Quim aiguafreda (189 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Speculative realism begins with a simple, offensive idea: reality does not exist merely as something for humans to experience, interpret, use, fear, admire, or turn into a conference panel. For centuries, philosophy has often treated the human-world relationship as the main event. What can we know How do things appear to us How does the mind shape experience All very respectable questions, naturally. But what about the world that existed before humans arrived What about objects that exceed our uses of them What about fossils, stars, bacteria, machines, oceans, algorithms, climate systems, and all the other nonhuman things that continue behaving as if they were not waiting for our permission This book introduces speculative realism in clear, accessible language, without requiring the reader to have spent ten years trapped in a philosophy department. It explains the central ideas behind Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant, along with related movements such as object-oriented ontology, new materialism, actor-network theory, and ecological thought. Along the way, it discusses correlationism, the thing-in-itself, ancestrality, contingency, withdrawn objects, vicarious causation, nihilism, scientific realism, extinction, nature, technology, and the difference between what is real and what is merely known. It also spends a suspicious amount of time worrying about tables, because philosophy has never met furniture it could leave alone. Written for curious readers rather than specialists, Speculative Realism Made Simple: Objects, Reality, and the World Outside Us is a dry, sharp, and readable guide to one of the most provocative turns in contemporary philosophy.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What does it mean to be free when no one has handed you a script, a guarantee, or a reliable instruction manual for becoming a person Existentialism Unpacked: A Simple Guide to Freedom, Anxiety, and Meaning is a clear, sharp, and engaging exploration of one of the most urgent traditions in modern thought. It explains existentialism without drowning it in academic fog or pretending that anxiety becomes charming once translated into French. Through the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and others, this book explores the central existential questions: What does freedom actually mean Why does choice produce anxiety Can life have meaning without certainty What is authenticity, and why is it so often confused with self-indulgence How do other people shape, reveal, and sometimes trap us What happens when work, technology, consumer culture, and personal identity become substitutes for a life genuinely lived Rather than treating existentialism as a gloomy museum of old European despair, this book shows why its questions remain painfully modern. Career burnout, social media performance, algorithmic identity, consumer selfhood, political oppression, bad faith, loneliness, love, death, responsibility, and the search for meaning all belong to the same human problem: we are free enough to be responsible, limited enough to suffer, and self-aware enough to make the whole arrangement uncomfortable.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Phenomenology Starts with Experience is an accessible introduction to phenomenology: the philosophical tradition that asks what experience is like before we bury it under theories, diagrams, and impressive vocabulary. The book looks at the strange machinery of ordinary life: why the world feels obvious until it suddenly does not, why other people are never just objects with opinions, why time can crawl or collapse, why moods make reality look guilty, why being seen changes who you are to yourself, and why 'just explain it scientifically' is not always the mic drop people think it is. Along the way, the book introduces thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone de Beauvoir, Max Scheler, William James, Paul Ricoeur, and contemporary phenomenologists working on illness, psychiatry, technology, race, gender, politics, and cognitive science. Written for readers without a background in philosophy, it keeps the ideas clear without pretending the subject is simpler than it is. Phenomenology, after all, begins with the obvious-and then has the bad manners to show that the obvious was never obvious at all.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What if misanthropy is not merely a bad mood, but a philosophical judgment Misanthropy and Pessimism explores the thinkers who questioned humanity's flattering self-image. From Plato, Diogenes, Hobbes, and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Arendt, it examines recurring doubts about reason, morality, conformity, cruelty, vanity, power, and progress. The book also looks beyond individual philosophers to the habits of the species itself: tribalism, hypocrisy, self-deception, bureaucracy, war, consumerism, the treatment of animals, and environmental destruction. Again and again, human beings prove capable of recognizing their own failures while remaining impressively committed to repeating them. Is humanity genuinely improving Are our worst traits exceptional, or simply ordinary traits given the right conditions Can pessimism be intellectually serious without collapsing into despair A philosophical examination of humanity's darker tendencies-and of the long tradition of thinkers who suspected that our opinion of ourselves may be somewhat generous. …

