Philosophy Books

Nice, but familiar.

See also SIMPLICITY by Wm Jensen, 2001. See also THE LAWS OF SIMPLICITY by Maeda, 2006.

What's next - Simplicegery?

I picked up this book with some excitement thinking that I would be introduced to some new paradigm on how to view the world, as captured by the new science of simplexity, or what purports to be the study of the way simple things can be made complex and complex things can be made simple. In the end, I was disappointed.

Maybe it's me but I just did not get how this is a new science. What I did find was a lot of very interesting and even fascinating information about how complicated some things really are; i.e. how a pencil is the sum of a lrage number of processes, events and even other complicated systems; or at the simple end, how what was apparently an insurmountable and complicated cholera outbreak was broken by the very simple act of disabling the water pump from which the epidemic was born. These things by themselves are fascinating. However, putting them together in one room, so to speak, does not a new science make, in my opinion.

The one new insight that I do concede to Kluger is the complexity curve which he introduces early on. This is, for me, a new way to look at the relationship between complexity and simplicity, but again, I'm not so sure that this visual display of a concept necessarily creates a new science.

If you liked the book Freakonomics, you'll enjoy this one. Also, economics, complexity theory, chaos theory, fractals, evolution, randomness, medicine, the arts, the humanities, politics and several others are touched upon here. Well written, well researched, and each chapter topic is concise, full of fun concepts and intelligently, thoughtfully addressed.

"Simplexity" analyses various things and deduces how they are either simple or complex, the purpose being that we should look a little deeper into things before making consequential decisions. Sounds like pretty much common sense, and it is to a degree, but the book does highlight some scientific insights which might help the reader in approaching some situations. Here are some items which the book presents which I think are worthwhile:

1. It is the region between order and disorder which gives complexity. For instance, a piece of copper pipe can be thought of as a simple piece of frozen solid, but it gets more complex as a network of plumbing in a skyscraper, and extremely compex at the subatomic level.

2. Any system must be seen at all levels before determining if it is complex.

3. The stock market may seem complex, but major changes in it come more from some bland pieces of information, rather than from some catastrophic news events.

4. With experiments involving how people will divide up money, they show that we "appear to be wired for justice".

5. Although human behavior can't be mathematized, it is influenced thusly. For example, 1.3M people die in auto accidents globally, yet something as simple as well placed speed bumps could reduce that amount quite significantly, since there is about an 80% death rate when accidents happen above 35mph.

6. Fads spread faster rather than by first influencing the most popular people first, but by first influencing a smaller number of people but those having a close relationship with the originator.

7. Politically, it is better to market ideas about a candidate which voters already think, than by breaking bigger, more surpising things. Hence, a simple approach is more effective in such situations.

8. Complicated work skills appear at some of the least prestigous jobs. For instance, truck drivers must process visual, tactile, auditory and cognitive skills all instantaneously.

9. Animals have about 1B heartbeats per lifetime, influenced by the mass of the animal. Based on that, humans should only live to age 20 or so, but they are the exception because they use their brains to "game the system".

10. Since humans survive by converting carbs to CO2 + H2O + energy, perhaps inorganic substances share overlapping similarities with humans since CO2 and H2O also are associated with them, like with cities compared with humans.

11. Zipf's Law - certain mathematical patterns appear as how often centain words and terms show up in text. Therefore, maybe similar patterns show up elsewhere, like income, size of corporations and urban populations. They do seem to do so.

12. "Probability neglect" - people seem to fear a catastophic event (terrorist attack) rather than a more chronic one (climate change) when the chronic one can cause greater harm. Apparently, there are two systems for analyzing risk, automatic (feelings) and more thoughtful (experience).

13. "Availability heuristic" - the better able it is to summon an image of a dangerous event, the easier it is to be afraid of it.

14. In the computer world, it has been said "there are two kinds of people, software engineers and those who are afraid of them".

15. Muhammad Yunnis, who pioneered microloans, showed that surgical strikes, so to speak, are more effective in reducing poverty, but that involves complex analysis.

16. The Pareto principle applies to an 80:20 rule when looking at income distribution, but also shows up in all sorts of things.

17. For the arts, complexity falls flat, but there is still a connection. Sure, in music, but also in art, reflective of nature's quasicrystals, which have seemingly symmetric patterns though they never repeat. Jackson Pollack's paintings exhibit the mathematical concept of fractals.

So, overall, if one wants to ponder how the mind works or might work better, there are some helpful thoughts here.

This book starts with a bang, and contains occasional flashes of brilliancy. The cover artwork, title, and premise are very appealing. Unfortunately this book doesn't live up to it's parenthetical subtitle of "how complex things can be made simple."

I picked this up at an airport for a good cross-country airplane read. Initially I was very happy with this purchase.

The first two chapters are very interesting, and propose some brilliant insights into human behavior. These insights, like all of the interesting facts in this book, are disappointingly unsupported by any bibliography or source references. Hopefully the publisher will consider adding a bibliography when the edition goes into paperback.

This book fizzles out around chapter 4. There are a few interesting tidbits of information in the sports-centric 6th chapter. But it never seems to pick up the momentum created in the first two chapters.

As a senior software developer I was keenly interested in reading chapter 9, which is technology centered. It's titled "Why are your cell phone and camera so absurdly complicated? Confused by Flexibility." This is where I expected Mr. Kluger to shine on the book's subtitle "How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple." In that respect this chapter was a complete let-down.

The chapter provides an overview of the development of TVs, cell phones, and software, with dips into washing machines and other gadgets. Ultimately it boils down to a list of complaints about the complexity in technology, and a suggestion that simplification will eventually come as a result of market forces.

My expectation was that some insights would be offered on HOW to make the technology simpler. Jakob Nielsen and others have done remarkable work in this arena, though we are still only scratching the surface of making user interfaces "more intuitive." It seems that the intuitive user interface is the mystical gold standard that no-one can seem to get right. But I digress...

Read chapters 1, 2, and 6 for the meat of this book. Then move on to another book in your summer reading list.

Through an artfully constructed blend of science and common sense, Ervin Laszlo has given us a convincing reason to believe in the existence of what he calls the Akashic Field, or A-Field. This parallels what I called Universal Intelligence in 'My Owner's Manual' (2005, Voltaire Press), but the difference is much more than semantics! Laszlo's explanation is far superior to my own feeble attempt at proof.

A must-read for anyone who has ever asked "What is the meaning of life?"

Reading this book was a joyful experience. Of course, if you want a more profound, detailed, technical if you will, discussion you can read one of the several books by the same author on this or related subject.Or, other authors on this same matter. I enjoyed very much the previous to the last part: The Phenomenon of Coherence where Dr. Laszlo discusses the Coherence in Consciousness with such a simple approach that it made the complex subject a very understandable one. He also refers his discussion to several well known resources on the subject. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to introduce him/herself into the realm of universal consciousness phenomenon.

