Here are 100 books that Follow the Devil / Follow the Light fans have personally recommended if you like
Follow the Devil / Follow the Light.
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I love to read (full stop). And especially, I love to read Plato in English and in Greek, by myself and with others. I studied Plato for my doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (in England) because in his dialogues, one finds all the dimensions of philosophy coming together. Why does thinking about how to live lead not only to ethics and political philosophy, but also epistemology (what we can know), aesthetics (what is beautiful), and metaphysics (what is the nature of reality)? Having read Plato with third graders, graduate students, business leaders, and retirees, I find that people of all kinds respond to his works.
This book blows the cobwebs off Plato. It shows him to have been a force in remaking the terms of the Athenian political imagination and public life.
Allen tracks how images and words that Plato crafted made their way into the public speeches through which Athenians pursued personal vendettas and debated public policy. This book proves that Plato was no ivory tower philosopher. On the contrary: “Plato wrote unacknowledged legislation” and was “the western world’s first think-tank activist and message man”.
Why Plato Wrote argues that Plato was not only the world's first systematic political philosopher, but also the western world's first think-tank activist and message man.
Shows that Plato wrote to change Athenian society and thereby transform Athenian politics
Offers accessible discussions of Plato's philosophy of language and political theory
Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I love to read (full stop). And especially, I love to read Plato in English and in Greek, by myself and with others. I studied Plato for my doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (in England) because in his dialogues, one finds all the dimensions of philosophy coming together. Why does thinking about how to live lead not only to ethics and political philosophy, but also epistemology (what we can know), aesthetics (what is beautiful), and metaphysics (what is the nature of reality)? Having read Plato with third graders, graduate students, business leaders, and retirees, I find that people of all kinds respond to his works.
Who would have expected a chapter on money in a book on Plato?
This book persuaded me that the effects of money on souls and societies alike were central to Plato’s ideas. Money distracts from deeper values. It produces false equivalences. It enslaves our reasoning power to the aim of mere accumulation. At a social level, it drives imperialism and war, as Plato saw that it did in ancient Athens.
While there is so much in this book, I find myself going back to this chapter again and again, and finding new insights about Plato’s world and ours each time.
The Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought series presents critical examinations of the work of major political philosophers and social theorists, assessing both their initial contribution and their continuing relevance to politics and society. Each volume provides a clear, accessible, historically informed account of a thinker's work, focusing on a reassessment of the central ideas and arguments. The series encourages scholars and students to link their study of classic texts to current debates in political philosophy and social theory.
In this authoritative general account of Plato's political thought, a leading scholar of ancient Greek philosophy explores its key themes:…
Our history is spoken through the voice of the conqueror – notably white male. My work seeks to balance our narratives through insight from women’s perspectives. I support my creative writing with extensive research in history, archeology, and myths, and include in situ interpretations of the relevant landscape. There are many truths to be told, not simply one ordained story and I wish to shine the light on stories that have been hidden and/or silenced. The themed series title, Women Unveiled, pertains to this.
I chose this book for its interesting exploration of spiritual resurrections that were common throughout ancient civilizations including the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greek, Persian, and Indians. Silva says these mystical rituals lead initiates (including Plato and Socrates) onto a path of self-empowerment and spiritual awakening. Silva includes the gnostic teachings practiced by the Cathars, who claimed the literal resurrection of Jesus was a lie, and were persecuted by the Church to suppress such gospel teachings by Mary Magdalene and Phillip.
“Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error,” states the once banned Gospel of Philip. For centuries, every esoteric and Gnostic sect was aware that the literal interpretation of the resurrection of Christ promoted by the Church was a fraud. And with good reason: thousands of years before Jesus, initiates from Egypt and China to Celtic Britain and North America practiced a mystical ritual, and its adepts — from Zoroaster to Plato —regarded the experience as the pinnacle of spiritual development: a life-altering awakening that disclosed insights into the nature of reality and the self.…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
Who knows why, but I have always been enticed by absurdities, paradoxes, incongruities — I use them in my talks, articles, and books — of everyday lives, our humanity, and mysteries of our ‘going on.’ Reflections on being human can be triggered by humour such as Cambridge’sBeyond the Fringe and New York’s sitcom Seinfeld— within which I wallow — as well as by lengthy philosophical works and novels. My work draws on bafflements: for example, shampoo instructions “Lather, rinse, repeat” (making shampoo-ing infinite?); Barmaid to Peter Cook, “Bitter?”, reply being “Just tired”— and Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Yes, I go on.