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - History looks straightforward until someone asks what it means. Why do empires rise and fall Are revolutions caused by ideas, material conditions, institutions, individual decisions-or bad weather arriving at an inconvenient moment Does history move toward progress, repeat itself, or simply acquire a direction when historians begin arranging the evidence History Is a Philosophical Problem explores the questions hidden inside every account of the past. Moving from providence, progress, and historical materialism to causation, contingency, narrative, memory, colonialism, gender, race, and environmental history, it introduces the thinkers and debates that have shaped how history is understood. Drawing on thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Benjamin, Popper, Foucault, Hayden White, Edward Said, and Reinhart Koselleck, as well as historians including Fernand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Carlo Ginzburg, Theda Skocpol, and Natalie Zemon Davis, the book uses concrete historical examples to explore how historians establish facts, explain actions, identify causes, shape narratives, recover excluded voices, and judge people who lived under very different conditions. It also examines the major objections raised against these approaches. The past may be finished. The argument about what it means is not.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Posthumanism and the More-Than-Human World is a sharp, accessible, and intellectually serious guide to one of the most important shifts in contemporary thought: the move away from the fantasy of the human as sovereign master of reality. It explains why the old image of 'Man' as rational, independent, superior, and separate from the world no longer survives contact with biology, ecology, technology, disability theory, animal studies, feminist thought, climate science, capitalism, and everyday life. This is not a book about worshipping robots, abandoning human dignity, or pretending that rivers have little legal briefcases. It is about understanding the human more honestly. Humans are embodied, dependent, technological, ecological, vulnerable, and powerful in ways they rarely control as neatly as they imagine. We live with animals, microbes, tools, algorithms, plants, infrastructures, weather systems, supply chains, histories, and forms of matter that do not politely remain passive scenery. With dry wit and clear explanations, the book introduces major figures and ideas from Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Indigenous thinkers, disability theorists, environmental scholars, and many others. Along the way, it asks what agency means when action is distributed, what responsibility means when no one is innocent, and what ethics looks like when humans are no longer alone at the center of the picture. Posthumanism is often made unnecessarily obscure. This book does not do that. It treats difficult ideas seriously without pretending that seriousness requires fog. It is written for readers who want philosophy that can survive contact with supermarkets, smartphones, pets, bills, climate anxiety, and the ordinary indignities of having a body.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The Philosophy of Digital Identity is a sharp, accessible, and darkly funny exploration of selfhood in the age of social media. It examines how online life transforms the ordinary human need to be seen into something measurable, searchable, editable, and endlessly performable. Profiles become tiny museums. Likes become emotional verdicts. Authenticity becomes a style. Privacy becomes suspicious. The body becomes adjustable. Even grief, friendship, virtue, and happiness acquire interfaces. Drawing on thinkers such as Socrates, Hegel, Goffman, Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others, this book explains major philosophical ideas in plain language and shows how they appear in everyday digital life. No prior knowledge of philosophy is required. Only a working familiarity with notifications, awkward self-presentation, and the faint suspicion that the internet has made being a person unnecessarily administrative. This is not a call to abandon social media and live in a forest, although the forest has made a strong case. Instead, it asks how we might live more reflectively online: how to seek recognition without becoming dependent on metrics, how to appear without becoming only appearance, how to share without surrendering privacy, and how to remain more than what can be seen.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Artificial intelligence has become very good at trespassing. It writes, argues, draws, codes, explains, advises, imitates, and occasionally lies with the calm confidence of a system that cannot feel embarrassment. Perhaps this is only performance. Perhaps performance is exactly where the problem begins. When a system produces the signs of intelligence, creativity, and self-awareness, we are forced to ask whether those signs are empty - or whether our old tests were never as secure as we thought. For centuries, humans have defended their special status by pointing to language, reason, creativity, morality, selfhood, and consciousness. Then machines arrived and began crossing some of those borders cheaply, quickly, and at scale. The result is not simply a technological revolution. It is a philosophical disturbance. The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: Mind, Meaning, and the End of Human Exceptionalism asks what AI reveals about the mind, and what it exposes about the stories humans tell when they try to protect the category 'human.' It brings today's AI into contact with Turing's imitation game, Searle's Chinese Room, functionalism, biological naturalism, the hard problem of consciousness, embodied cognition, predictive processing, the other minds problem, machine rights, alignment, bias, and the spread of AI into human work and culture. Can a machine understand, or only imitate understanding Is consciousness tied to biology, or could it arise in another kind of system If an AI speaks like a person, creates like an artist, reasons like an assistant, and comforts like a friend, what exactly is missing - and how would we know This book follows the question without pretending it has already been settled. The hardest issue is no longer what machines can do, but whether anything is happening inside.