50 DE CLASICI. FILOSOFIE. Tom Butler Bowdon

Tom Butler-Bowdon looks at 50 key books on being, truth, and meaning. His guide helps those new to philosophy learn its ideas. It sets out big questions about human life. It shares the answers that thinkers have put forward. Each part looks at ideas that shaped how we think. These ideas still stir debate.

The books range from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. Aristotle asks what it means to be happy. Epicurus looks at how to live a simple life. Arendt asks what it means to be human. Beauvoir looks at the lives of women. Cicero looks at duty. Confucius asks what we must take charge of and answer for. Bentham explores utility, or how much good things do. Kant looks at moral law. Murdoch asks what it means to be good. Mill looks at freedom. Rawls asks what makes a fair society. Machiavelli looks at how to lead.

Other parts turn to knowledge, faith, and the self. Descartes asks what we can know. Montaigne asks how we can know our own selves. Heidegger asks what life means. Sartre asks what humans can become. Heraclitus looks at change. Spinoza looks at reason. James explores pragmatism, which links ideas to how they work in practice. Kierkegaard looks at faith, Pascal at God, and Leibniz at evil. Popper asks how science should test its claims. Wittgenstein looks at language and meaning.

The guide takes up recent debates, too. Baggini looks at the ego, or sense of self. Chomsky looks at power. Frankfurt looks at empty talk or talk that misleads. Harris asks about free will. Kripke looks at names. Sandel asks what makes things just. Singer looks at giving. Taleb asks about what we cannot know for sure. Žižek looks at capitalism on a world scale.

The books also look at logic, the rules of sound thought. They explore simulation, or models that copy what is real. They ask how humans come to grasp things. They cover great shifts in science and forms of media. They ask what is right and wrong. They explore the social contract, the terms that bind people in a society. Other themes include happiness and the world as will and representation. This last theme views the world in terms of will and how it appears to the mind. This edition forms part of the IQ230 series.