In this book, Ervin Laszlo is taking us on a journey, previously attempted by many authors/thinkers, from the antiquity to the current era. Laszlo's trek is different, however, because it not only incorporates, in quite a readable format, some of the discoveries in frontier sciences such as cosmology but also uses concepts of Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory. Such an approach allows the author a high degree of conceptual integration which he aptly labels coherence. For those whose thoughts are not quite as ethereal but are still primarily matter-bound, the venture into transpersonal psychology, the mind, etc. may still feel too many conceptual light-years away. Sporadic studies of analogies in morphology, physiology, and behavior among separated but at birth identical twins, have been just as mysterious and intriguing as is the concept of nonlocal coherence and teleportation, so far proven to exist only in the quantum world. What unifies the quantum observations with those of the studied twins is that in both instances, there is an initial entanglement, a form of a special and close relationship in physical and biologic realms respectively.
The capability of biologic entities to generate magnetic waves is also touched upon by the authors as a possible medium of near instantaneous communication within the human body. The release of magnetic waves, albeit following an external magnetic jolt, is already explored in the current usage of magnetic resonance imaging, the MRI, in medicine. It is a technology which allows for unprecedented and near-real time images of the human body in health and disease.
This book literarily teleports us to another paradigm. At a time of human and climate instability, this book goes a long way toward making the existence of Universe-wide and all-encompassing connections worth deep exploration. The author utilized science-based observations, with a special focus on the paradigm of integration/coherence, to raise the plausibility of bi-directional relationships not just within esoteric quantum physics but among all of us and all that surrounds us on any scale. This book is very timely and highly recommended.
Ivo P. Janecka, MD, MBA, PhD
Janecka@post.harvard.edu

This book is another illustrative example of how complex, philosophic and unrealizable to direct experience a theory-of-everything (TOE) can become once you wander too far down the wrong rabbit hole. A real theory-of-everything should be so simple and run so close to your being and everyday experience that a three year child could easily understand and relate to it, it should not be something requiring multiple Phds' to decode and still find yourself having many difficulties visualizing and connecting the dots to. There are much simpler TOEs around. One simply states - "God-IS" while another says "I Am That" and you can even join these together, if you want. But the ego needs its fix of complexity, inventiveness, and ingenuity and avoids naked simplicity, which does not meets its needs for specialness.

Ervin's TOE links the Vedic notion of the Akashic Field to physical space through the notion of the quantum vacuum. He sees this vacuum, as a subtle energy sea and as a very active plenum rather than an inert space and background to the world of matter. And he uses his linkage in his attempt to marry science with mystical insights and religion, mind with matter, consciousness with perception.

He indicates that information is encoded through the modulation of quantum state fluctuations in the energy sea of the quantum vacuum. The encoding mechanism itself, he sees as holographic in nature and arise out of the coherent interference patterns setup and created by the interpenetration (entanglement) of the waves represented by the wave functions of individual quanta. While, the reading mechanism of the stored information back into consciousness, he sees as relying on resonance and phase conjugation which can occur between the quantum-ly superimposed wavefunctions (quantum entanglement) setup by the chemicals in our brain and that of the quantum vacuum of the world around us.

His theory therefore borrows heavily on Bohm's idea of an implicate order and on the notion of a higher dimensional existence, in which the holographic fields representing all possible quantum states and therefore encodings can be stored. Bohm relied on the concept of "hidden variables" to connect this higher dimensional theoretical existence to the manifest existence that we experience. The big difference of course, is that Bohm's higher dimensional existence was not a higher order physical dimensional existence but only higher order dimensionally in terms of our understanding. It suggests a higher order evolution in our mental and psychic development than a higher order objective dimensional existence and is closer therefore to the understandings of Ouspensky and Kant. He saw the limited context imposed by the belief in 3-D space and time and the apparent separation between things as insufficient in itself to adequately explain many phenomena in the world appearing around us and saw that our real hope was only in transcending this limited context.

This newer context, which he called the implicate order he felt would help connect and explain all known/unknown phenomena in a higher and `truer' modality. He realized that most of the phenomena are not real in themselves but are artifacts imposed by our mind's limited context. Just as a sphere cutting two dimensional space would be experienced as growing circles and therefore "alive" when viewed in 2-D space would appear as being fundamentally static in a 3-D one. Bohm elucidated this idea in his example of the simultaneous video recordings of two views of a fish piped to two different TV screens. And he used this as an alternative explanation of Alain Aspect's findings on the non-local connection and 'faster-than-light' signaling between quantumly entangled particles.

In Bohm's view this apparent instantaneous communication between the two fish on two screens can be entirely understood if we drop the notions of two fish, the `faster than light' signaling as well as the belief in the space appearing to separate them as real. He indicated that all of this is also easily explainable, in an alternative explanation once we are prepared to transcend the many contextual limitations imposed by our current belief system. His explanation of these non-local phenomena is that all we are seeing is just two views of the same fish and we use our minds to project these different views through space, which has no true existence in itself. This then makes the fish appear to be separate as two different entities, yet somehow synchronised and communicating non-locally.

And so, the two fish are not instantaneously communicating with each other through space, because there is only one fish and no space. Therefore Bohm's theory is that we are only ever seeing (with quantum entanglement and non-local connections) different views of same undifferentiated oneness of ultimate reality that we then projected to different locations in space and time and then take to be separate entities in themselves. So we are really projecting our biased beliefs in time, space and the separation as a fundamental mold which behaves as false context that then embeds and limits our experiencing of phenomena. Within this limiting context, there can be no direct experience of reality as it is and therefore of the noumenal existence. And so like the teachings of "A Course in Miracles", only Oneness IS, the belief in separation is a faulty construct developed through limitations in our mental evolution and our many attempts to partition reality on our own terms.

And so Bohm's understandings correlate closely to Plato's analogy in "the cave". In this analogy the prisoners, tied together in the confines of the cave since birth see the meaningless shadows arising on the cave wall as representing all that there is to experience and fail to recognize, that these shadows but represent weak reflections of the real world as experienced through the distorted lens imposed by the limited scope and context through which they are experienced. In the same way Ervin hints that what we experience into our manifest world of experience instant-by-instant but one holographic encoding of all possible holographic encodings and it is this encoding that gets stored to the eternal record of the Akashic Field. He briefly describes some of the common elements to the various string theories that also support this belief and to explain that the quantum-ly collapsed state of our individual experience operating within a fundamental multi-dimensional existence beyond our own scope and experience.

The key mistakes, that I feel Ervin makes are that he takes the world of matter and space, to be real in-and-of itself. In fact, he sees matter as arising out of and to be interchangeable with space. He therefore believes in an external world and espouses the belief in Evolutionary Panpsychism that "there is no categorical divide between mind and matter... conscious matter at a lower level of organisation (the neurons in the brain) generates conscious matter at a higher level of organisation (the brain as a whole). He therefore ties the Akashic field (A-Field) to physical existence and the existing notions of the gravitational field, the electromagnetic field and the Higgs field.

But, I am confident that his belief that there is not categorical divide beween mind and matter is where he makes the compromise that will never work. They arise out of his attempt to reconcile his direct experience of his own consciousness with his concurrent belief in an external world of matter. And so if I hold a cup of tea in my hand. The epiphenomenalists will attempt to convince me that this cup can create me along with all the refinements in my consciousness, while the mystics and enlightened, say otherwise that we create the cup out of our consciousness. Ervin adds to this the third view that my consciousness and the cup co-create each other. But reason would say that one must be cause and the other the effect, and this effect is entirely dependant on its cause. The epiphenomenalists belief that our consciousness is tied to matter and cannot exist apart from it contradicts however the findings of transpersonal psychology, OBEs, NDEs, ADCs etc. The panpsychism view it ultimately the view that both consciousness and matter can exist without a real cause since each is a cause and effect of each other. The mystical and religious view is that all is consciousness, it does not deny matter as part of the experience of our consciousness but insists that it has no existence in-and-of itself, independent of this consciousness.