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What if the self does not exist What if everything is predetermined What if reality is one, many, material, mental-or empty of any fixed essence Indian philosophers have been arguing about such questions for more than two thousand years, usually with great sophistication and remarkably little agreement. The World of Indian Philosophy: Traditions, Arguments, and Visions of Reality is an accessible journey through Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka materialism, Nyaya logic, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, Vedanta, and other major traditions. Along the way, you will meet the Buddha, Nagarjuna, Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Dignaga, Dharmakirti, Gangesha, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Tagore, Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan, Daya Krishna, B. K. Matilal, and others-thinkers who disagreed about the self, God, matter, consciousness, language, knowledge, freedom, and just about everything else worth disagreeing about. Clear, lively, and irreverent, this book presents Indian philosophy not as one serene mystical worldview, but as a vast and often ruthless intellectual argument about reality, suffering, morality, liberation, and how anyone can possibly know that they are right.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What happens when humanity stops accepting its limitations as permanent Transhumanism and the New Human explores the radical philosophy of redesigning the human condition. From genetic engineering, artificial organs, neural implants, and cognitive enhancement to life extension, mind uploading, artificial intelligence, and posthuman identity, this book examines the technologies that may transform not only what human beings can do, but what it means to be human at all. Bringing together major thinkers, landmark experiments, real medical breakthroughs, and unsettling ethical questions, the book investigates the promises and contradictions of human enhancement. Can intelligence be upgraded without improving wisdom Does changing personality liberate the self or replace it Would radical longevity enrich life or make every decision indefinitely postponable If a digital copy remembers your childhood, owns your memories, and insists it is you, should anyone believe it.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Making Sense of Metaphysics: A Simple Guide to Reality is a clear, witty introduction to one of philosophy's oldest and most unreasonable habits: refusing to leave reality alone.What is a thing What makes a person the same over time Do causes really cause anything Is the world made of matter, mind, structure, information, or something even less convenient Why do philosophers keep inventing systems that promise to explain everything, and why do those systems keep collapsing, mutating, or coming back under better branding This book guides the reader through the main questions, arguments, and traditions of metaphysics in plain English, without pretending the subject is simpler than it is. It explains the central concepts, the major schools, and the most important thinkers from the ancient world to contemporary debates about consciousness, time, possibility, science, AI, and digital identity. Along the way it compares rival views, shows what each gets right and wrong, and keeps a healthy eye on philosophy's recurring talent for both insight and overreach.For readers interested in philosophy, ideas, reality, and the strange durability of questions that never quite go away.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What are space and time-and why do they become harder to understand the more carefully we think about them Space and Time Beyond Common Sense traces the changing ideas of space and time from classical philosophy to modern physics. Are space and time real things, or only relations between objects and events Newton made them absolute. Leibniz argued that such invisible metaphysical furniture was unnecessary. Kant transformed the debate by asking whether space and time belong to reality itself or to the way we experience it. Then Einstein removed universal simultaneity, joined space and time into spacetime, and made geometry part of the machinery of gravity. From there, the questions become stranger. Is there really a universal present Do past and future exist just as fully as the present Why does time seem to flow in one direction What happens to time near a black hole What does it mean for the universe itself to expand And could spacetime turn out not to be fundamental at all Drawing on philosophy, relativity, thermodynamics, cosmology, and quantum gravity, the book explores the arguments and discoveries that overturned ordinary ideas about where and when anything exists. Space is where things are. Time is when things happen. Simple enough. Unfortunately, both philosophy and physics kept asking follow-up questions.