Philosophy Audiobooks | Non-Fiction

The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East

Brought to you by Penguin. From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part in outrageous tales of monsters and giants, of silk and spices trans-shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the 20th century much of Asia may have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back. The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of this vexed, confused but centrally important relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. China, India and Japan were all acknowledged to be both great civilizations and in crude ways superseded by the West. Christopher Harding's captivating gallery of geniuses, adventurers and con-men celebrates Asia's impact on the West in all its variety. ©2024 Christopher Harding (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Christopher Harding (Author), Christopher Harding, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

Brought to you by Penguin. This bold new take on the life and ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt explores her lessons for living in an age of uncertainty The violent unease of today's world would have been all too familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration, the banality of evil: she had lived through them all. Born in the first decade of the last century, Arendt escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of the world's most influential - and controversial - public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. In place of the forces of darkness and insanity, she pitched a politics of plurality, spontaneity and defiance. Loving the world, Arendt taught, meant finding the courage to protect it. Written with passion and authority, Lyndsey Stonebridge's We Are Free to Change the World illuminates Arendt's life and work and its urgent dialogue with our troubled present. It is a call for each of us to think our way, as Hannah Arendt did-unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly-through our own unpredictable times. 'Exhilarating, brilliant and utterly original' PHILIPPE SANDS 'Witty, moving and inspiring. An extraordinary book' SARAH CHURCHWELL ©2024 Lyndsey Stonebridge (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Lyndsey Stonebridge (Author), Cosima Shaw, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia

Brought to you by Penguin. For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not. Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates-how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of 'body reflexivity'-a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size. ©2024 Kate Manne (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Kate Manne (Author), Kate Manne, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Moral Articulation: On the Development of New Moral Concepts

This book explores the historical development of new moral concepts. Starting from examples of new moral terms invented in the twentieth century, like 'sexual harassment', 'racism', and 'hate speech', this book asks: what we are doing when we bring ethically significant acts and events under new descriptions? Are we simply naming moral phenomena that already exist, fully formed and intact, prior to their expression in language? Or are moral phenomena sensitive to the descriptions under which they fall, such that new modes of moral expression can reshape the phenomena they bring to light? Moral Articulation outlines an ethical framework that allows us to embrace a version of the latter, transformative view without sacrificing notions of moral truth, objectivity, and knowledge. The book presents a view of moral meaningfulness as extending beyond what we can presently put into words, urging that expansions in our moral vocabularies often begin in dissonant experiences of conceptual and linguistic limits. Resisting a tendency in contemporary ethics to start with situations and dilemmas whose descriptions are already given, this book argues that the struggle to piece together a discursively articulate picture of a situation is an ethical task in its own right. The result is a picture of ethical life that emphasizes the role of language in shaping who we are.

Matthew Congdon (Author), James Romick (Narrator)

Audiobook

Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying

‘I would get out of the car at every shopping centre and want to ask the stranger walking by with their trolley: “Why are you still shopping? Someone I love has died.”’ – Dela Gwala Death is a fact of life, but the experience of grief is unique to each of us. This timely collection brings together a range of voices to offer reflections on death and dying, from individual losses to large scale catastrophes. Karin Schimke revisits her troubled relationship with her late father, a Second World War survivor ‘whose brain had been broken by violence’. Madeleine Fullard, the head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team, draws us into the search for activists who were ‘disappeared’ or went missing in political circumstances between 1960 and 1994. Caine Prize winner Lidudumalingani remembers his childhood in a small village in the Eastern Cape, and how his mother always listened to death notices read over the radio as a way of bearing witness to the grief of strangers. The other contributors in this poignant and thought-provoking anthology turn their minds to subjects as varied as the ritual of washing the body of the deceased before burial, the ethics of killing small animals, and the extinction of humankind. In a time of relentless grief, Our Ghosts Were Once People reminds us that one of the small consolations of literature is that all sorrows can be borne.

