This sophisticated book by internationally renowned theorist Zaki Laidi, tackles the problem of individual identity in a rapidly changing global political environment. He argues that it is increasingly hard to find meaning in our ever-expanding world, especially after the collapse of political ideologies such as communism. With the breakup of countries such as the former Yugoslavia, it is clear that people are now looking to old models like nationalism and ethnicity to help them forge an identity. But how effective are these old certainties in a globalized world in a permanent state of flux?

Why the human and natural world is not as intelligible to us as we think it is Wishful thinking is a deeply ingrained human trait that has had a long-term distorting effect on ethical thinking. Many influential ethical views depend on the optimistic assumption that, despite appearances to the contrary, the human and natural world in which we live could, eventually, be made to make sense to us. In A World without Why, Raymond Geuss challenges this assumption. The essays in this collection—several of which are published here for the first time—explore the genesis and historical development of this optimistic configuration in ethical thought and the ways in which it has shown itself to be unfounded and misguided. Discussions of Greco-Roman antiquity and of the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno play a central role in many of these essays. Geuss also ranges over such topics as the concepts of intelligibility, authority, democracy, and criticism; the role of lying in politics; architecture; the place of theology in ethics; tragedy and comedy; and the struggle between realism and our search for meaning. Characterized by Geuss's wide-ranging interests in literature, philosophy, and history, and by his political commitment and trenchant style, A World without Why raises fundamental questions about the viability not just of specific ethical concepts and theses, but of our most basic assumptions about what ethics could and must be.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES & MCKINSEY 2020 BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR One of Fortune Best Books of the Year One of Inc. Best Business Books of the Year One of The Times (UK) Best Business Books of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice From an Oxford economist, a visionary account of how technology will transform the world of work, and what we should do about it From mechanical looms to the combustion engine to the first computers, new technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. For centuries, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. But as Daniel Susskind demonstrates, this time really is different. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk. Drawing on almost a decade of research in the field, Susskind argues that machines no longer need to think like us in order to outperform us, as was once widely believed. As a result, more and more tasks that used to be far beyond the capability of computers – from diagnosing illnesses to drafting legal contracts, from writing news reports to composing music – are coming within their reach. The threat of technological unemployment is now real. This is not necessarily a bad thing, Susskind emphasizes. Technological progress could bring about unprecedented prosperity, solving one of humanity’s oldest problems: how to make sure that everyone has enough to live on. The challenges will be to distribute this prosperity fairly, to constrain the burgeoning power of Big Tech, and to provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the center of our lives. Perceptive, pragmatic, and ultimately hopeful, A World Without Work shows the way.

Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also erodes conventional attitudes toward Eliot's intellectual and spiritual development, showing how early and consistently his classical and religious sensibility manifests itself in his poetry and criticism. The book examines his reading, his teaching, his bawdy poems, and his life-long attraction to music halls and other modes of popular culture to show the complex relation between intellectual biography and art.

In the mid-1970s, A Course in Miracles was published. It is a self-study course designed to help you undo your conscious and unconscious beliefs that you are separate from God, so that you can return to your natural State of Boundless Love, Peace, and Joy. Since then, it has become the ‘Holy Book’ of millions of people worldwide who have experienced a loving transformation to a more peaceful experience. Practicing A Course in Miracles and The Way of A Course in Miracles are practical companions to The Message of A Course in Miracles, the first volume of the Plain Language A Course in Miracles. Where MACIM lays out the theoretical foundation of the Course, PACIM provides a year of practical lessons to transform your experience to peace, and WACIM provides answers to common questions. These volumes also contain mentoring notes from the translator, a student and teacher of the Course since 1984. Together, these books offer a clear means for attaining lasting inner peace.

Practical guidance on how Christians can share their faith with friends and loved ones.

The specter of the apocalypse has always been a semiotic fantasy: only at the end of all things will their true meaning be revealed. Our long romance with catastrophe is inseparable from the Western hermeneutical tradition: our search for an elusive truth, one that can only be uncovered through the interminable work of interpretation. Catastrophe terrifies and tantalizes to the extent it promises an end to this task. 9/11 is this book’s beginning, but not its end. Here, it seemed, was the apocalypse America had long been waiting for; until it became just another event. And, indeed, the real lesson of 9/11 may be that catastrophe is the purest form of the event. From the poetry of classical Greece to the popular culture of contemporary America, The End of Meaning seeks to demonstrate that catastrophe, precisely as the notion of the sui generis, has always been generic. This is not a book on the great catastrophes of the West; it offers no canon of catastrophe, no history of the catastrophic. The End of Meaning asks, instead, what if meaning itself is a catastrophe?

Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? demonstrates how much Marvin Mudrick loved life and celebrated the dignity of life in literature. “It’s helpful to be reminded now and then,” he writes, that “while novelists persist in their noisy betrayals of human dignity, living has a longer history than reading, and truth than fiction.” Mudrick insists on seeing authors and their characters as people and he describes and judges them as frankly as if they were living among us. In this collection, we meet heroes, monsters, and every shade of character in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics. We get to know each of them, so vivid are Mudrick’s quotations and commentary. Essay after essay demonstrates that good criticism can amplify both life and literature.

From the international phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard, the extraordinary final volume of 'the most significant literary enterprise of our times' (Guardian). * Karl Ove Knausgaard's dazzling new novel, The Morning Star, is available to pre-order now * In this final novel in the My Struggle cycle, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines life, death, love and literature with unsparing rigour and begins to count the cost of his project. The End reflects on the fallout from the earlier books, with Knausgaard facing the pressures of literary acclaim and its often shattering repercussions. It is at once a meditation on writing and its relationship with reality, and an account of a writer's relationship with himself - from his ambitions to his doubts and frailties. 'Epic... It creates a world that absorbs you utterly' Sunday Times 'Compulsively addictive' Daily Telegraph 'My Struggle has strong claim to be the great literary event of the twenty-first century' Guardian 'A mesmerising, thought-provoking and genuinely important work of art' Spectator