This is the understanding that there is no world (excepting the Absolute) apart from our conscious experience of it. Our consciousness and its subtle involutions creates the world of our experience and all its apparent evolutions. This understanding takes the world appearing outside back inside us. And so isthe understanding also matter is not and cannot ever become conscious, rather that consciousness appears in the form of matter if we limit the context enough through our conscious ideas. And so consciousness like any good river flows downstream to lower and lower levels based on more and more restrictive and limiting contexts into which we put it. In one limiting context, it may appear as a dog, in a lower one as a cell and in a lower one still as a rock. It is the same one-consciousness seen in the mind's eye through the different transparencies established by each context. Remove our belief in any particular context and consciousness will no longer appear in that form.

This was the teaching of the original and real Akashic field as espoused by Vedic thought. That it is all recorded and available because it is recorded not only at the level of our conscious development, but at the cellular level, at the organic levels and at higher levels of consciousness more subtle than our own. One last point on this, just because we experience something, does not mean that it is true. We have truer and falser experiences all the time but all perceptions have some error in it, being born out of error and the fall from the undifferentiated reality. And so people experiences their dreams as real but find them to be false and lacking substance on awaking, those with schizophrenia and on drugs experience worlds that do not exist apart from their own mind and their own belief in them and we all share in some individual and collective hallucinations that we then take to be true amd self-evident because we experience them and they are validated by others from the apparent outside.

And so, just because one experiences the world of space, matter and an external world does not mean that it is true, just part of your experience. In time, this experience will be seen to be an unreal or a very limiting modality of living as we undergo even more refined quantum evolutions in our consciousness. After all, consciousness at the organism or cellular level have no conscious experience of us because it downstream from us on the consciousness level. It can only deem, its own limited experience as valid to itself. This is not surprising, because we do the exact same thing, believing in the reality of matter and in an external world when in reality all these are just part of our own experiential level, given our level of conscious evolution. Consciousness itself will eventually disappear, because it can only exist in duality. Once restored to awareness of Oneness, duality is seen to be a faulty construct and so without purpose simply disappears.

Some of the other sections of this book attempt to join the findings of cosmology, quantum physics, transpersonal psychology, remote viewing, many lives, as well as some of the findings in modern biology such as morphogenetic fields within the context of the non-local intelligence of the A-Field. I have no problem with this just with his placement of the A-field itself and his attempts to mix-up true cause-and-effect relationships. If he had placed the Akashic field and record within the universal consciousness, and this existing as an imperfect formulation of fundamental spaceless essence of the One-mind, all would be fine.

In the book, he talks of Pierre S. Laplace's comments to emperor Napolean, namely that God was a hypothesis for which there is no longer any need. Do not mistake this for a random innocuous quote from an otherwise unbiased and impartial observer, for we all scavenge the world of our perception, in search for all that is like us and which appears to strengthen out thought system and to consolidate our own beliefs about ourselves. And this particular TOE is Ervin's own belief about himself and his attempts to offer it to you for your belief.

A Course in Miracles discusses our attempts to dismiss God in this way and have creation under our own terms and beliefs, in its section called "The Authority Problem".In indicates that this world of duality, of many apparent separate things represent nothing more than our attempts to usurp the power of God and have reality on our own terms rather than how it is. We create this artifice of our experience as a cover to hide ourselves from God. But it is all mindless and without meaning and represents only our attempts to add meaning to the meaningless. They are just attempts of escapism and the fundamental Truth that we cannot and did not create ourselves, for our creation is beyond our own error. And so God remains present but yet out of our awareness because of the many mindless and meaningless artifices we have attempted to interpose between Truth and our experience of Truth.

Ervin's background is as a system's theorist. These are the folk that go madly hopping about like magpies looking for the shiney trinkets of apparent value from many diverse fields and then attempting to join them into a convergent thought system and systems theory that meets with the umbrella of their own beliefs and biases. Sometimes, they make useful connections but most often they attempt to make a Cleopatra from many different body parts that they have collected over the years.

These are not the inner explorers or those real thinkers that build from below ground level often from first principles that need to be invented and to establish a new framework or context that does not yet exist. Einstein and Bohm fall into this latter category. If phenomena cannot be explained by the existing theory, then maybe an entire new theory and context is needed instead. They do not try to have the theory meet with the biases of common sense and personal experience knowing both can be invalid.

The FCC has officially announced plans to regulate public transmissions over the Akashic field.

Also mentioned was the possibility of relaxing their restriction of time-invariance, officially imposed upon physical laws by Western powers since the time of Galileo. Checks for repeatability of experimental results may cease as early as this July, although officials emphasized that talks are just beginning and a final date has not been set.

Sounds like your morning commute might get a lot more interesting!

Unreadable. A curiosity. A long way from English. The difficult made impossible. Many sentences, long and short, like, "So let these things have been spoken of just this much." Page 9. The footnotes are somewhat clearer than the text.

I read this book for a graduate seminar on Aristotle. I think Aristotle's ethics is his most seminal work in philosophy. In the early 1960's virtue ethics came to fore. It is a retrieval of Aristotle. It has very close parallels to the ancient Chinese philosophy of Confucius and the modern philosophy espoused in the 1970's called Communitarianism.

For Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, (EN) is about human life in an embodied state. Area of inquirery for EN is "good" this is his phenomenology. What does "good" mean? He suggests good means "a desired end." Something desirable. Means towards these ends. Such as money is good, so one can buy food to eat because "eating is good." In moral philosophy distinction between "intrinsic good" vs. "instrumental good." Instrumental good towards a desire is "instrumental good" like money. Thus, money is an "instrumental good" for another purpose because it produces something beyond itself. Instrumental good means because it further produces a good, "intrinsic good" is a good for itself, "for the sake of" an object like money. "Intrinsic good" for him is "Eudemonia=happiness." This is what ethics and virtues are for the sake of the organizing principle. Eudemonia=happiness. Today we think of happiness as a feeling. It is not a feeling for Aristotle. Best translation for eudaimonia is "flourishing" or "living well." It is an active term and way of living for him thus, "excellence." Ultimate "intrinsic good" of "for the sake of." Eudaimonia is the last word for Aristotle. Can also mean fulfillment. Idea of nature was thought to be fixed in Greece convention is a variation. What he means is ethics is loose like "wealth is good but some people are ruined by wealth." EN isn't formula but a rough outline. Ethics is not precise; the nature of subject won't allow it. When you become a "good person" you don't think it out, you just do it out of habit!

You can have ethics without religion for Aristotle. Nothing in his EN is about the afterlife. He doesn't believe in the universal good for all people at all times like Plato and Socrates. The way he thought about character of agent, "thinking about the good." In addition, Aristotle talked about character traits. Good qualities of a person who would act well. Difference between benevolent acts and a benevolent person. If you have good character, you don't need to follow rules. Aretç=virtue, in Greek not religious connotation but anything across the board meaning "excellence" high level of functioning, a peak. Like a musical virtuoso. Ethical virtue is ethical excellence, which is the "good like." In Plato, ethics has to do with quality of soul defining what to do instead of body like desires and reason. For Aristotle these are not two separate entities.

To be good is how we live with other people, not just focus on one individual. Virtue can't be a separate or individual trait. Socrates said same the thing. Important concept for Aristotle, good upbringing for children is paramount if you don't have it, you are a lost cause. Being raised well is "good fortune" a child can't choose their upbringing. Happenstance is a matter of chance.