Bongani Kona (ed) (Author), A Jacobs, A Pearce, C Cosa, M Boraine, N Jamndu, N Mayet, S K Tsubane, S Sebotsane, T Sebe (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Tao of Human Interactions: Zen and the Art of Communication

I decided to write this book because of the need for an effective system of managing and enhancing people's ability to communicate. Its applications span business as well as personal interactions. It can be a simple way of assessing the personalities of people around you and enabling you to better interact with them. I've played the role of an employee in middle management as well as upper management. One essential skill for any good manager is communication. It is important to be able to assess the people you are managing and also to be able to effectively deliver the correct messages. It is not only important to deliver the ideas, but it also needs to be done in a way that impacts the audience correctly. An effective manager must also assess and manage the emotional states of the people involved. I have spent a good part of my life working as an employee and in upper management and middle management. I have also consulted management for many different types of organizations in the public as well as the private sector. I have worked in specific industries such as transit, technology, public works, city government, the military, and hospitality. My approach has always been to try to create effective modes of interaction and communication between employees and middle management, as well as between management and upper management. This book is concerned mostly with daily interactions at the employee level. The system and skills taught can be applied to any interaction in the business and personal life. Management systems are often well thought out and well structured, but quite often, they do not lend themselves to the chaotic, on-the-spot timber of human interactions. The Tao of Human Communications is a system rooted in present-moment fluid interactions.

Suli Daniel Johnson (Author), Paul Metcalfe (Narrator)

Audiobook

[Spanish] - Fantasmas: Una exhortación contra Dios

El relato 'Fantasmas, (Una Exhortación Contra Dios)', es uno de los textos contenidos en los 'Cuadernos Personales' del Marqués de Sade escritos en 1802, mientras estaba encarcelado en Bicétre, institución mitad manicomio mitad cárcel, conocida como 'La Bastilla de los Canallas'. Esta obra es una exploración de la negación de la existencia de Dios y una crítica feroz a la religión y la moral tradicional. Sade cuestiona y desafía las creencias religiosas y propone una visión atea y hedonista del mundo, argumentando en contra de las estructuras de poder religioso y social. Es un ejemplo de su enfoque radical y subversivo en la literatura.

Marqués De Sade (Author), Artur Mas (Narrator)

Audiobook

Morality and Socially Constructed Norms

Observe social distancing. Tip your waiter. Give priority to the elderly. Stop at the red light. Pay your taxes. Do not chew with your mouth open. These are imperatives we face every day, imposed upon us by norms that happen to be generally accepted in our environment. These 'socially constructed norms' elicit mixed feelings. On the one hand, we treat them as valid standards of behavior and respond to their violation with emotions such disapproval, resentment, and guilt. On the other hand, we look at them with suspicion: after all, they are arbitrary human constructs that may contribute to oppression and injustice. In light of this ambivalence, it is important to have a criterion telling us when, if ever, we are morally bound by socially constructed norms and when we should instead disregard them. Morality and Socially Constructed Norms systematically develops such a criterion. It traces the moral significance of those norms to the agential commitments that underpin them, and explains why those commitments ought to be respected, provided the content of the corresponding norms is consistent with independent moral constraints. The book then explores the implications of this view for three core questions in moral, legal, and political philosophy: the grounding of moral rights, the obligation to obey the law, and the wrong of sovereignty violations.

Laura Valentini (Author), Wendy Tremont King (Narrator)

Audiobook

How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction

Distraction isn't a new problem. We're also not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Early Christian monks beat us to it. They had given up everything to focus on God, yet they still struggled to keep the demons of distraction at bay. But rather than surrender to the meandering of their minds, they developed powerful strategies to improve their attention and engagement. How to Focus is an inviting collection of their strikingly relatable insights and advice-frank, funny, sympathetic, and psychologically sophisticated. This wisdom is drawn from John Cassian's Collationes, one of the most influential manuals for monks from late antiquity. The Collationes follow Cassian and his friend Germanus as they travel around Egypt, asking a series of sage monks how they can make their minds stronger. In response, these monks offer a range of techniques for increasing focus, including setting goals, training the body, managing the memory, using mantras, taking breaks, consulting others-and, most of all, being honest about yourself. As Cassian and Germanus eventually realize, we can't escape distraction-but we can learn how to confront it and, eventually, to concentrate. Featuring an engaging new translation by Jamie Kreiner, How to Focus can help even the least monkish of us to train our attention on what matters most.

