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A Brief History of Thought
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From the timeless wisdom of ancient Greece through to Christianity, the Enlightenment, existentialism and postmodernism, A Brief History of Thought brilliantly and accessibly explains the enduring teachings of philosophy – including its profound relevance in today’s world as well as its essential role in achieving happiness and living a meaningful life. This lively journey through the great thinkers challenges every one of us to learn to think for ourselves and asks us the most important question of all: how can we live better?
Learning to Live
From the ordered universe of the ancient Greeks to the shadows of Nietzsche's nineteenth century, LEARNING TO LIVE shakes the dust from the history of philosophy and takes us on a fascinating journey through more than two millennia of humanity's search for understanding - of the world around us and of each other. Both a sparkling and accessible history of Western thought, and a courageous dissection of how religion and philosophy have converged and clashed through the ages, Luc Ferry's blueprint for a new humanism challenges every one of us to learn to think for ourselves, and asks us the most important question of all: how can we live better?
Man Made God
What happens when the meaning of life based on a divine revelation no longer makes sense? Does the quest for transcendence end in the pursuit of material success and self-absorption? Luc Ferry argues that modernity and the emergence of secular humanism in Europe since the eighteenth century have not killed the search for meaning and the sacred, or even the idea of God, but rather have transformed both through a dual process: the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human. Ferry sees evidence for the first of these in the Catholic Church's attempts to counter the growing rejection of dogmatism and to translate the religious tradition into contemporary language. The second he traces to the birth of modern love and humanitarianism, both of which demand a concern for others and even self-sacrifice in defense of values that transcend life itself. Ferry concludes with a powerful statement in favor of what he calls "transcendental humanism"—a concept that for the first time in human history gives us access to a genuine spirituality rooted in human beings instead of the divine.
The New Ecological Order
Is ecology in the process of becoming the object of our contemporary passions, in the same way that Fascism was in the 30s, or Communism under Stalin? In The New Ecological Order, Luc Ferry offers a penetrating critique of the ideological root of the "Deep Ecology" movement spreading throughout the United States, Germany, and France. Traditional ecological movements, or "democratic ecology," seek to protect the environment of human societies; they are pragmatic and reformist. But another movement has become the refuge both of nostalgic counterrevolutionaries and of leftist illusions. This is "deep ecology." Its followers go beyond practical critique of human greed and waste: they call into q...
The Wisdom of the Myths
“A marvelously wise and expansive book. . . . Ferry writes with warmth, wit, and energy; one could call his prose conversational, but it’s rare to have a conversation quite this wonderful.” — Boston Globe A fascinating journey through Greek mythology that explains the myths' timeless lessons and meaning Heroes, gods, and mortals. The Greek myths are the founding narratives of Western civilization: to understand them is to know the origins of philosophy, literature, art, science, law, and more. Indeed, as Luc Ferry shows in this masterful book, they remain a great store of wisdom, as relevant to our lives today as ever before. No mere legends or clichés ("Herculean task," "Pandora's box," "Achilles heel," etc.), these classic stories offer profound and manifold lessons, providing the first sustained attempt to answer fundamental human questions concerning "the good life," the burden of mortality, and how to find one's place in the world. Vividly retelling the great tales of mythology and illuminating fresh new ways of understanding them, The Wisdom of the Myths will enlighten readers of all ages.
Political Philosophy 3
What is the common element linking the right to health care and the right of free speech, the right to leisure and the right of free association, the right to work and the right to be protected? Debates on the rights of man abound in the media today, but all too often they remain confused and fail to recognize the fundamental political conceptions on which they hinge. Several French theorists have recently attempted a new account of rights, one that would replace the discredited Marxist view of rights as mere formalities concealing the realities of class domination. In this final volume of Political Philosophy, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut summarize these efforts and put forward their own set of arguments.
Homo Aestheticus
Can subjective, individual taste be reconciled with an objective, universal standard? In Homo Aestheticus, Luc Ferry argues that this central problem of aesthetic theory is fundamentally related to the political problem of democratic individualism. Ferry's treatise begins in the mid-1600s with the simultaneous invention of the notions of taste (the essence of art as subjective pleasure) and modern democracy (the idea of the State as a consensus among individuals). He explores the differences between subjectivity and individuality by examining aesthetic theory as developed first by Kant's predecessors and then by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and proponents of the avant-garde. Ferry discerns two "m...
Why We Are Not Nietzscheans
Preface to the 1991 French Edition 1 Hierarchy and Truth 1 2 The Brute, the Sophist, and the Aesthete: "Art in the Service of Illusion" 21 3 Nietzsche's French Moment 70 4 "What Must First Be Proved Is Worth Little" 92 5 The Nietzschean Metaphysics of Life 110 6 Nietzsche as Educator 141 7 The Traditional Paradigm - Horror of Modernity and Antiliberalism: Nietzsche in Reactionary Rhetoric 158 Index 225.
On Love
All the great ideals that gave life meaning in earlier societies - God, the nation, revolution, freedom, democracy - are in disarray today, questioned by many and rejected by those who have lost faith in them. But there is another value, rooted in the birth of the modern family and in the passage from traditional to modern marriage, that has transformed our lives in profound and often unrecognized ways: love. It affects not only our personal lives but many aspects of our social and collective life too, from art and education to politics. In this book Luc Ferry shows how the quiet rise of love as the central value in modern societies has created a new principle of meaning and a new definition...
Political Philosophy 2
Because contemporary political philosophy owes a significant debt to the great nineteenth-century German philosophies of history, a sound knowledge of German Idealist philosophy is crucial to an understanding of our own time. In Political Philosophy 2, Luc Ferry provides not only a thorough introduction to German Idealism and its critics, but also an insightful look at contemporary political philosophy. Ferry begins this second volume of his ambitious three-volume Political Philosophy by considering both the structure and the potential political effects of the various philosophies of history born of German Idealism. He focuses on the key question of whether, and to what extent, the principle of reason may be said to govern the totality of the historically real. This leads to an examination of Hegel's criticism of the moral view of the world and to an assessment of the phenomenological criticism of Hegel put forth by Heidegger and Arendt.