Pleasure cannot be an ultimate good. Part of the "good life" involves external goods like money, one can't attain "good life" if one is poor and always working. Socrates said material goods don't matter, then he always mooched off of his friends! Aristotle surmises that the highest form of happiness is contemplation. In Aristotle's Rhetoric, he lists several ingredients for attaining eudaimonia. Prosperity, self-sufficiency, etc., is important, thus, if you are not subject to other, competing needs. A long interesting list. It is common for the hoi polloi to say pleasure=happiness. Aristotle does not deny pleasure is good; however, it is part of a package of goods. Pleasure is a condition of the soul. In the animal world, biological beings react to pleasure and pain as usual. Humans as reasoning beings must pursue knowledge to fulfill human nature. It must be pleasurable to seek knowledge and other virtues and if it is not there is something wrong according to Aristotle. These are the higher pleasures and so you may have to put off lower pleasures for the sake of attaining "higher pleasures."

Phronçsis= "intelligence," really better to say "practical wisdom." The word practical helps here because the word Phronçsis for Aristotle is a term having to do with ethics, the choices that are made for the good. As a human being, you have to face choices about what to do and not to do. Phronçsis is going to be that capacity that power of the soul that when it is operating well will enable us to turn out well and that is why it is called practical wisdom. The practically wise person is somebody who knows how to live in such a way so that their life will turn out well, in a full package of "goods." For Aristotle, Phronçsis is not deductive or inductive knowledge like episteme; Phronçsis is not a kind of rational knowledge where you operate in either deduction or induction, you don't go thru "steps" to arrive at the conclusion. Therefore, Phronçsis is a special kind of capacity that Aristotle thinks operates in ethics. Only if you understand what Aristotle means by phronesis do you get a hold on the concept. My way of organizing it, it is Phronçsis that is a capacity that enables the virtues to manifest themselves.

What are the virtues? Phronçsis is the capacity of the soul that will enable the virtues to fulfill themselves. Virtue ethics is the characteristics of a person that will bring about a certain kind of moral living, and that is exactly what the virtues are. The virtues are capacities of a person to act well. All of the virtues can be organized by way of this basic power of the soul called Phronçsis. There are different virtues, but it is the capacity of Phronçsis that enables these virtues to become activated. Basic issue is to find the "mean" between extremes; this is how Aristotle defines virtues.

Humans are not born with the virtues; we learn them and practice them habitually. "We reach our complete perfection through habit." Aristotle says we have a natural potential to be virtuous and through learning and habit, we attain them. Learn by doing according to Aristotle and John Dewey. Then it becomes habitual like playing a harp. Learning by doing is important for Aristotle. Hexis= "state," "having possession." Theoria= "study." The idea is not to know what virtue is but to become "good." Emphasis on finding the balance of the mean. Each virtue involves four basic points.

1. Action or circumstance. Such as risk of losing one's life.
2. Relevant emotion or capacity. Such as fear and pain.
3. Vices of excess and vices of deficiency in the emotions or the capacities. Such as cowardice is the excess vice of fear, recklessness is the excess deficiency.
4. Virtue as a "mean" between the vices and deficiencies. Such as courage as the "mean."

No formal rule or "mean" it depends on the situation and is different for different people as well. For example--one should eat 3,000 calories a day. Well depends on the health and girth of the person, and what activity they are engaged in. It is relative to us individually.
All Aristotle's qualifications are based on individual situations and done with knowledge of experience. Some things are not able to have a "mean" like murder and adultery because these are not "goods."
Akrasia= "incontinence" really "weakness of the will. Socrates thought that all virtues are instances of intelligence or Phronçsis. Aristotle criticizes Socrates idea of virtue, virtue is not caused by state of knowledge it is more complicated. Aristotle does not think you have to have a reasoned principle in the mind and then do what is right, they go together.

The distinctions between continent and incontinent persons, and moderate (virtue) and immoderate (not virtuous) persons is as follows:

1. Virtue. Truly virtuous people do not struggle to be virtuous, they do it effortlessly, very few people in this category, and most are in #2 and #3.
2. Ethical strength. Continence. We know what is right thing to do but struggle with our desires.
3. Ethical weakness. This is akrasia incontinence. Happens in real life.
4. Vice. The person acts without regret of his bad actions.

What does Aristotle mean by "fully virtuous"? Ethical strength is not virtue in the full sense of the term. Ethical weakness is not a full vice either. This is the critique against Socrates idea that "Knowledge equals virtue." No one can knowingly do the wrong thing. Thus, Socrates denies appetites and desires. Aristotle understands that people do things that they know are wrong, Socrates denies this. Socrates says if you know the right thing you will do it, Aristotle disagrees. The law is the social mechanism for numbers 2, 3, 4. A truly virtuous person is their own moral compass.

I recommend Aristotle's works to anyone interested in obtaining a classical education, and those interested in philosophy. Aristotle is one of the most important philosophers and the standard that all others must be judged by.

Aristotle was a philosopher in search of the chief good for human beings. This chief good is eudaimonia, which is often translated as 'happiness' (but can also be translated as 'thriving' or 'flourishing'). Aristotle sees pleasure, honour and virtue as significant 'wants' for people, and then argues that virtue is the most important of these.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the claim that happiness is something which is both precious and final. This seems to be so because it is a first principle or ultimate starting point. For, it is for the sake of happiness that we do everything else, and we regard the cause of all good things to be precious and divine. Moreover, since happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with complete and perfect virtue, it is necessary to consider virtue, as this will be the best way of studying happiness.

How many of us today speak of happiness and virtue in the same breath? Aristotle's work in the Nicomachean Ethics is considered one of his greatest achievements, and by extension, one of the greatest pieces of philosophy from the ancient world. When the framers of the American Declaration of Independence were thinking of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there is little doubt they had an acquaintance with Aristotle's work connecting happiness, virtue, and ethics together.

When one thinks of ethical ideas such as an avoidance of extremes, of taking the tolerant or middle ground, or of taking all things in moderation, one is tapping into Aristotle's ideas. It is in the Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle proposes the Doctrine of the Mean - he states that virtue is a 'mean state', that is, it aims for the mean or middle ground. However, Aristotle is often misquoted and misinterpreted here, for he very quickly in the text disallows the idea of the mean to be applied in all cases. There are things, actions and emotions, that do not allow the mean state. Thus, Aristotle tends to view virtue as a relative state, making the analogy with food - for some, two pounds of meat might be too much food, but for others, it might be too little. The mean exists between the state of deficiency, too little, and excessiveness, too much.

Aristotle proposes many different examples of virtues and vices, together with their mean states. With regard to money, being stingy and being illiberal with generosity are the extremes, the one deficient and the other excessive. The mean state here would be liberality and generosity, a willingness to buy and to give, but not to extremes. Anger, too, is highlighted as having a deficient state (too much passivity), an excessive state (too much passion) and a mean state (a gentleness but firmness with regard to emotions).

Aristotle states that one of the difficulties with leading a virtuous life is that it takes a person of science to find the mean between the extremes (or, in some cases, Aristotle uses the image of a circle, the scientist finding the centre). Many of us, being imperfect humans, err on one side or the other, choosing in Aristotle's words, the lesser of two evils. Aristotle's wording here, that a scientist is the only one fully capable of virtue, has a different meaning for scientist - this is a pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment view; for Aristotle, the person of science is one who is capable of observation and calculation, and this can take many different forms.

