Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

John Dewey

How We Think

"How We Think" is John Dewey's exposition on the nature of human thinking. Illustrated through numerous everyday examples, Dewey details the varying processes by which one might engage in the critical thinking process. With the aim of making students better at the methods of thought and thus better students, "How We Think" is an essential read for both students and teachers alike.

Alenka Zupancic

The Odd One in: On Comedy

A Lacanian look at how comedy might come to philosophy's rescue, with examples ranging from Hegel and Molière to George W. Bush and Borat.Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object--of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed comedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupančič draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, ...

Plato

Gorgias

An unabridged edition with introduction for study: Plato can do with words just as he pleases; to him they are indeed 'more plastic than wax' (Republic). We are in the habit of opposing speech and writing, poetry and prose. But he has discovered a use of language in which they are united; which gives a fitting expression to the highest truths; and in which the trifles of courtesy and the familiarities of daily life are not overlooked.