I frequently return to Plato and his portrayal of Socrates. The Phaedrus intrigues me. It is a difficult work for piecing together, yet with fascinating thoughts, taking us from rhetoric to erotic love to the search for Beauty, Truth, the Good. What it is to be human continues to baffle me — not least because we often do have a sense of 'going beyond' the mystical. Yes — I do write as an atheist.
Phaedrus is widely recognized as one of Plato's most profound and beautiful works. It takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus and its ostensible subject is love, especially homoerotic love. This new translation is accompanied by an introduction, further reading, and full notes on the text and translation that discuss the structure of the dialogue and elucidate issues that might puzzle the modern reader.
I experienced being a parent as a return to my own childhood. As much as I enjoyed teaching my children, I loved learning from them as well. That got me thinking about how one might recapture the joys and insights of childhood. As a philosopher interested in education, I have long wondered whether we leave childhood behind or somehow carry it with us into old age. I discovered that several important philosophers, such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Rousseau have keen insights about the relation of childhood to adulthood. And the biblical Jesus seems to have been the first person to suggest that adults can learn from children.
“Never rush childhood but let it ripen in the child”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first philosopher to see children as more than adults-in-training. As someone who loved revisiting childhood as a parent, I simply adored this celebration of the world of a child.
In this philosophical novel, Rousseau is tutor to Emile from infancy to adulthood, and we watch Emile discover the world without any use of schools or books: “I hate books!” says the world-famous author. Purely through experiential learning, Emile matures, falls in love with Sophie, and becomes a model citizen. Rousseau pioneers the idea of learning through natural consequences: if Emile breaks the window in his room, he gets to enjoy a cold room.
Alan Bloom's new translation of Emile , Rousseau's masterpiece on the education and training of the young, is the first in more than seventy years. In it, Bloom, whose magnificent translation of Plato's Republic has been universally hailed as a virtual rediscovery of that timeless text, again brings together the translator's gift for journeying between two languages and cultures and the philosopher's perception of the true meaning and significance of the issues being examined in the work. The result is a clear, readable, and highly engrossing text that at the same time offers a wholly new sense of the importance…
I have been fascinated by the Bible since my earliest days in Sunday school, coloring pictures of Noah’s Ark. Yet, even as a young child I was very skeptical of the Christian interpretation of biblical stories, seeing that they couldn’t possibly be true. But I’ve always respected the Bible as a literary work and sought to understand its details. In my years of researching the Bible and Christian origins, several works stand out as being particularly important in shaping my understanding of Judaism and Christianity. These are those books.
Along with his other book,Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, Russell Gmirkin puts forward compelling evidence to show that many of the most revered works of Jewish scripture were produced after the conquests of Alexander the Great, hundreds of years later than widely believed. Relationships between the Jewish Torah and the works of Plato have long been acknowledged by scholars, dating back to antiquity. Jews had long claimed that it was Plato who had derived his concepts from their writings, but here Gmirkin shows convincingly that the relationship goes the other way around.This realization has profound implications for our understanding of the origins of Judaism and Christianity.
Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible for the first time compares the ancient law collections of the Ancient Near East, the Greeks and the Pentateuch to determine the legal antecedents for the biblical laws. Following on from his 2006 work, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, Gmirkin takes up his theory that the Pentateuch was written around 270 BCE using Greek sources found at the Great Library of Alexandria, and applies this to an examination of the biblical law codes. A striking number of legal parallels are found between the Pentateuch and Athenian laws, and specifically with those…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
During my life, I’ve been told that I was not a true engineer, not a true banker, not a true CEO, not a true entrepreneur, not a true teacher… But one day an executive told me: “I want to work with you because you’re not a true consultant.” I then realized it is was a privilege not to be a true something! I like to call myself a corporate philosopher. Fellow of the BCG Henderson Institute, and co-founder of Cartoonbase, I split my time between the worlds of academia and business. I have published several other books on various subjects such as language, mathematics, humor, or fallacies.
