Philosophy

“Karma” is in our vocabulary, but we don’t know what it means.

The word is everywhere—not just in alternative spirituality, and among Hindus and Buddhists, but in news reports, ads, sitcoms, sports columns, and the everyday conversations of people who wouldn’t know the Upanishads from Us Magazine. Stephen Colbert invokes the term on TV, and Taylor Swift summons it in song. iTunes in fact lists more than 150 karmic song titles.

This book highlights karmic belief and practice throughout history and how they came to the West, then applies the principles of these ethics to relationships, life decisions, health, death, and all aspects of self-development.

“We’re always planting karmic seeds,” writes Philip Goldberg.

Karma is a profoundly useful idea, and Karmic Relief is a profoundly useful book. It offers a blueprint for building a fulfilling life and a way to reconcile some of life’s most vexing conundrums.

Questions and answers from two great philosophers

Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi to the philosopher and historian Abu 'Ali Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century.

The correspondence between al-Tawhidi and Miskawayh holds a mirror to many of the debates and preoccupations of the time and reflects the spirit of rationalistic inquiry that animated their era. It also provides insight into the intellectual outlooks of two thinkers who were divided as much by their distinctive temperaments as by the very different trajectories of their professional careers.

Alternately whimsical and tragic, wondering and brooding, trivial and profound, al-Tawhidi’s questions provoke an interaction as interesting in its spiritedness as in its content. This new edition of The Philosopher Responds is accompanied by the first full-length English translation of this important text, bringing this interaction to life for the English reader.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Questions and answers from two great philosophers

Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi to the philosopher and historian Abu 'Ali Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world
during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century.

The correspondence between al-Tawhidi and Miskawayh holds a mirror to many of the debates and preoccupations of the time and reflects the spirit of rationalistic inquiry that animated their era. It also provides insight into the intellectual outlooks of two thinkers who were divided as much by their distinctive temperaments as by the very different trajectories of their professional careers.

Alternately whimsical and tragic, wondering and brooding, trivial and profound, al-Tawhidi’s questions provoke an interaction as interesting in its spiritedness as in its content. This new edition of The Philosopher Responds is accompanied by the first full-length English translation of this important text, bringing this interaction to life for the English reader.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Stoicism, Skepticism, Cynicism, Continental philosophy, ethics, government and governing, virtue, love, life, and death. Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Bertrand Russell, and Michel Foucault…. From famous figures in the history of philosophy to the deepest questions of religion to the relationship between knowledge and power, The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book: The Ancient Greek Influence on Modern Understanding makes esoteric ideas and the jumble of names easy to understand, enriching readers’ lives and answering the question, What does philosophy have to teach us about life and society?

Today many people experience a loss of trust in government and organized religion. There's increased social isolation and a rise in insult politics. Seeking an alternative, some have experimented with new forms of politics, social organization, and spirituality. All these developments have led to a great deal of confusion and puzzlement. Who and what can we believe, and how can we know it is correct? From its beginning, philosophy was conceived as a conversation or dialogue, and The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book raises and offers answers to questions like these …

Philosophy is the pursuit of answers to big questions about the purpose of life, death, and existence. Philosophy is about how to reason and find the answers for yourself. Philosophy is a puzzle. You collect clues. You make connections. The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book is a perfect companion for anyone seeking wider truths and happiness. It is an informative, accessible, easy-to-understand guide to the big questions about living. With more than 120 photos and graphics, it is richly illustrated. Plus, its helpful bibliography, glossary of terms, and extensive index add to its usefulness.

“A great way to deepen your spiritual life is to take a deep dive into a tradition other than your own—especially if you have a competent guide, and Rabbi Rami is an extraordinary guide. Not into Zen? Not a Jew? Not a problem. Anyone on any path will benefit enormously from this profoundly illuminating book.” —Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

With reference to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Rami Shapiro begins with beginner’s mind as “empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything.” Then, Rami ponders beginner’s mind in the child of the Passover Haggadah “who knows not how to ask.” The parents of this child are told to open (patach) the child to the art of questioning. Asking questions is key to Jewish mind.

The questioning perennial beginner is central to both Zen and Jewish, Rami demonstrates: a daring, iconoclastic, often humorous mind devoted to shattering the words, texts, isms, and ideologies on which expert mind—closed to inquiry—depends.

Zen Mind / Jewish Mind is not a scholarly study of anything, let alone Zen or Judaism, and despite all the footnotes, the book rests solely on Shapiro’s fifty-plus years of playing in the garden of Judaism, Zen, and advaita/nonduality. Chapters include “Dharma Eye, God’s I” (1), “Koan and Midrash” (4), and “The Yoga of Conversation” (7).

A memoir about how solitude can deepen a life.

In his twenties, writer and activist Michael McGregor traveled to the remote Greek island of Patmos to spend two months alone. It was 1985, before cellphones or the internet, when even a phone call home was costly. Those days transformed his understanding of himself, his God, and his purpose—and in this book he offers, for others, how finding a place of solitude can change a life.

McGregor had spent three years writing about the world’s poorest people and five months traveling when he chose, at 27, to live for two months in total solitude, 6,000 miles from home. He went primarily to write a novel, but from the moment he stepped onto the ferry to begin the 11-hour ride to Patmos, he knew his time would be meaningful. As he settled into a routine that included hours of writing each day, walks through fierce wind in the evenings, and nights that brought on dreams, memories, and unexpected spiritual encounters, he soon realized that solitude can be difficult and even dangerous but also awe-inspiring and life-altering.

McGregor immerses the reader in particulars of the simple life he lived for two winter months on an island where he knew no one. He reflects on authors and spiritual teachers before showing the ways in which his returns to solitude in subsequent decades reflected or altered his earlier experiences of being alone.

In the book’s final section, McGregor returns to Patmos during the same January dates he visited four decades earlier. He attempts to replicate his earlier experience. His reflections on the changes in his life, the island world, and his understanding of both God and solitude add another dimension to this multifaceted book.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.

Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.

Avicenna is the most influential figure in the intellectual history of the Islamic world. This book is the first comprehensive study of his theory of science, which profoundly shaped his philosophical method and indirectly influenced philosophers and theologians not only in the Islamic world but also throughout Christian Europe and the medieval Jewish tradition. 

A sophisticated interpreter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Avicenna took on the ambitious task of reorganizing Aristotelian philosophy of science into an applicable model of scientific reasoning, striving to identify conditions of certainty for scientific assertions and conditions of adequacy for real definitions. Riccardo Strobino combines philosophical and textual analysis to explore the scope and nature of Avicenna’s contributions to the logic of scientific reasoning in his effort to recalibrate Aristotle’s model and overcome some of its internal limitations. Focusing on a broad array of philosophical innovations at the intersection of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, this book casts light on an essential aspect of the thought of the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world.