Alain de Botton draws on the work of six of the world's most uncommonly brilliant thinkers to offer this panoply of accessible, entertaining wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.

Roger Huard invites readers to explore Plato's Myth of the Cave, which is central to his magnum opus on political philosophy, The Republic. The primary goal of this exploration is to arrive at an understanding of Plato's political ideas...

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and...

For most of us, the major questions of life continue to perplex: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live? In the late nineteenth century, a class of thinkers emerged who made solving these problems central to their work. They...

Have we been taught to discount the veracity and deeper meaning of our emotional resonance with the world around us? In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis looks at the curriculum of the English "prep school" and begins to wonder...

Sweet Nothing is an eco-feminist, spiritual and philosophical lament against the increasing speed and fragmentation of modern life. It draws parallels between some of the central ideas of existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis and...

In Spinoza in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Spinoza's life and ideas and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world.

In Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece, John Poulakos offers a new conceptualization of sophistry, explaining its direction and shape as well as the reasons why Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle found it objectionable. Poulakos...