Aristotle uses different kinds of argumentation in the Nicomachean Ethics. He uses a dialectical method, as well as a functional method. In the dialectical method, there are opposing ideas held in tension, whose interactions against each other yield a result - this is often how the mean between extremes is derived. However, there are other times that Aristotle seems to prefer a more direct, functional approach. Both of these methods lead to the same understanding for Aristotle's sense of the rational - that humanity's highest or final good is happiness.

There is a discussion of the human soul (for this is where virtue and happiness reside). Aristotle argues that virtue is not a natural state; we are not born with nor do we acquire through any natural processes virtue, but rather through 'habitation', an embedding process or enculturation that makes these a part of our soul. However, it is not sufficient for Aristotle's virtue that one merely function as a virtuous person or that virtuous things be done. This is not a skill, but rather an art, and to be virtuous, one must live virtuously and act virtuously with intention as well as form.

Of course, one of the implications here is that virtue is a quantifiable thing, that periodically resurfaces in later philosophies. How do we calculate virtue?

This is a difficult question, and not one that Aristotle answers in any definitive way. However, more important than this is the key difference that Aristotle displayed setting himself apart from his tutor Plato; rather than seeing the possession of 'the good' or 'virtue' as the highest ideal, Aristotle is concerned with the practical aspects, the ethics of this. Based on Aristotle's lectures in Athens in the fourth century BCE, this remains one of the most important works on ethical and moral philosophy in history.

I've read and taught the Nicomachean Ethics several times in translation, and working through it this time with Joe Sachs' exceptional translation is what for the first time brought the urgency and interest of the text alive for me. I'd always said, in response to student complaints, something like: I know that the book itself, in style, is kind of boring and dry, but the subject matter could not be more important so try and look past that. With this translation, I didn't need to say that. You feel the urgency and importance of the subject in the writing itself. Joe Sachs has done a remarkable thing in bringing this text -- easily one of the most important philosophical works ever written -- to life.

As if that weren't enough, he has also written an excellent and very short introduction to the text that goes a long way towards overcoming many of the commmon misunderstandings of Aristotle's ethics, especially misconceptions tied to the Latin influences on translations of the text. Without any effort to give a "definitive" and inevitably partial account of the text as a whole, he confines himself to addressing three central concepts -- habit, the mean, and the noble -- shows how these have led many readers of the text astray, and points readers towards the passages in Aristotle that can overcome or resolve some of the basic misunderstandings (incidentally, one of these misunderstandings is evident in another review of this translation by FrKurt Mesick, and I can only assume he either didn't read the intro, or he disagreed with it in favor of more standard "textbook" interpretations of Aristotle, or that he is commenting on another translation and just happened to include his review under this one). Along the way, Sachs shows that the common reading of Aristotle as a kind of reformed or anti-Platonist is just false -- and that Aristotle's ethics is richer and more compelling than is usually thought precisely because of the elements of Platonism that Aristotle wisely retains.

Aristotle was a philosopher in search of the chief good for human beings. This chief good is eudaimonia, which is often translated as 'happiness' (but can also be translated as 'thriving' or 'flourishing'). Aristotle sees pleasure, honour and virtue as significant 'wants' for people, and then argues that virtue is the most important of these.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the claim that happiness is something which is both precious and final. This seems to be so because it is a first principle or ultimate starting point. For, it is for the sake of happiness that we do everything else, and we regard the cause of all good things to be precious and divine. Moreover, since happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with complete and perfect virtue, it is necessary to consider virtue, as this will be the best way of studying happiness.

How many of us today speak of happiness and virtue in the same breath? Aristotle's work in the Nicomachean Ethics is considered one of his greatest achievements, and by extension, one of the greatest pieces of philosophy from the ancient world. When the framers of the American Declaration of Independence were thinking of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there is little doubt they had an acquaintance with Aristotle's work connecting happiness, virtue, and ethics together.

When one thinks of ethical ideas such as an avoidance of extremes, of taking the tolerant or middle ground, or of taking all things in moderation, one is tapping into Aristotle's ideas. It is in the Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle proposes the Doctrine of the Mean - he states that virtue is a 'mean state', that is, it aims for the mean or middle ground. However, Aristotle is often misquoted and misinterpreted here, for he very quickly in the text disallows the idea of the mean to be applied in all cases. There are things, actions and emotions, that do not allow the mean state. Thus, Aristotle tends to view virtue as a relative state, making the analogy with food - for some, two pounds of meat might be too much food, but for others, it might be too little. The mean exists between the state of deficiency, too little, and excessiveness, too much.

Aristotle proposes many different examples of virtues and vices, together with their mean states. With regard to money, being stingy and being illiberal with generosity are the extremes, the one deficient and the other excessive. The mean state here would be liberality and generosity, a willingness to buy and to give, but not to extremes. Anger, too, is highlighted as having a deficient state (too much passivity), an excessive state (too much passion) and a mean state (a gentleness but firmness with regard to emotions).

Aristotle states that one of the difficulties with leading a virtuous life is that it takes a person of science to find the mean between the extremes (or, in some cases, Aristotle uses the image of a circle, the scientist finding the centre). Many of us, being imperfect humans, err on one side or the other, choosing in Aristotle's words, the lesser of two evils. Aristotle's wording here, that a scientist is the only one fully capable of virtue, has a different meaning for scientist - this is a pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment view; for Aristotle, the person of science is one who is capable of observation and calculation, and this can take many different forms.

Aristotle uses different kinds of argumentation in the Nicomachean Ethics. He uses a dialectical method, as well as a functional method. In the dialectical method, there are opposing ideas held in tension, whose interactions against each other yield a result - this is often how the mean between extremes is derived. However, there are other times that Aristotle seems to prefer a more direct, functional approach. Both of these methods lead to the same understanding for Aristotle's sense of the rational - that humanity's highest or final good is happiness.

There is a discussion of the human soul (for this is where virtue and happiness reside). Aristotle argues that virtue is not a natural state; we are not born with nor do we acquire through any natural processes virtue, but rather through 'habitation', an embedding process or enculturation that makes these a part of our soul. However, it is not sufficient for Aristotle's virtue that one merely function as a virtuous person or that virtuous things be done. This is not a skill, but rather an art, and to be virtuous, one must live virtuously and act virtuously with intention as well as form.

Of course, one of the implications here is that virtue is a quantifiable thing, that periodically resurfaces in later philosophies. How do we calculate virtue?

This is a difficult question, and not one that Aristotle answers in any definitive way. However, more important than this is the key difference that Aristotle displayed setting himself apart from his tutor Plato; rather than seeing the possession of 'the good' or 'virtue' as the highest ideal, Aristotle is concerned with the practical aspects, the ethics of this. Based on Aristotle's lectures in Athens in the fourth century BCE, this remains one of the most important works on ethical and moral philosophy in history.

It was a bit disconcerting to get a book whose cover art was different from the cover art on amazon, but the book arrived speedily and in good shape.

It's interesting to read this book and see where it fits in today's Right Wing Christian Conservative mind-set, especially since they have been taking over the legislative, judicial and executive levels of government. And here is a damn good analysis on the formation of Protestant ethics born from and yet opposing it's mother, Catholicism. From her isolated monastic aim to the pursuit of a virtuous life pertaining to worldly advancement in capitalistic enterprise. The book is relatively reader friendly, but with a hundred pages of footnotes.

