It is not difficult to imagine the sense of panic when faced with the sheer administrative hassle of the end of life, despite the fact that it will come to us all sooner or later. As we get older, all that needs to be done can feel alarmingly daunting. The good news is that Sir Peter Thornton KC has rationally organised and prioritised everything we need to know, and presents it in a simple, straightforward way that encourages us to complete all the necessary tasks.With chapters on...

Francesco Petrarch's Canzoniere (translated in English as 'Scattered Rhymes') is a collection of 14th century poems famed for their deep exploration of love, grief, spirituality and nature. Written over the course of forty years (approximately between 1328-1368), this collection includes 317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestine, 4 madrigals and 7 ballate.These Scattered Rhymes almost always return to Laura, a women who Petrarch loves deeply, whom he first saw on...

Yorkshire’s hilarious adventurer-pensioners wreak havoc in twelve classic TV episodes from the world’s longest-running sitcom, presented as audio soundtracks with linking narration by Peter Sallis.The story centres on a trio of older men in the Yorkshire town of Holmfirth whose attempts to inject adventure into retirement routinely descend into farce. Across its long run, the central trio evolved, but the combinations of Compo (Bill Owen), Clegg (

From bookshelves overflowing with self-help books to scholarly treatises on neurobiology to late-night infomercials that promise to make you happier, healthier, and smarter with the acquisition of just a few simple practices, the discourse of habit is a staple of contemporary culture high and low. Discussion of habit, however, tends to neglect the most fundamental questions: What is habit? Habits, we say, are hard to break. But what does it mean to break a habit? Where and how do habits ta...

In "The Essence of Hume's Philosophy," David Hume presents an intricate tapestry of empiricism and skepticism that challenges the foundations of knowledge and belief. Written in Hume's trademark prose'—accessible yet profound'—the work delves into the relationships between human perception, experience, and the noumenal world. It explores key themes such as causation, the limits of reason, and the nature of the self, all while engaging with the metaphysics and epistemological currents of th...

One of philosophy's most widely read books and the best introduction to Hume's other works, this 1748 treatise offers an accessible account of the author's provocative notions about the limitations of the mind. Topics include the logical coexistence of free will and determinism and the deficiencies of religious doctrine.

'What is real?' has been one of the key questions of philosophy since its beginning in antiquity. It is a question that, due to such films as The Matrix, has also made its way into popular culture. But it is not just a question philosophers ask. It is also asked by scientists when they investigate whether the fundamental constituents of matter are actually 'out there' or just a mere abstraction from a successful theory. Cognitive scientists ask it when trying to find out which set...

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem (refuting a global skepticism regarding the objectivity of experience), it addresses a new problem (the role of a priori concepts or categories stemming from the nature of the understanding in grounding this objectivity), and he t...

Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Riddles, paradoxes, conundrums--for millennia the human mind has found such knotty logical problems both perplexing and irresistible. Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked wh...

This book seeks to set humanism on a new footing. No longer Enlightenment intuitions of an autonomous, disconnected, and rational self but a philosophy oriented towards the relationship between self and other. With this, it seeks to provide an escape from present egotism and narcissism in society. It discusses altruism as well as its limitations.

The central idea developed by the contributions to this book is that the split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology - perhaps the most impor tant schism in twentieth-century philosophy - resulted from a radicalization of reciprocal partialities. Both schools of thought share, in fact, the same cultural background and their same initial stimulus in the thought of Franz Brentano. And one outcome of the subsequent rift between them was the oblivion into which the figure and thought o...