TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016'Gray must be one of the best read of contemporary philosophers, trawling insouciantly through high-, middle- and low-brow literature with the sharp-eyed eclecticism of a magpie of genius' John Banville, Guardian'Like Isaiah Berlin with a thing for sci-fi' Tibor Fischer, SpectatorEveryone thinks they want to be free - or do they? John Gray's thought-stirring new book on freedom draws together insights from Gnosticism, science fiction, ancient sacrifice and the occult to...
Evolved "Mind" of the 22nd Century (Dma Body Health, #2)
by David D Danforth MS
Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre are usually identified with completely different philosophical traditions: intellectualism and voluntarism. In this original study, Stephen Wang shows, instead, that there are some profound similarities in their understanding of freedom and human identity. Aquinas gives far more scope than is generally acknowledged to the open-endedness of reason in human deliberation, and argues that we can transform ourselves in quite radical ways through our choices. Sartre...
Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested in exploring the...
The Mechanics of Divine Foreknowledge and Providence (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion)
by T. Ryan Byerly
How exactly could God achieve infallible foreknowledge of every future event, including the free actions of human persons? How could God exercise careful providence over these same events? Byerly offers a novel response to these important questions by contending that God exercises providence and achieves foreknowledge by ordering the times. The first part of the book defends the importance of the above questions. After characterizing the contemporary freedom-foreknowledge debate, Byerly argues...
A blend of natural history, science, social and political philosophy, wrapped up in a humorous autobiographical narrative. Look around...have you ever wondered how all this works? What is the goal of life, its object or purpose and what is the best way to achieve that goal? Me, too, so I embarked on a journey to find the fundamental law of the Universe. Sometimes you simply cannot see the wood for the trees. Two systems of a small planet and how the Universe works. Jeremy Flint embarks upon an a...