I can see this is where Erich Fromm obtained much of his information in his Escape From Freedom, yet this is much more detailed. How the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church's control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. How the Catholics, quieter less inquisitive impulse, had a stronger propensity to remain in their crafts while the Protestants attracted to action, to the factories in order to fill the upper ranks of skilled labor and administrative positions. The restful lesiureness of society was lost to the spirit of capitalism of "time is money" and efficiency, the utilization of personal powers and material possessions or capital, the moral attributes as quoted by Benjamin Franklin of "honesty the best policy" , the acquisition of money in diligence" Seest thou a man diligent in his business. He shall stand before kings - Proverbs XXii,29. Like the conservatives: unregulate all business in free trade, but instill morals in them.


It was here that Weber brings out that Luther reinterpreted the "calling" of Christ from the life of a monk and solitude to the aim of daily life both in family, domestic and in business; all activity was now considered as sacred. And now the amount of virtuous actions in business and money making was considered as part of this calling. What developed was the rejection of monastic asceticism to a new worldly asceticism. In this, Calvin's doctrine of predestination played a large role. True one is either elected or damned at birth, but the visible signs were worldly asceticism in virtues of daily life and the outward manifestations of capital, money, successful entrepreneurship. Calvin rejected all Catholic mystical and magical realms of imaginative and religious experiential awareness and rejection to all emotional appeal of religious experience to that of the utilitarian practicality of everyday efficient living in virtuous, the Puritan distrust of men, and ethical capitalistic society.

There's an excellent comparison of Lutheranism, Calvinism, the Pietism, Methodism and the Baptists sects, and their differences relating to capitalistic society. How the Puritans obsession with salvation from their anxious fear of death differs greatly from the Machiavelli proud love of this life. How conduct and poverty were signs to them of damnation and not of the elect. Man was systematized into a mechanical code of conduct as even the name Methodists implies "methods," to prove one's faith in worldly activity, as in book keeping, paying debts, scoring credit with God as in business transactions. The whole moral code of ethics can be described in monetary transactions as the price for sin, the paying of debts, the ransom payment and so forth, a systematic rational ordering of he moral life as a whole. Pietism allowed more emotion which was foreign to Calvinism, but not without methodical treatment and formulations, assuming grace is offered to all men, perhaps only at a certain moment in life, so here was the restorations of sacraments and confessionals from sin, grace being applied.

The Methodists saw all work not for salvation but for the glory of God, thus the clear sign of living a virtuous life, performing good works and pies actions with the Wesley anti-Calvinistic doctrine of grace. Here the doctrine of predestination was given up for the doctrine of ascetic conduct and grace.

And so as the unequal distribution of goods were seen as Divine Providence, then so was their productivity at low wages, as God's grace and damnation has secret ends unknown to men. Begging which was not only allowed but by Monks considered honorable, was now contemptible and the poor were so by God and thus the legalized exploitation and elected grace of the employer to his calling by God. There were differences though, as for and against big businesses and so forth.

While the Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. "In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport." ... "The next task would be to show the significance of ascetic rationalism." p. 182

Max Weber (1864-1920) had noticed that Protestants appeared excessively under the numbers of people who economically were successful. The Catholicism seemed to make it easier (due to an integrated sin pardon mechanics) to enjoy life in between times. The Mediterranean countries have saved this as a differentiable lifestyle till nowadays, but particular the Nordic, by the majority Protestant countries put the human beings into a hermetic box of duty fulfillment and responsibility. The suicide installment is also higher in these areas: Unfortunately, Luther's theological revolution was not namely a liberation, no reduction of control but its millionfold multiplication: In the end everyone became the merciless inspector of himself. The reformation has increased the pressure extremely. Now mixed religious aims and working actions were bound each other with the visibility of financial success. Other religions, the Buddhism, the Islam etc., seem strikingly less in conformity with the capitalism in this regard. On the contrary: Being obstinate or disinterested seem to be transported rather. The Calvinistic capitalism on the other hand produces (besides all superficial correctness) a subtle social coldness, a fight of everybody against everybody, which promotes the assumption, that there is not enough space in the paradisiacal sky for everyone at all. Therefore the fear of being not preferred later on by the dear God starts a hitting and fighting between the human beings vehemently. Being religious in this manner has not contributed to humanness, but, instead, made some steps backward globally, regarding the great individual sovereignty, which the renaissance man already had achieved. Face of the fact, that (at the moment) a second theocracy seems to spread himself apparently in the USA -- at least in the opinion of the ones who sit at the decisive Washington coordinating points -- in the face of such developments among the conservative Christians of the USA, which surpass many a nastiness of the frowned Machiavellism or the elite oriented Darwinism, yes even the racism -- in view of such developments it seems recommended to examine the rational analyses of Max Weber again ...

Weber's "Protestant Ethic" has here been published along with the author's responses to various reviews; and this is a good idea as it may be helpful in dispelling the misconceptions that arose from the "Weber thesis" and are still rampant. Weber primarily had to deal with interpretations of his work that took him to say that modern capitalism had its cause in the attitudes and working habits of certain minority groups, to wit the "Protestants" or "Puritans" of the early modern era. So it was Weber's primary aim in his "counter-reviews" to point out that he had made no such claim at all; in fact, he assumed that modern capitalism had its origin in various social, political und scientific developments of the West completely independent of Protestantism. In particular, he tried to refute two common prejudices: that modern capitalism arose from greed and avarice, or alternatively, from industriousness. The Chinese, as far as we can tell, throughout history had been as industrious and hard-working as any people in the West, but failed to develop modern capitalism.
What Weber's thesis was all about was a change of outlook of certain groups of people at the beginning of the modern era. He noted, that-largely as a result of religious beliefs and attitudes-some people rejected the age-old and still prevalent ideal of the "universal man" of sound erudition and refined taste, the "gentleman" ideal of the Renaissance, in favor of a completely different life goal, that of the "professional man". This reduction of all human interests to success in one's vocation, has-far from being the "cause" of modern capitalism-simply proved to be the optimal adaptation to the ecological niche created by it.
While the upside of this development, in Weber's reckoning of things, was the emergence of the modern "rationalistic" outlook in all areas of life and thought, the downside was a thorough "disenchantment" of the world. Despite it enormous success in transforming the world and making it truly "humane", the human side of the ledger was not so upbeat. The more successful modern capitalism was, the more it produced a breed of individuals different from anything the world has seen before: "experts without wisdom, hedonists without a heart", as Weber contemptuously remarked, was the final outcome of the "Protestant ethic". (It is now upon us to prove him wrong on that charge.)

This classic is more referred to than read by economists in Anglo-Saxon countries where Weber is considered mainly a sociologist. When I went to Graduate School (Wisconsin) it was not even mentioned. A pity, because it is a milestone in the search for explanations of historical events, in this case the extraordinary spread of capitalism in Protestant countries. One
may not buy Weber's thesis in part or in toto, but it is so carefully argued that dissent has to be very nuanced and scholarly to be persuasive. (An example of such creative dissent is Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism").

This Edition contains a fairly good translation; its main weakness is the arrangement of notes (Editor's and Weber's) at the end of each chapter. Hard to find because tops of pages don't contain chapter titles. And the notes are an important part of the whole.

The book also contains several of Weber's rebuttals to some citicisms that he received. Since these critiques are not reprinted here, the rebuttals are not fully self-explanatory. Moreover, this section is not inspiring for another reason: the tone of academic petulance diminishes the image of a great scholar.

I managed to have this book added as an alternate after fighting for years to avoid teaching another text, Humanities Through the Arts. That text had a very bad habit of talking in circles and I spent more time trying to explain the book than I did teaching the course. Our students normally have little to no exposure to the Arts and are easily discouraged. Not only is this little book half the price of the other but it is very straight forward in its approach. If you want a book that offers lots of chapters for testing purposes this isn't it. If you do a lot of group work and use projects and your own examples to teach, this text nails down the basics..

