The Culture Map - Erin Meyer (2014) - The cultural differences
Book review - 2 pages - Philosophy
If I need to admit something, it was the only book in the three proposed that I hadn't chosen to read, thinking that I would be able to adapt to the cultural differences compared to the topic "communication" treated in the book "Non-violent communication" for example. But, in the end since...
Rene Descartes v. Thomas Nagel: perspectives on the mind and consciousness
Book review - 2 pages - Philosophy
The idea of what makes a person a person has been debated for many centuries. Many philosophers have pondered that exact question and have come up with many different and distinct possibilities. Rene Descartes and Thomas Nagel, two renowned philosophers, have written extensively on the subject,...
Utilitarianism - John Stuart Mill, 1861 - Chapter II
Book review - 2 pages - Philosophy
John Stuart Mill was one of the staunchest supporters of Utilitarianism, as well as one of the influential developers of the theory. In chapter two of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill takes on the various criticisms of the theory and refutes them one by one as either misapplication or the...
The View of an Originalist
Book review - 7 pages - Philosophy
In Keith Whittington's book, Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review, he uses a quote, originally articulated by Plato, that helps explain the diametrically opposing views the judicial system faces today: And once a thing is put in writing, the...
Examination of the My Lai massacre- one of the most infamous events of the Vietnam War Review of the book "My Lai: A Brief History with Documents" (James Stuart Olson, Randy Roberts)
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
This report will look at the book My Lai. Written by the history professors James S. Olson and Randy Roberts. Distinguished Professor of History in Houston, James S Olson is a historian whose main concern is recent American history. In this respect, he had been very interested in Vietnam, having...
The Earth as our Blanket: The Struggle for Human Importance, as described by Annie Dillard in 'For the Time Being' and Karen Armstrong in 'The Case for God'
Book review - 3 pages - Philosophy
Humans are neither individually special nor even so collectively supreme as we have lately been purporting to be. This is what Amy Dillard, in 'For the Time Being' and Karen Armstrong, in 'The Case For God', operating on the framework that God is unexplainable, focus on the human...
The Problem with the 'Grue Problem'
Book review - 5 pages - Philosophy
Nelson Goodman, in his book 'Fact, Fiction and Forecast', presents a well known problem he calls “The New Riddle of Induction.” It seeks to criticize a basic kind of inductive reasoning most notably characterized by the phrase “all emeralds are green.” Goodman wants...
Hobbes and the question of Legitimate Authority in the Leviathan: liberalism or fascism avant la lettre?
Book review - 3 pages - Philosophy
Hobbes contends that the human state of nature exists where every man is at war with every other man and in order to free ourselves from this state, we must relinquish all of our rights to one unified authority. The intention of this sovereign body is supposedly to serve the good of the people,...
Analysis of Socrates' Crito
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
The Crito strikes us as an oddly shocking story simply because Socrates, who was once portrayed as a loyalist to the gods, now argues the importance and essentiality of obedience to the laws of the state. It is natural to find The Crito surprising because Plato had described Socrates in The...
Comparing the ideas of sovereignty of Hobbes and Rousseau
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
As the study revolves around the notion of sovereignty, it is important to know what sovereignty is. Presenting the definition given by a dictionary might be of no use, but it could partially enlighten us of what we are discussing. Various dictionaries offer alternative definitions for...
John Rawls' Theory of Justice
Book review - 5 pages - Philosophy
In the Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls offered an alternative to utilitarianism that led to different conclusions about justice. He asserted that if people had to choose principles of justice from behind a "veil of ignorance" that restricted their understanding of their own position in the...
The investigation of human intention and mortal acquisition as related to virtue (Meno 77b3-78c)
Book review - 2 pages - Philosophy
A simple question posed by Meno to Socrates about virtue—“can virtue be taught”? (70a)—started an intense conversation about the definition of virtue and consequently, virtue's attributes. After concluding that the teachability of virtue would indeed be a characteristic, and...