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What happens when 'Native American philosophy' is treated as philosophy rather than as mythology, spirituality, folklore, or a decorative quotation about living in harmony with nature Native American Philosophical Traditions: Thought, Life, and Belonging in the Indigenous World examines the ideas, arguments, and political realities found across the diverse intellectual traditions of Indigenous North America. It rejects the extremely convenient notion that hundreds of nations share one timeless worldview involving circles, balance, and sunsets. Instead, this book explores how particular Indigenous traditions have approached questions of reality, knowledge, personhood, land, time, kinship, law, sovereignty, science, technology, death, responsibility, and the good life. It considers stories as forms of reasoning, places as sources of memory and authority, nonhuman beings as possible persons, and nations as political communities rather than cultural interest groups. Along the way, it confronts familiar myths: the noble ecological saint, the primitive enemy of progress, the genetically certified Indian, the vanished traditional person, and the universally peaceful community that somehow never had an argument. Drawing on specific nations, historical cases, legal disputes, and thinkers such as Vine Deloria Jr., Viola F. Cordova, Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kyle Powys Whyte, and many others, the book presents Indigenous philosophy as living, plural, contested, and intellectually demanding.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What happens when inherited authority is no longer allowed to answer, 'Because it always has' The Enlightenment Mind explores the ideas that transformed debates about knowledge, religion, government, freedom, morality, and human nature. From Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza to Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Smith, Wollstonecraft, Condorcet, and Kant, the book follows the arguments that challenged tradition and helped redefine the modern world. It examines skepticism, natural rights, religious toleration, the social contract, separation of powers, moral sentiment, commerce, progress, education, and public reason. It also confronts the Enlightenment's less comfortable contradictions: thinkers defended liberty while living amid slavery, empire, hierarchy, and the political exclusion of women. Universal principles were announced with confidence, then applied with remarkable selectivity. The Enlightenment Mind is a story of philosophers demanding reasons from authority-and discovering that once questioning begins, it becomes very difficult to control. …

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Technology is supposed to solve problems. It also has an inconvenient habit of changing the people, institutions, habits, and environments around those problems. A clock does more than tell time. A factory does more than make goods. A car does more than move its driver. A smartphone is not merely a phone with delusions of grandeur. Technologies shape what societies consider normal, efficient, possible, desirable, and increasingly unavoidable. Philosophy of Technology explores the ideas of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Bruno Latour, Langdon Winner, Neil Postman, and Shoshana Zuboff through the technologies and systems of everyday life. The book examines industrial machinery, infrastructure, bureaucracy, standards, measurement, surveillance, platforms, algorithms, automation, and artificial intelligence. Along the way, it asks why labor-saving devices so often create more work, how efficiency became a social ideal, why technological systems become difficult to escape, how design quietly distributes power, and what happens when human judgment is converted into metrics, profiles, and automated decisions.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Modern society promises freedom, choice, efficiency, and connection. It also delivers insecure work, unaffordable housing, constant surveillance, algorithmic management, political spectacle, ecological crisis, and the cheerful suggestion that any resulting distress can be solved through better personal habits. Critical Theory and the Machinery of Society explains how thinkers from Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial thought help us understand the systems shaping everyday life. Complex ideas such as ideology, alienation, hegemony, instrumental reason, the culture industry, biopolitics, and governmentality are explained in clear language and applied to work, debt, media, platforms, climate breakdown, and artificial intelligence. This is not a reverent tour of philosophical monuments. It is an accessible guide to the machinery behind modern society: who owns it, who maintains it, how it secures consent, and why arrangements created by human beings so often present themselves as natural laws. The machinery is not hidden. It is in the workplace dashboard, the rental payment, the recommendation feed, the credit score, the border system, and the artificial intelligence model explaining that no human being was responsible for the decision. Understanding it is the first step toward deciding who should control it.