Search Results: Mystics & Mysticism from Lifeways Books & Gifts

After kicking open the doors to 20th-Century philosophy with earlier work, the author refined his ideal of the superman with this book. Conventional morality is a sign of slavery, he maintains, and the superman goes beyond good and evil in action, thought, and creation. Nietzsche especially targets what he calls a "slave morality" that fosters herdlike quiescence and stigmatizes the "highest human types". In this pathbreaking work, the author's philosophical and literary powers are at their height: with devastating irony and flashing wit he gleefully dynamites centuries of accumulated conventional wisdom in metaphysics, morals, and psychology, clearing a path for several 20th-Century innovators.

What is the relationship of the individual to the state? What is the ideal state, and how can it bring about the most desirable life for its citizens? What sort of education should it provide? What is the purpose of amassing wealth? These are some of the questions Aristotle attempts to answer in this book. Both influenced by and critical of Plato's "Republic and Laws," this book represents the distillation of a lifetime of thought and observation.

This celebrated philosophical work of the Fourth Century BCE contemplates the elements of an ideal state, serving as the forerunner for many other classics. This book concerns itself chiefly with the question, "what is justice?" as well as Plato's theory of ideas and his conception of the philosopher's role in society. To explore the latter, he invents the allegory of the cave to illustrate his notion that ordinary people are like prisoners in a cave, observing only shadows, while philosophers are those who venture outside and see things as they are and return to the cave and tell the truth about what they have seen. This dynamic metaphor expresses at once the eternal conflict between the worlds of the senses and ideas, and the philosopher's role as mediator between the two.