San Antonio College Library

"In Uncommon Sense, Andrew Pessin leads us on an entertaining tour of philosophy, explaining the pivotal moments when the greatest minds solved some of the knottiest conundrums--by asserting some very strange things. But the great philosophers don't merely make unusual claims, they offer powerful arguments for those claims that you can't easily dismiss. And these arguments suggest that the world is much stranger than you could have imagined: You neither...

Part cautionary tale, part celebration, this book is a witty, deeply engaging guide for the perlexed.

Presents profiles of one hundred philosophers, from ancient times to the present day.

"The author shows us a Socrates who, though he has been long overshadowed by his successors Plato and Aristotle, represented the true turning point in Greek philosophy, religion and ethics. In his quest for the historical Socrates, the author focuses on Plato's earlier dialogues, setting the Socrates we find there in sharp contrast to the Socrates of later dialogues, in which he is used as a mouthpiece for Plato's own doctrines, many of them anti-Socratic...

"From philosophy's founding fathers - Thales, Socrates, Plato ... to great minds of the post-modern era - Satre, Ayer, Feyerabend ... this concise new guide presents 100 of the world's most influential thinkers. Arranged from the ancient world to the present day, each philosopher's key ideas, notable works and pronouncements are encapsulated in a series of succinct biographies, accompanied by illustrations, at-a-glance fact panels and thought-provoking...

"This is the first full-length biography in more than fifty years of Immanuel Kant, one of the giants among the pantheon of Western philosophers as well as the one with the most powerful and broad influence on contemporary philosophy." "It is well known that Kant spent his entire life in an isolated part of Prussia, living the life of a typical university professor. This has given rise to the view that Kant was a pure thinker with no life of his own,...

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of...