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What if the only thing you can know with certainty is that your own experience exists Solipsism Taken Seriously explores one of philosophy's most stubborn problems: how can we justify belief in a world beyond the mind The book follows the skeptical challenge from Descartes' dreams and evil demon to Berkeley's idealism, Hume's doubts about causation, Kant's attempt to rescue objective knowledge, Wittgenstein's attack on radical doubt, and modern thought experiments involving brains in vats, simulations, and philosophical zombies. Along the way, it asks deceptively simple questions. Can perception prove the existence of physical objects How do we know other people are conscious rather than merely behaving as though they are Does the possibility of being wrong undermine knowledge And if solipsism cannot be conclusively disproved, does that make it a serious account of reality-or simply an extraordinarily difficult idea to get rid of Rather than treating solipsism as a bizarre philosophical curiosity, Solipsism Taken Seriously uses it as a way to examine the foundations of knowledge itself: certainty, evidence, perception, inference, other minds, and the limits of what can reasonably be proved.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Why do clothes, accents, films, food, celebrities, memes, and monuments become arguments about class, identity, morality, and power Cultural Studies and Modern Society explores how everyday culture shapes what people see as normal, valuable, respectable, authentic, desirable, or threatening. Drawing on thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Benedict Anderson, Edward Said, and Theodor Adorno, the book examines representation, ideology, discourse, class, gender, race, nation, sexuality, popular culture, advertising, celebrity, consumption, subcultures, digital platforms, algorithms, and culture wars. From luxury brands and television to beauty standards, national symbols, recommendation feeds, and online outrage, the book shows how ordinary cultural forms become loaded with social meaning-and why people so often disagree about what those meanings are. It also explores how cultural authority is changing: from critics, broadcasters, publishers, and institutions to influencers, platforms, recommendation systems, metrics, and viral attention. In a world where visibility can be calculated, amplified, suppressed, or monetized, even the question of what becomes culturally important has acquired an algorithmic middleman. Culture is everywhere. Unfortunately, so is interpretation. …

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What if life has no cosmic purpose, morality has no eternal foundation, and the universe is completely indifferent to your plans Welcome to nihilism. Nihilism and the Problem of Meaning is an accessible, irreverent introduction to one of philosophy's most uncomfortable problems: if there is no ultimate foundation beneath our values, beliefs, and purposes, what follows From Nietzsche's 'death of God' to Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Hume, Kant, and Marx, the book explores nihilism, absurdism, freedom, morality, skepticism, relativism, and the modern struggle to find meaning through work, identity, achievement, consumption, and self-improvement. Because 'nothing matters' sounds simple enough-until you try to work out what it actually means.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Why are we so exhausted when we have more freedom, convenience, and productivity tools than ever before Burnout in the Age of Productivity explores burnout not simply as a problem of overwork or poor time management, but as a philosophical problem shaped by modern ideas about work, freedom, ambition, success, and identity. We are encouraged to treat life as an endless project of improvement. Careers must advance. Talents must be developed. Hobbies should become skills. Rest should improve performance. Even sleep now comes with a score. Drawing on thinkers including Aristotle, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Sartre, Camus, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, René Girard, Charles Taylor, and Byung-Chul Han, the book examines how work became tied to identity, why freedom can create anxiety, how self-improvement turns into self-surveillance, and why modern life so often produces the feeling of being permanently behind. Along the way, it looks at alienation, choice, status, attention, technology, leisure, meaning, and the curious belief that every unused hour represents a minor administrative failure. This is a book about what burnout reveals-not only about work, but about the kind of life modern society has taught us to pursue.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - German Idealism was one of philosophy's most audacious attempts to explain how reason, freedom, nature, morality, history, and reality could belong to a single intelligible world. It began with Kant's effort to establish the limits of human knowledge and ended with Hegel constructing a system in which even those limits had acquired a history. German Idealism from Kant to Hegel follows the argument from the intellectual crises that made Idealism possible through Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, while also examining figures such as Spinoza, Rousseau, Jacobi, Reinhold, Schulze, Maimon, Hölderlin, and the early Romantics. The book explains the central ideas behind transcendental idealism, autonomy, the thing-in-itself, self-consciousness, recognition, the Absolute, Naturphilosophie, dialectic, alienation, Spirit, social freedom, and the philosophy of history. Along the way, it shows why each new system arose from problems left by the previous one. Kant drew boundaries around reason; Fichte decided some of them were unnecessary; Schelling objected that nature had been reduced to scenery; Hegel concluded that the real problem was treating the boundaries as fixed in the first place. The story does not end with Hegel. The book follows German Idealism into Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, Critical Theory, hermeneutics, and contemporary theories of recognition and social freedom. It also confronts the tradition's persistent difficulties: the ambitions of speculative reason, the danger of turning contingent history into necessary progress, Hegel's Eurocentrism, the political risks of reconciliation, and the uncomfortable possibility that the Absolute may preserve individuality mainly by explaining why it was never as independent as it thought. This is the story of how a generation of thinkers tried to reconcile freedom with necessity, thought with reality, and the individual with history-and, having found those tasks insufficiently difficult, attempted to explain why all three conflicts belonged to one system.