New Jersey Democratic Senator Gordon MacInnes criticizes conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats for betraying the working and urban poor and particularly American blacks and other minorities. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This volume demonstrates the enduring relevance of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes for the political and social problems we face today.

'There are no substantive rights for subjects in Hobbes's political theory, only bare freedoms without correlated duties to protect them'. Curran challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship, and argues that Hobbes's theory is not a theory of natural rights but rather, a modern, secular theory of rights, with relevance to modern rights theory.

This volume deals with the general theory of pleasure of Plato and his successors. The first part describes the two paradigms between which all theories of pleasure oscillate: Plato's definition of pleasure as the repletion of a lack, and Aristotle's view that pleasure is the perfect performance of an activity. After an excursus on Epicureans and Stoics, the book concentrates on Neoplatonism, opposing the 'standard Neoplatonic view' of Plotinus and Proclus to the original viewpoint of Damascius' commentary on Plato's Philebus. The volume sheds light on the discussion between hedonists and anti-hedonists, by concentrating on the 'crucial point' at which any philosophical analysis of the good life (hedonistic or other) ought to argue that the life of the philosopher is the most desirable, and thus truly pleasurable, life.

This book is a response to Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. Damasio, a prominent neuroscientist, begins by explaining what the latest discoveries in the neurosciences tell us about human psychology. He rejects the two prominent models of human psychology since the Western Enlightenment, the blank slate and dualism. Instead, says Damasio, we now know that the brain and body are completely integrated through a complex system of neural maps. Damasio’s recognition of the complete unity of body, brain and mind leads him to the conclusion that we have to develop ideas and ideas of ideas and use them to reform our neural maps. This book presents Damasio’s own ideas about the most “serious” questions in life that we ought to use to reform ourselves and our societies, including homeostasis; spirituality; feelings; suffering and death; the value of religious traditions; and the value of the philosophical path to God among others. The book presents additional positions on the same serious questions from perspectives that it is hoped Damasio will consider adding to or, in some cases, replacing, his position. Most of the book is a discussion of many aspects of Ancient Greek culture, showing how it developed into a complex cultural system that aimed to create exactly the kind of integrated system of neural maps that Damasio claims is so important for us today. As such, this book strives to contribute to our collective need to reform our system of education based on our new understanding of the nature of the human psyche.

This book expounds an analytical method that focuses on paradoxes - a method originally associated with deconstructive philosophy, but bearing little resemblance to the interpretive techniques that have come to be designated as 'deconstruction' in literary studies. The book then applies its paradox-focused method as it undertakes a sustained investigation of Thomas Hobbe's political philosophy. Hobbes's theory of the advent and purpose of government turns out to reveal the impossibility of the very developments which it portrays as indispensable.

While the popular talk of English common sense in the eighteenth century might seem a by-product of familiar Enlightenment discourses of rationalism and empiricism, this book argues that terms such as ‘common sense’ or ‘good sense’ are not simply synonyms of applied reason. On the contrary, the discourse of common sense is shaped by a defensive impulse against the totalizing intellectual regimes of the Enlightenment and the cultural climate of change they promote, in order to contain the unbounded discursive proliferation of modern learning. Hence, common sense discourse has a vital regulatory function in cultural negotiations of political and intellectual change in eighteenth-century Britain against the backdrop of patriotic national self-concepts. This study discusses early eighteenth-century common sense in four broad complexes, as to its discursive functions that are ethical (which at that time implies aesthetic as well), transgressive (as a corrective), political (in patriotic constructs of the nation), and repressive (of otherness). The selection of texts in this study strikes a balance between dominant literary culture – Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson – and the periphery, such as pamphlets and magazine essays, satiric poems and patriotic songs.

Looks at being a follower of Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas in a modern philosophical world.

Clinical Nursing Calculations is an essential text for teaching dosage calculation to undergraduate nursing students.