I ordered this book based on the ISBN # from the university. What I received was same title of book - WRONG ISBN - Creates a lot of problems. I would have not taken the book at any price if it had not been the correct edition. Accelerated course does not allow time to return and get correct book.

I had to purchase this book for my Arts & Humanities requirement at WGU. I have enjoyed the user friendliness of the book. I have a greater knowledge of Art History, but next to nothing about composers etc, I have found this book to be a wonderful introduction into the world of the Arts, and look forward to finding ways to utilize what I've learned in the classroom!

I have taught a course on the Humanities using this book, and found it mostly spot on in its specific contents. How to present all of the Humanities using one paperback? But - with just a few exceptions - this presents a good first look and useful rules of thumb in approaching the various disciplines. In areas that are underserved, such as Landscape Art, it actually fills a void. I recommend it and will use it again.

I used this book for my introduction to fine arts class and thought it was very good. Easy to understand and follow, and gave good information straight out without haveing to search for defintions or other stuff.

I worked on the production of this translation at The University of South Carolina in 1998. I designed the costumes and masks. Before I began the design process, I read other translations of the script. Peter's translation was done with attention to what the characters were saying, not just the literal dictionary definition of the Ancient Greek. The pacing and flow of the play is great and I recommend it to anyone who thinks that Ancient Greek plays are dull and better left alone.

I read this book as a recommendation from a friend, supposedly I wasn't going to be able to put it down. While I didn't find the book as difficult to read as some, the writing style is still dry and somewhat unapproachable. I was also told that the underlying ideology of the book was distinctly non-western in tone and content. However, when you scutinize the basic logic of the philosophy that he derives from the observation that many myths are similar in cross-culturally relevant ways, one sees that his concept is essentially Christian in nature.

Campbell asserts, toward the end of the text, that mankind is unified not only to the rest of humanity but to the whole of reality. Somehow he concludes that because many stories originating from many disperate cultures are basically similar man must not be the summation of his parts or the combination of his actions, body, thoughts and deeds. In fact all of the characteristics and actions of man are mere accidents and it is simply the foible of turning away from our underlying unified "essence" toward the dividing ego that causes all of the suffering in the world.

Supposedly this is a non-christian concept, however, if we replace essence with God we see that these two supposedly different ideas are nearly identical. Basic theology asserts that God is one, much like the oneness of Campbell's unifying essence. God is also the ground from which all being arises, much like the fundemental essence of reality to which man and all things are connected, and from which all things are derived. Also, in Christianity man causes suffering in his life by turning from God toward himself, seeking to worship the value of ego over the value of man's connectedness to God. How does this differ from the assertion by Campbell that man cuses much of his own strife by turning away from the fundamental "essence" of all reality toward the purely, transitory, non-eternal, accidental ego which is supposedly only an illusion of who each one of us truly is.

Ultimately it's deep philosophy for a thirteen year old who thinks it's neat to wonder about the coyote eating the rabbit and the coyote dying and decomposing and a plant eating the coyote and then a rabbit eating the plant. Aside from that it's a pretty decent, though biased introduction to world mythology, espesially if you're lazy (like me) and don't intend to actually read most of the myths and stories mentioned in the book.

Perhaps the greatest validation I could afford this book is its applicability to my own life.

I read parts of this book when I was younger. It was somewhat interesting then in a very abstract way of "Oh, look at how all the stories are similar. Cool."

Since that time, however, having nothing to do with Campbell, I have followed my highest intuitive guidance (or, my bliss, as Campbell would say) through hell and high water. I have reached the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy. Confused why my life was so miserable all the while the mystical forces guiding me were more prevalent than ever, I was struck by the notion that I was being stripped of my ego.

A few days later I was in a bookstore and, without any thought of a connection, began flipping through this book. I could not copy passages fast enough. I was reading - in Campbell's writing and in the ancient stories throughout time - the experience through which I have been traveling.

In following my highest intuitive guidance (aka bliss), I have inadvertently lived the hero's journey: removed from the comforts of my life, put through tests where the realm between the physical and the metaphysical shattered with forces helpful and hurtful engaging almost simultaneously, been stripped of my ego, been given vast insights to help save our civilization, and am now reaching the phase of return.

Whatever the critiques of this book are with regard to outdated psychological theories and science, this book reveals the ancient wisdoms of humanity available to all if they all simply follow their bliss. Those who critique it on technicalities have simply not experienced the transcendence necessary to read this book and the stories of history as an inadvertent autobiography.

Perhaps most compelling about this book is I have to remind myself it was written in 1949. The language and style are so timeless.

For those burdened by the many stories and complexities within, I would suggest that there are two ways of reading this book:

1. Academically, whereby you study the stories and their relation to the overall theme.

2. Stylistically, whereby you skim through the stories and focus on Campbell's analytical writing. In just doing that, you will be able to find the main thrust of the journey's key points without getting lost in how ancient cultures understood this same journey for themselves.

This work is Campbell's most famous and has been the source most quoted as being the inspiration for "The Hero's Journey" as outlined in many Hollywood screenplays. Most notably George Lucas' Star Wars Saga. While many may find the work to be more scholarly in its approach and not as easily accessable as some of the books written about Campbell's ideas, it is a necessary part of the student of mythology's library. Some may find it easier to get acquainted with the teacher's work through other volumes of his collected works, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces may be an easier read after one is already abreast of Campbell's modus operendi. A casual reader may find that the scholar's approach to be a bit hard to get through, although this only serves to prove the point that Campbell's scope of knowledge and research was vast. And yet this is an essential component to illustrating his theme, in that it ties all the disparate cultures under one mythic banner. Campbell found that all the heroes in all cultures, despite what costumes they wore, or weapons they carried, all followed one hero thread that cut across all cultures and nationalities. His work serves to remind the tellers of tales that despite all that makes us different, we are all the same in the most important way. We are all human. To students of mythology this is a must read!

There's nothing I can say about Campbell that hasn't been written already. I used this masterpiece of his work to write my Master's Thesis and got nominated for a creative thesis award. Thank you, Joseph Campbell, may your soul rest in peace!

Ok, this is the big one! Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" is a revolution in the field of Anthropology of Religion. His lucid study of Mythology has literally changed the way the world views ITSELF. Ok I'm sorry I don't want to overstate things, but I don't think I am. If you read this book and actually understand what he is saying you wont be the same.

Campbell has found the creative archtypes found throughout history in the mythologies of all cultures. There is an excellent blend of classical psychology as well as Occidental and Oriental Mythology references.

If you have never read Joseph Campbell and you love Mythology BUY THIS BOOK! Buy the POWER OF MYTH and watch the video with Bill Moyers.

Joseph Campbell is the best.

There are few books that lift the veil surrounding religion--Berger's book is one of them. Religion is not simply a spiritual phenomenon, it is a social one as well. Berger zeros in on this social aspect and allows us to see one of the reasons that every society has, and undoubtedly will continue to have, religion. Berger argues that human beings live in a peculiar world; it is a cultural world, a world of meaning, and religion plays a specific role in creating and maintaining this world. Is the book difficult to read as some commentators have said? Yes. Is it worth the effort? Undoubtedly. After reading this book, the reader will never view their world or religion in quite the same way.