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Science is supposed to be the reliable one. It observes the facts, tests its theories, corrects its errors, and moves steadily toward the truth-at least according to the version found in school textbooks, institutional press releases, and speeches delivered shortly before the evidence becomes complicated. The Restless Philosophy of Science explores what really happens when theories change, experiments fail, experts disagree, and evidence supports more than one explanation. Through famous disputes and scientific revolutions-from phlogiston and planetary motion to evolution, medical evidence, continental drift, replication, and manufactured doubt-the book examines how scientific knowledge is actually made. Why do scientists preserve theories that appear to have been falsified Can observations ever be neutral What makes one explanation better than another Is scientific consensus trustworthy Do social values corrupt objectivity, or help make it possible And if successful theories have repeatedly been replaced, why should we believe the theories accepted today Written with clarity and without unnecessary ceremony, the book introduces the central ideas of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and other major thinkers without turning the discussion into a procession of important surnames. Abstract questions are grounded in historical cases, contemporary controversies, and the inconvenient details that simplified accounts of 'the scientific method' tend to misplace.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Does God explain reality-or simply give the mystery a respectable name Is God a Good Explanation examines the strongest arguments for and against belief in God in clear, accessible language, without reducing difficult questions to slogans, sermons, or philosophical fog. The book explores why the universe exists, whether it had a beginning, whether its laws and life-permitting conditions suggest design, and whether consciousness, reason, morality, and human purpose point beyond the natural world. It also confronts the evidence that makes belief difficult: suffering, divine hiddenness, conflicting religions, unanswered prayer, unreliable miracle claims, and a universe that seems surprisingly dangerous for something allegedly designed with us in mind. Rather than treating theism, atheism, and agnosticism as rival identities, the book compares them as explanations. What does each view account for What must it assume What does it leave unexplained Does appealing to God genuinely improve our understanding, or merely move every difficult question into an invisible mind This is not a search for absolute certainty. It is a rational investigation into which conclusion best fits the evidence-and how confident anyone should be when discussing the possible creator of everything.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What does it really mean to know something We rely on perception, memory, reason, testimony, experts, institutions, search engines, and artificial intelligence. Yet each can mislead us. Certainty is rare, disagreement is unavoidable, and even a true belief may owe more to luck than to sound judgment. \*Epistemology and the Shape of Truth\* explores the central questions of the philosophy of knowledge. What separates knowledge from belief How much evidence is enough Can we know something while admitting that we might be wrong What should we do when experts disagree, institutions fail, or persuasive explanations connect the wrong dots Drawing on thinkers including Aristotle, René Descartes, David Hume, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski, Miranda Fricker, and many others, the book examines perception, memory, skepticism, testimony, justification, intellectual character, social knowledge, misinformation, and the ethics of belief. Classic problems such as the Gettier cases, the skeptical dream, the brain in a vat, the regress of reasons, and peer disagreement are placed alongside contemporary questions about expertise, algorithms, social media, and artificial intelligence.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What do our possessions say about us-and how much of that message did we actually choose Consumerism and the Philosophy of Things is an accessible, witty exploration of identity, status, freedom, belonging, and the good life in a world overflowing with goods. Moving from shopping baskets and branded water bottles to luxury, advertising, algorithms, tourism, artificial intelligence, and ecological limits, the book reveals the philosophical questions hidden inside ordinary consumption. Drawing on thinkers including Aristotle, Marx, Kant, Veblen, Adorno, Horkheimer, Debord, Foucault, Fanon, Bourdieu, bell hooks, Mark Fisher, and Kate Soper, it examines how objects become symbols, how brands organize social recognition, how markets turn insecurity into demand, and how consumer choice can coexist with limited control over work, housing, healthcare, time, and production. The book neither blames individuals for every purchase nor pretends that liberation requires rejecting all possessions. Instead, it asks how things might support flourishing rather than substitute for it-and why ethical shopping alone cannot solve problems created by institutions, ownership, labor systems, and political power. …

