Philosophy is about the big questions - where are we from, why are we here, and what's going to happen afterward? - and the various answers that people have come up with. This book will guide you along the route that leads from the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle via the Summa Theologica of Aquinas to the Discourse on Method of Descartes and onward to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, with breaks for refreshment at the cooling springs of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (...) and the stirring heat of Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra. Get a Grip on Philosophy includes clear explanations of all the different branches of philosophy, traces the development of human thinking on the meaning of life, and gives the key ideas of all the significant philosophers in a digestible fashion. If you think Heidegger is a piece of agricultural machinery, this is the book for you. (shrink)

Provides an introduction to the discipline of philosophy, and includes information on the well-known figures in the field.

This article argues that contemporary space exploration, in producing visual representations of the planetary Earth for terrestrial consumption, has engendered a shift in the way the Earth - as terra firma - is both experienced and conceived. The article goes on to suggest that this shift is a key, but still largely tacit presupposition, underlying contemporary discourses on globalization and cultural cosmopolitanization. However, a close reading of some of the texts that make up the canon of 20th-century European philosophy shows (...) that this idea of a ‘deterritorialized’ planetary Earth challenges some basic presuppositions of that canon: especially its use of the pre-reflective experience of terra firma as a tropic site of intological and normative grounds. This article examines the way in which contemporary Western European philosophy - and intellectual culture generally - has responded to this challenge: and offers Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the Earth as a ‘surface without territory’ as the most intellectually and ethically viable conception of the Earth in the age of ‘planetary deterritorialization’. (shrink)