Lee covers and connects two of my favorite topics, creativity, and technology. From the facts and truths of technology to the role models play in creativity (looking at how early philosophers suggested modeling thought), he argues that computers are not universal machines and that their power comes from their partnership with humans.
How humans and technology evolve together in a creative partnership.
In this book, Edward Ashford Lee makes a bold claim: that the creators of digital technology have an unsurpassed medium for creativity. Technology has advanced to the point where progress seems limited not by physical constraints but the human imagination. Writing for both literate technologists and numerate humanists, Lee makes a case for engineering—creating technology—as a deeply intellectual and fundamentally creative process. Explaining why digital technology has been so transformative and so liberating, Lee argues that the real power of technology stems from its partnership with humans.
I’m a professor of cognitive psychology at UCLA, and also a poet. Growing up on a dairy farm in British Columbia, I immersed myself in the world of books. My mother showed me her well-worn copy of a poetry book written by her Scottish great-great-aunt, and I longed to create my own arrangements of words. Later, as a student at the University of British Columbia and then Stanford, my interest in creativity was channeled into research on how people think. I’ve studied how people use analogies and metaphors to create new ideas. In addition to books on the psychology of thinking and reasoning, I’ve written several volumes of poetry.
If you love Borges, and thought you’d read everything he wrote, this is the book for you—a collection of his “lost lectures,” delivered at Harvard in 1967-68 and finally published in 2000. And if you want to hear the actual voice of a creative genius, as if risen from the dead, the recordings are also available. Best known for his intricate short stories and essays, Borges was also—perhaps foremost—a poet. As he puts it in the book, “The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.” Starting from the creation of poems, Borges explores the creation of metaphors, meaning, and life’s irreducible mystery.
Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967-1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet…
I have studied the ancient world for over 50 years and have found that there are always new things to discover. Everyone thought that all that was known about Socrates had already been said, so I was excited to discover new evidence for his relationship with Aspasia - a woman of extraordinary influence and intellect - hiding in plain sight. I am a Professor of Classics at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford.
This book provides a series of translations of ancient texts relating to the life of Socrates, raising questions about his earlier trajectory among other things. The scattered sources gathered in this volume tell a very different story about the philosopher from that normally obtained by concentrating almost exclusively on his trial and death.
Socrates (469 399 B.C.) is one of history's most enigmatic and intriguing figures. He is often considered the father of Western philosophy, yet the four most famous accounts we have of him present a contradictory, confusing picture.
Just who was Socrates? Was he Plato's brilliant philosopher, at times confounding and infuriating, morally serious and yet ironic; the ever-worldly man, sometime mystic, and uncommon martyr? Or did Plato conflate Socrates' views with his own startling genius, as Aristotle suggests? Was Socrates instead the less impressive, more mundane man whose commonsense impressed the laconic Xenophon? Or could Socrates have been the charlatan,…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I was educated at Stanford and MIT. I taught for four years at Yale and 24 years at Princeton before moving to USC, where I am Chair of the Philosophy Department. I specialize in the Philosophy of Language, History of Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Law. I have published many articles, authored fifteen books, co-authored two, and co-edited two. I am fascinated by philosophy's enduring role in our individual and collective lives, impressed by its ability to periodically reinvent itself, and challenged to bring what it has to offer to more students and to the broader culture.
These dialogues introduce the ideas that gave birth to western philosophy and its contributions to civilization. Providing the foundations of rational thought and theoretical knowledge in multiple domains, Greek philosophers, especially Socrates and Plato, imbued the search for truth with the urgency of both a personal, and a communal, quest for meaning. Just as the advances of Greek mathematics required concepts that are precisely defined or rigorously governed by axioms, so, the dialogues teach, advances in our knowledge of the world, and of ourselves, require well-regulated concepts like truth, knowledge,justice, virtue, and happiness. In these dialogues, we see the birth of philosophy's two great projects--providing concepts needed to advance theoretical knowledge in every domain and charting the path to wisdom in leading a good and meaningful life.
The second edition of Five Dialogues presents G. M. A. Grube's distinguished translations, as revised by John Cooper for Plato, Complete Works . A number of new or expanded footnotes are also included along with an updated bibliography.
