Ecclesiastes is a persuasive speech with a rhetoric so unique that it can be easily misunderstood. It speaks powerfully to believers as well as nonbelievers because it addresses the question of the meaning of life in the most satisfying way. The heart of this book is an expositional commentary that interprets Ecclesiastes as authoritative Scripture. It seeks to recover the rhetoric of the speech in terms of its comprehensive message on the meaning of life as well as its compelling force to get the message across. Preceding the expositional commentary is an introduction to Ecclesiastes that presents a new approach to outlining and reading Ecclesiastes as a coherent speech. It also presents an overview of the "forest"--the overall rhetorical flow of the speech from beginning to end. This is to prevent one from getting lost when immersed in the "trees" of the expositional commentary. Following the expositional commentary are two topical studies to give Ecclesiastes the breadth and depth of coverage it deserves. The first is an interdisciplinary exposition on the meaning of life. The second is an interpretive essay to defend exegetically the interpretation of Ecclesiastes as a coherent speech.

A study of Bible teaching about the nature of God, evidences for God, Jesus, and the Bible, including a careful study of creation vs. evolution Topics studied are: * God's power, wisdom, love, and holiness * The providence of God * The number of individuals in the Godhead * The Deity of Jesus * The Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts * Fulfilled prophecy, miracles, and the resurrection * The significance of the Bible doctrine of creation * The consequences of evolution * Humanism compared to the Bible * The length of the days of creation

T. M. Scanlon offers a qualified defense of normative cognitivism--the view that there are irreducibly normative truths about reasons for action. He responds to three familiar objections: that such truths would have troubling metaphysical implications; that we would have no way of knowing what they are; and that the role of reasons in motivating and explaining action could not be explained if accepting a conclusion about reasons for action were a kind of belief. Scanlon answers the first of these objections within a general account of ontological commitment, applying to mathematics as well as normative judgments. He argues that the method of reflective equilibrium, properly understood, provides an adequate account of how we come to know both normative truths and mathematical truths, and that the idea of a rational agent explains the link between an agent's normative beliefs and his or her actions. Whether every statement about reasons for action has a determinate truth value is a question to be answered by an overall account of reasons for action, in normative terms. Since it seems unlikely that there is such an account, the defense of normative cognitivism offered here is qualified: statements about reasons for action can have determinate truth values, but it is not clear that all of them do. Along the way, Scanlon offers an interpretation of the distinction between normative and non-normative claims, a new account of the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative, an interpretation of the idea of the relative strength of reasons, and a defense of the method of reflective equilibrium.

People do things for reasons, but what are reasons and how are they related to the resulting actions? Bittner explores this question and proposes an answer: a reason is a response to that state of affairs.

The acknowledged masterpiece of one of Spain's most influential thinkers. Between despair and the desire for something better, Unamuno finds that "saving incertitude" that alone can console us.

This book uses the study of philosophical texts to raise and explore metaphysical issues. On one level, each essay addresses a scholarly issue in a classical text, often a text of Aristotle's. On a deeper level, the issues Halper considers are metaphysical. However, unlike thinkers who have brought linguistic analysis and contemporary metaphysical notions to these texts, Halper approaches them to find their formulations of issues and their strategies of pursuit. Halper is not concerned with the defense of metaphysical commitments but with finding and exploring paths of metaphysical inquiry. The essays in this volume are exploratory and exegetical rather than decisive. Their contribution to metaphysics lies in the issues they raise, the methods they explore, and their conception of metaphysics as a discipline rooted in philosophical problems.

Assertion-Reason Questions are the most tedious part in the AIIMS examination. They require not only understanding the statements but also the correct and accurate conceptual reasoning. Assertion-Reason Question Bank in Biology for AIIMS provides a comprehensive set of questionnaires to supplement learning from the NCERT textbooks. The book contains, in all, 2000+ questions with 95% + explanations. This book is devised for students to overcome the difficulty faced by them in attempting Assertion and Reason questions. It will help them to refine their concepts and emerge out successful in various competitive medical entrance examinations. This entire book comprises of chapter-wise questions according to the NCERT curriculum. At the end of every chapter, detailed solutions have been provided to help students with self-assessment. The uniqueness of this book lies in the new set of questions providing coverage of the entire NCERT syllabus.