something to simply consider and discuss. His self-consciousness and self-examination highlight the practical demands of existence, and he opposes the speculative thinking of philosophical idealists. Kierkegaard says much of life's meaning depends not on external conditions, but on our internal choices about relating to them. He urges us to live with purpose and emphasizes that our task is not knowing but doing. In Either/Or, he concentrates on sensual indulgence versus duty and the avant garde versus tradition. In Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard diagnoses a spiritual disease throughout society: despair. Kierkegaard argues that we are estranged from the source of our very being as we try to escape the moral responsibility of the self.

Soren Kierkegaard (Audio Classics: The Giants of Philosophy)

Education & Teaching

George Conell, Charleton Heston (Narrator)

Schools & Teaching

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche boldly announced that God is dead. There are no absolute truths, he said; the only reality is this world of life and death, conflict and change, creation and destruction. For centuries, religious ideas had given meaning to life in the western world; but with their collapse, humanity faced a grave crisis of nihilism and despair. Nietzsche proposed to replace restrictive traditional morals with the idea of humans as creative beings whose energy, strength and intelligence enable them to give purpose and meaning to their lives. He rejected democratic ideals, believing that they ignore human differences and that conflict and creative competition are essential to life’s development. His own creative work has exercised a powerful influence on the development of literature since his day.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Germany (1844-1900) (Audio Classics: The Giants of Philosophy)

SCHACHT, RICHARD

David Hume (1711-1776) represented the culmination of the British philosophy of sense-experience. Although he lived in the age of reason, Hume had profound doubts about our ability to know anything in the world with certainty. This skepticism colored his view of science and gave rise to his devastating attack on proofs of the existence of God. Hume believed that values are neither objective nor universal, but nevertheless was optimistic about human nature and our ability to achieve decency in our actions. The Giants of Philosophy is a series of dramatic presentations, in understandable language, of the concerns, questions, interests, and overall world view of history’s greatest philosophers. Special emphasis on clear and relevant explanations gives you a new arsenal of insights toward living a better life.

David Hume: Knowledge Products (Giants of Philosophy) (Audio Classics: The Giants of Philosophy)

Nicholas Capaldi, Charleton Heston (Narrator)

Reference

A Portuguese Jew living in Holland, Spinoza was excommunicated because of the unorthodox view he took of God. Spinoza wrote in the rationalist style of a geometric proof to develop his idea of God as the infinite, indwelling cause of all things, a unified causal system that is virtually synonymous with nature. In this system, there is no free will, for all things are necessary and inevitable, and all objects, including humans, are part of God's active self-expression. Our minds can participate in the eternity of God by focusing on natural laws and the way all things follow from God or nature. Human fulfillment is possible, he believed, only by rejecting our finite, flawed selves and identifying with the eternal within us. Spinoza believed that by doing so we can love God with an immediate devotion without asking anything in return.

Baruch Spinoza: The Netherlands (1632-1677) (Audio Classics: The Giants of Philosophy)

Cook, Thomas

Plato was the first great philosopher of the West to organize and record the issues and questions that define philosophy. A student of Socrates, Plato preserved the teachings of his mentor in many famous "dialogues" that deal with classic issues like law and justice, perception and reality, death and the soul, mind and body, reason and passion, and the nature of love. The most famous of all Platonic doctrines is the "theory of forms," the idea that there are changeless, eternal forms on which existing things are modeled. To Plato, human beings consist of an immortal soul together with a body that keeps it in the twilight world of changing, perishing things. The soul has a love for the eternal, the Good, which gives life stability and meaning. The ideal government, Plato believed, must reflect the structure of the human soul, guarded by those with a sure knowledge of the good.

Plato: Greece (CA. 428-348 B.C.) (Audio Classics: The Giants of Philosophy)

Lang, Prof Berel

Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, is perhaps the best known advocate of existentialism. In this view, no external authority gives life meaning: mankind is radically free and responsible. In every moment we choose ourselves, with no assurance that we have a continuing identity or power. We set up determinisms to ease our minds, but in the face of the finality of death, only through our present consciousness do we establish our own authentic existence. 
Sartre's existentialism faces the evil in human existence and sees that humans are responsible for it. He doubts mankind can make moral progress, yet he embraces the possibilities for human life and believes we can attain dignity by our own efforts. Sartre’s ideas had a profound influence on ordinary people after World War II and continue to contribute to the development of thought in Europe and America today.

Jean-Paul Sartre: France (1905-1980) (Audio Classics: The Giants of Philosophy)

Compton, John

Immanuel Kant's "transcendental" philosophy transcends the question of "what" we know to ask "how" we know it. Before Kant, philosophers had debated for centuries whether knowledge is derived from experience or reason. Kant says that both views are partly right and partly wrong, that they share the same error; both believe that the mind and the world, reason and nature, are separated from one another. Kant says that our reason organizes our sense perception to produce knowledge. The mind is a creative force for understanding the manifold of new, unconceptualized sense impressions with which the world bombards us. Kant says we cannot know the "thing-in-itself"—the object apart from our conceptualization of it. His influence on subsequent thought has been monumental; all of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy stands in his debt.

Immanuel Kant (Giants of Philosophy) (Library Edition)

Professor A. J. Mandt

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Knowledge Products publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Knowledge Products