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What does it mean to exist Ontology and the Question of Existence offers a clear and accessible introduction to one of philosophy's oldest and most fundamental fields. Beginning with ordinary objects and everyday language, it explores the deeper questions hidden beneath familiar assumptions: What kinds of things are real Are properties, numbers, events, institutions, minds, and fictional characters genuine parts of reality What makes something remain the same through change Can absences, possibilities, or digital objects exist Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle and René Descartes to Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Kit Fine, Sally Haslanger, and contemporary philosophers of mind, society, mathematics, and technology, the book explains major ontological theories without assuming previous philosophical training. Difficult ideas such as substance, universals, grounding, possible worlds, personal identity, consciousness, social construction, and artificial agency are introduced through concrete examples and precise arguments. The discussion also shows why ontology matters beyond academic philosophy. Questions about what exists now shape debates involving artificial intelligence, digital ownership, institutional responsibility, social categories, modern physics, personhood, and the status of increasingly complex technological systems.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What happens when philosophy stops promising certainty Postmodern Philosophy Beyond Certainty: Language, Power, and Meaning in a Fragmented World offers a clear, engaging account of the thinkers and ideas that transformed modern intellectual life. Beginning with the cracks that appeared in Enlightenment confidence, it traces how philosophers such as Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Butler, Crenshaw, Said, and Habermas challenged familiar assumptions about truth, language, identity, progress, and power. The book explains complex concepts without reducing them to slogans. It explores deconstruction, discourse, genealogy, normalization, gender performativity, intersectionality, Orientalism, simulacra, hyperreality, and the distrust of grand narratives. It also distinguishes postmodernism from poststructuralism and deconstruction, while examining proposed successors such as metamodernism, remodernism, posthumanism, and post-postmodernism. Postmodern thought is taken seriously without being treated as sacred. Its strongest insights are presented alongside the objections they provoke: Does criticism of absolute truth lead to relativism Can suspicion become politically sterile If identities and institutions are historically constructed, how can people still make responsible judgments or act together.…

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Meaning is not as well behaved as it looks. Poststructuralism for Open Minds is a friendly, sharp, and occasionally impolite guide to one of the most misunderstood areas of modern thought. It explains how language, identity, power, gender, race, institutions, media, and 'common sense' are not simply natural facts waiting to be noticed, but systems of meaning shaped by history, culture, repetition, and authority. This book introduces readers to major thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and many others without assuming a background in philosophy or literary theory. It explains difficult ideas such as signs, difference, deconstruction, discourse, performativity, biopower, genealogy, othering, and posthumanism in clear language, with enough wit to make the suspicious machinery of meaning slightly less painful to inspect. Rather than treating poststructuralism as a fashionable academic fog machine, this book shows why its questions still matter. Who gets to define truth Why do some categories feel natural How does power speak through institutions Why do identities need repetition What happens when language refuses to sit still And why does 'common sense' so often arrive carrying someone else's assumptions. …

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - What if everything you see, touch, remember, and believe is taking place inside a simulation The idea sounds like science fiction, but the questions behind it are much older-and much more difficult. Philosophers have spent centuries wondering whether we can trust our senses, whether the external world is what it appears to be, and what it would even mean for something to be 'real.' Modern computing has simply given those old problems a particularly fashionable new costume. Is Reality a Simulation examines the strongest arguments for and against the idea that our universe could be simulated. It explores Nick Bostrom's famous simulation argument, Bayesian reasoning, anthropic reasoning, consciousness, artificial minds, the limits of computation, quantum mechanics, supposed 'glitches,' and the uncomfortable question of whether simulated beings could be every bit as conscious-and morally important-as biological ones. Along the way, the book asks what evidence for a simulation could actually look like, whether mathematics or the laws of physics tell us anything about the universe's underlying nature, who the hypothetical simulators might be, and whether calling our world 'simulated' would really make it less real. Could we be living in a simulation Possibly. Do we have good reason to believe that we are That is where things become interesting.…