Peter Berger's "The Sacred Canopy", while containing some insightful ideas, are too muddled down with Berger's personal terminology to be considered an interesting read. Does Berger point out some interesting and intriguing thoughts? Yes. But that's not the argument here. I consider myself an intelligent, university-educated individual, but Berger makes up his own words, comes up with entirely new meanings for existing terms, and throws in as many Latin terms as he can in one sentence, that simply trying to comprehend one sentence becomes a chore. Moreover, each chapter feels redundant with ideas expressed in previous areas throughout the book. Berger's inflated language gives the reader a feeling of his pompousness and self-importance. If you'd like the condensed version of the book, here it is: Religion was/is created by man as a "sacred canopy" to give us meaning as human beings, but we forget that religion is man-made and thus give power to religion to control us. The End.

A seminal work in sociological theory. Berger's argument that the process of being religious comes from a deep seated biological need for humans to structure their environments is both empirically demonstrable as it is important for theologians in order to understand the assumptions that govern doctrine.

The process is a dialectic from externalizing structures of understanding reality that create order. These are then apprehended as objects by others and internalized. From this internalization new structures will then emerge as the process continues. Epistemologically, this process is then regulated in terms of plausibility and legitimation. As structures of order are created, different ways of knowing and understanding the world are made plausible and thus different forms of knowledge are seen as legitimate ways of understanding and maintaining order in the world. The end of this process is to make the world a habitable place by mitigating the effects of disorder or "anomy".

The last piece on secularization traces the division of the numinous reality of God and the spiritual things of God and the physical structures of experience. This begins in the radical division between Yahweh and Israel, is re-united in medieval Catholicism, and then re-divided in Protestantism. Rationalism in the Nineteenth century then creates a challenge where theology is forced to define itself against a more plural environment where the plausibility of religious dogma is challenged by other equally plausible structures of reality. Maintaining these religious plausibility structures is legitimated in terms of marketing their respective value rather than assuming that one's dogma must be true in itself.

Berger closes with the state of this process in the late 1960's where theology was in the process of coming out of the neo-orthodox reassertion of the otherness of God and primacy of Scripture and investing itself with psychological and existential legitimation. He uses Tillich as an example of this.

It is important for theologians to understand that in the process of doctrinal analysis and synthesis, that theology is relative to social constructions that shape doctrine by virtue of being human. The tendency is to mask theology as some discipline which is beyond the reproach of answering the challenge of what we can observe empirically. This is not the case is theology is a discipline that can develop and progress as do other disciplines in the field of what humans can know and understand about the world and themselves.

People will have problems with some of Berger's ideas; namely that religion is a social construction. So, of course removing "truth" with a capitol T will offend. However wordy or latinate his words get, he is still, by far, much more lucid and friendly to native english speakers than the majority of those who write in this feild.
Those interested in the modern, g-d-free, clean shiny secular religious studies will find a useful text here.
Those complaining about his lingistic machinations simply have not been plunged into the rather absurdity that populates the majority of religious studies. It is not an "easy read" as one would read say non-fiction for enjoyment, but, by far, much more lucid and approachable than other writers.

This work is mostly a protraction of the ideas expressed in Berger's previous co-written book THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY. Those who are familiar with that work will most likely not be surprised by the arguments put forward here. Much of the same methodology and argumentation are employed once again. As for those who are not familiar with the previous work, I believe they will find that this book stands well enough on its own merits.

Berger's sociological approach to religion, although incomplete, is insightful. He attempts and, I believe, somewhat succeeds to find a middle ground between ideational and materialistic approaches to the sociology of religion. His focus remains consistently throughout the human agency in the construction of their social reality and how this reality becomes objectified and subsequently becomes reified as an immovable, impenetrable `thing' which is perceived as superhuman-and more specifically, the role of religion in facilitating and sustaining this very process. From here, he moves on to the nature of this dynamic in modern societies, secularism and pluralism being shorthand for this, and the problems of social legitimation this entails.

Overall, this work is too cursory and pithy to be too satisfying for those who desire a robust sociology of religion. As Berger states, it was not his intention to provide this. Rather, one finds an exploration of how his prior work could be applied to the sociological study of religion.

A professor of mine in college assigned this book for a class, and it quickly became my favorite book of all time and remains so a decade later. I have what I would consider a sizable passion for philosophy, but I found taking a survey of the great philosophers rather difficult. Reading the primary, original texts are often opaque and dense at best (and there is no way one can read everything, even by a single philosopher), but many books that claim to be "introductions" to the greats are often very terse and rarely get too deep into the material.

This book is just-right. It introduces you to the the major philosophers neither by overly simplifying them or batting you over the head with their details.

Finally, as the title of the book suggests, Melchert wonderfully connects these philosophers together showing how they influenced each other and how different philosophers attempt to answer the same fundamental questions.

If you are interested in digging into classical philosophy, this is a good start. Some of the earlier chapters are very dry, but it is helpful to understand who came before Socrates. If you only want to take "intro to philosophy" this book is not for you.

The book we ordered was in great shape and save us mega bucks. Thanks

This book is written with passion. Its story is told not through the author, but through the anecdotes, vignettes, and interviews provided by his students. A reader can tell what an inspired and inspiring teacher Mr. Michie really is. I would recommend this book to any new teachers or anyone interested in the problems of social justice and education in the US.

I read this for Education class and it was very interesting. Most books i read are very boring, this one i actually read the whole thing with no skimming. Based on a teachers' experience at a Chicago middle school.

Gregory Michie's series of vignettes weaves an interesting story of his life as a young, inexperienced teacher in a poor and violent public school system. Although the book's time line is scattered, the reader can easily get a feel for the struggles of both Michie and his students. Set in the 1990's in the "Back of the Yard" Mexican-American neighborhood in inner city Chicago, we are introduced briefly, yet intensely, to many of Michie's students who struggle to stay in school. The pages fly by because they are rich with dialogue and stories from Michie's colorful students. If you was looking for an insightful book with a passionate look into the mind of some diversely opinionated adolescents, this is a great book for you.
As a teacher, I found Michie's book inspiring. Although the time line, at points, is difficult to follow, I sincerely enjoyed the honest approach of the book. As a result of reading this text, I decided to spend more one on one time with some of my students. Michie, with the help if a reverend-like teacher, starts to look past the "gangster" in order to find the student inside. I thought that maybe I had been judging some of my most challenging students too quickly. Have I been subconsciously treating the students who I know to be involved in more trouble differently? Have I been ignoring kids because I think that "they don't care anyway"? I tried to put my feeling aside and at least talk to some of the students whom I found troublesome. Every day last week, I invited a new kid to eat lunch with me. Even if I could not be the extra-curricular, field trip-loving Michie, I could at least try something! With a few, I found immediate results. It seemed to me, that their classroom antics were a cry for my attention, and an individual conference was the perfect medicine. One child in particular, asked to have lunch with me again, and I complied. When he began misbehaving in class later on that afternoon, all it took was a sideways glance of disappointment, and he was back on track. This small simple strategy may seem obvious to many (and it was to me, I just never did it!), but it really worked. I do not think that I would have made an effort to spend quality time with my "problem" children if I had not read this book.

Greg Mitchie gives a very personal account about the compassion and hard work involved in teaching. There is a great balance between teacher and student reflections on school, in particular middle school, and life. It is a thoughtful and emotional insight into what being a teacher should be about - promoting student voice. Great read for anyone insterested in teaching at the secondary level, at the beginning of their teaching career or in an inner city.