Reflections on The Prince
Book review - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Prince, by Nicollo Machiavelli, is a foundational work of political philosophy. Through the men it has shaped and who have in turn shaped modern society, its influence is incalculable. But the methods of political success, and, indeed, the definition of that success which it presents, have...
Christianity: From realism to modernism
Book review - 5 pages - Philosophy
The aspect of Christianity is often a theme that is woven into literature. Lessons about the power of God and the miracles of Jesus Christ provide evidence for readers of the importance of God in a person's life. One specific author, Gustave Flaubert, wrote three short stories, “A Simple...
Robert O.Paxton: The anatomy of fascism
Book review - 5 pages - Philosophy
Many authors have proposed definitions for the question “what is Fascism?”, but most of them failed to give a complete definition. The historian Robert O. Paxton answered this question for the first time by focusing on the concrete: what the Fascists did, rather than what they said. To...
The Third Way by Anthony Giddens
Book review - 7 pages - Philosophy
Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science published The Third Way in 1998. What does “Third Way” mean? For The author, the goal is a renewal of the social-democracy. Through this phrase he refers to a framework of thinking and policy-making that...
Empirical feasibility in Kant's Perpetual Peace
Book review - 8 pages - Philosophy
In his essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Immanuel Kant prescribes the means of attaining a worldwide peace among nations. In theory, Kant's idea of achieving Perpetual Peace relies not on reactionary peaceful measures of ending wars once they have begun, but instead on creating a...
The resurrection of narrative: Postmodern positions on knowledge in the work of Cormac McCarthy
Book review - 6 pages - Philosophy
‘For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale.' Cormac McCarthy, by profession, is concerned with narrative. Being so concerned, conclusions can be drawn by clues both explicit and implicit pertaining to McCarthy's stance on...
An investigation into cause and effect in Hume
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
My roommate has asserted that every time she breathes pepper, she sneezes. Her past experience of breathing pepper and sneezing has always reflected her future experience of breathing pepper and sneezing. She claims that if she amasses a sufficient number of similar cases where the future has...
The circle of life: A comparative look at the metaphysics of Conway and Spinoza
Book review - 3 pages - Philosophy
Both Lady Anne Conway and Baruch Spinoza argue that the individual things in the world, everything from the mosquito to the chair to the supermodel, contain the substance of God. And by sharing in the substance of God, the chair, the supermodel, and the mosquito are all alike. At the same time,...
European social philosophy: A look at human need in Hegel's "Modern civil society"
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel gives an account of the modern social world as consisting of three institutions: the family, civil society, and the state. Focusing on modern civil society, I plan to discuss one of several ways in which human need is affected by this...
Analyzing the Amplesso: The philosophy of lovemaking in Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore
Book review - 4 pages - Philosophy
Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is usually acclaimed on grounds of its experimentation with narrativity. More specifically, Calvino weaves the beginnings of ten different pseudo-novels into a larger plotline involving the adventures of a reader (Lettore), who the narrator...
Underground Egoism
Book review - 3 pages - Philosophy
Dostoevsky's Underground Man is an attempt to offer an example of the true result of egoism, as opposed to the rational egoism of Western European Enlightenment literature. It became the intellectual fashion at this time to believe that natural law was the only law, and that if men acted...
Animals Rights and Human Wrongs in a Fast Food Nation
Book review - 5 pages - Philosophy
The abolitionist movement in slave-era America was clear-cut and its ethos was simple: Free all slaves in the name of human rights. Looking back centuries later at those who argued for slavery, most would find holes in their argument that Africans were meant to be slaves because of their racial...
Songs of Caged Birds: life and its ups and downs
Book review - 3 pages - Philosophy
Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is her first book dedicated to “all the strong black birds of promise who defy the odds and gods and sing their songs.” The cage represents a life of racism, poverty, illiteracy and dysfunction. The black birds represent the certain people...