John Cassian (Author), Mike Cooper (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Weirdness of the World

This audiobook narrated by Will Collyer reveals why all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the structure of the cosmos are bizarre-and why that's a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it's hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth-whatever it is-is weird. Philosophy, he proposes, can aim to open-to reveal possibilities we had not previously appreciated-or to close, to narrow down to the one correct theory of the phenomenon in question. Schwitzgebel argues for a philosophy that opens. According to Schwitzgebel's "Universal Bizarreness" thesis, every possible theory of the relation of mind and cosmos defies common sense. According to his complementary "Universal Dubiety" thesis, no general theory of the relationship between mind and cosmos compels rational belief. Might the United States be a conscious organism-a conscious group mind with approximately the intelligence of a rabbit? Might virtually every action we perform cause virtually every possible type of future event, echoing down through the infinite future of an infinite universe? What, if anything, is it like to be a garden snail? Schwitzgebel makes a persuasive case for the thrill of considering the most bizarre philosophical possibilities.

Eric Schwitzgebel (Author), Will Collyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Summa Contra Gentiles

The four books of the Summa contra Gentiles were written by Thomas Aquinas between 1259-1265, before the considerably larger and more influential, Summa Theologica. The purpose of each work was different. Whereas the Summa Theologica addressed the faithful, especially theology students, the intention of the Summa Contra Gentiles (Systematic Exposition Against Non-Christians) was to speak to a non-aligned and even hostile audience. To that purpose, Aquinas presented arguments ‘refuting specific beliefs or heresies.' There is some evidence that it was suggested that Aquinas write Summa Contra Gentiles to convert particularly the Jews and the Muslims – at least they were underpinned by monotheism. Book I focuses on the one God. There are 102 chapters. Book II concerns the Creation, the physical universe. There are 101 chapters. Book III discusses Providence. There are 163 chapters Book IV looks at ‘Nicean' Christian doctrine in the light of other monotheistic traditions and practices. There are 97 chapters. The schema Aquinas developed was very straightforward and was continued during the Summa Theologica. Each chapter is given a topic, which is then discussed in detail. Book I Chapter V: ‘That those things which cannot be investigated by reason are fittingly proposed to man as an object of faith.' Book II XV ‘That God is to all things the cause of being.' Book III XXIX ‘That man's happiness consists not in glory.' Book 4 XXIX ‘The error of the Manicheans concerning the Incarnation.' Aquinas also established his insistence on referencing philosophy from the pre-Christian era, specifically Aristotle whom he calls The Philosopher – acknowledging his importance in Western thought. In fact, in Book I Chapter I he opens with a reference to ‘the Philosopher's opinion'. This translation, published in 1924, is formally ascribed to ‘The English Dominican Fathers from the latest Leonine Edition'. But is now acknowledged to be, like the translation of the Summa Theologica, the work of one man, Father Laurence Shapcote (1864-1947). Living in South Africa as he did, it was a remarkable achievement.

Thomas Aquinas (Author), Martin Swain (Narrator)

Audiobook

Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

David Hume (1711-1776) remains a major figure in British philosophy, particularly for two or three works, including A Treatise on Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. But he was also a prolific essayist and historian. During his lifetime Essays Moral, Political and Literary went through a number of editions and collections, far outselling his philosophy. Now, the situation is reversed. But reading the essays today it is difficult to see why. Even after 250 years they continue to be intellectually stimulating, witty, engrossing, and, in many cases, retain a relevance to our times. The variety of topics alone is appealing. Presented here in the main collection are 47 essays, divided into two parts, though not organised in any specific thematic way. Among the political essays are: Of the First Principles of Government; Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic; Of the Liberty of the Press; Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth. Economic concerns are addressed: Of Money; Of Interest; Of Public Credit; Of Taxes. Hume opens the collection with Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion, and also considered Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences before turning his attention to The Epicurean; The Stoic; The Platonist and The Sceptic. Not all the essays here were published in Hume's lifetime. Among eight in this category, some were withdrawn, some suppressed, and some simply didn't make print. These include Of Love and Marriage; Of Avarice; Of the Middle Station of Life; and even one which turned the mirror on his own activity: Of Essay-Writing. Though the essay form is not as popular as it once was, it can still sparkle, as can be seen here in the hands of a master.

David Hume (Author), Jonathan Keeble, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Philosophy Audiobooks in Non-Fiction