Science Ethics

A brilliant philosopher reimagines Stoicism for our modern age in this thought-provoking guide to a better life.

What is a fallacy? Many people may have heard the word before but don’t grasp the magnitude of it. They erroneously assume that they aren’t guilty of embracing half-truths or false conclusions. And yet, those are often the ones who do it the most. In this guide, you will receive greater comprehension of what fallacies are and close your blind spot to the truth of things.

Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy which teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions. It does not seek to extinguish emotions completely, but rather seeks to transform them through logic and reason, which enables a person to develop clear judgment, inner calm and freedom from suffering (which is considered the ultimate goal). This book will guide you through the origins and teachings of Stoicism, through direct quotes and experiences from its founding fathers.

Now in its second edition, The Virtues of Captain America is updated to include all the new developments in Captain America's saga. This edition also offers new material on Sam Wilson—formerly Captain America's partner the Falcon who recently became Captain America himself—and how his interpretation of the role compares to Steve Rogers's.

A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today's specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story—and, unfortunately, it's not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the annual US presidential "pardon" of a Thanksgiving turkey, and introduces us to "a tremendously handsome, outgoing, and intelligent turkey" named Cornelius. Above all, Singer explains how we can improve our holiday tables.

Effective altruism is built upon the simple, but profound, idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the "most good you can do". Such a life requires an unsentimental view of charitable giving: To be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas and shows how living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment.

Every aspect of your life, and that of your loved ones, can improve as you learn to accurately evaluate claims. This book provides practical tools so you can evaluate what is most probably true based on the totality of evidence. An invaluable net effect can occur as more people use the methods Dr. Schwartz provides and benefit from his extraordinary accomplishments.

Traditional economics measures the ways in which we spend our income, but doesn't attribute worth to the crucial human interactions that give our lives meaning. Clair Brown, an economics professor at U.C. Berkeley and a practicing Buddhist, has developed a holistic model, one based on the notion that quality of life should be measured by more than national income. Brown advocates an approach to organizing the economy that embraces rather than skirts questions of values, sustainability, and equity.

In this groundbreaking book, Anita Hannig brings us into the lives of ordinary Americans who go to extraordinary lengths to set the terms of their own death. Faced with a terminal diagnosis and unbearable suffering, they decide to seek medical assistance in dying—a legal option now available to one in five Americans. The Day I Die tackles one of the most urgent social issues of our time: how to restore dignity and meaning to the dying process in the age of high-tech medicine.

On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutally beaten and murdered in the street near her apartment, in full view of more than three dozen friends and neighbors - and no one did a thing to stop it. More than thirty-five years after its first publication, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, the true account of what transpired that night in Queens, New York, continues to disturb us. We would like to think that we would step in and do what we could to stop the carnage.

Homeschooling: A Hope for America is a collection of articles taken from The Voluntaryist, a newsletter with a libertarian outlook which has been published since 1982. The anthology has been assembled by Carl Watner (from many of his past articles, as well as those of others), and contains an original foreword by John Taylor Gatto. This anthology argues against government education in a unique way. One who advocates voluntaryism opposes government schools, not because he opposes schooling but, because he opposes coercion, which is to be found in government taxation, compulsory attendance laws, and in the monopolization of public services. Most of us would agree that there should not be any state religion; that religion should not be supported by taxation; and that people should not be compelled to attend religious services. Why shouldn’t the principles of voluntaryism in religion apply to education?

Stoicism is two things: a long past philosophical school of ancient Greece and Rome, and an enduring philosophical movement that still inspires people in the twenty-first century to rethink and reorganize their lives in order to achieve personal satisfaction. What is the connection between them? This Very Short Introduction provides an introductory account of Stoic philosophy, and tells the story of how ancient Stoicism survived and evolved into the movement we see today.

As a hospice chaplain, Kerry Egan didn't offer sermons or prayers unless they were requested; in fact, she found, the dying rarely want to talk about God, at least not overtly. Instead she discovered she'd been granted an invaluable chance to witness firsthand what she calls the "spiritual work of dying" - the work of finding or making meaning of one's life, the experiences it's contained, and the people who have touched it, the betrayals, wounds, unfinished business, and unrealized dreams.

"The Twilight of the Idols", Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo: “If anyone should desire to obtain a rapid sketch of how everything before my time was standing on its head, he should begin reading me in this book. That which is called ‘Idols’ on the title-page is simply the old truth that has been believed in hitherto. In plain English, The Twilight of the Idols means that the old truth is on its last legs.

Why We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory.

In this anthology, David Gray-Hammond has reworked and added to essays from his popular Emergent Divergence blog. The theme of the essays is that of neuronormativity in society, and the effect it is having on Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people.

"Que otros se jacten de las páginas que han escrito; a mí me enorgullecen las que he leído", decía Borges. Y es que los buenos libros nos transforman; un pasaje, por breve que sea, puede despertar la curiosidad del lector y animarlo a leer una obra que cambie su vida para siempre. He ahí el poder de la literatura, que no sólo nos abre horizontes, sino que deposita en nosotros, de manera lenta pero constante, la clave para entender la vida.

Racism. Immigration. Gun violence. Sexuality. Health care. The number of ethical issues that demand a response from Christians today is almost dizzying. How can Christians navigate such matters? What are faithful responses to these questions? Edited by two theologians with pastoral experience, this volume invites engagement with these issues and more by drawing on real-life experiences and offering a range of responses to some of the most challenging moral questions confronting the church today.

An incisive examination of bioethics and American healthcare, and their profound affects on American culture over the last 60 years, from two eminent scholars. An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care.

Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.