The Immortalization Commission

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The Immortalization Commission

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Doubleday Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307375730
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis The Immortalization Commission by : John Gray

Download or read book The Immortalization Commission written by John Gray and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great philosopher will change the way you think about your life. For most of human history, religion provided a clear explanation of life and death. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries new ideas — from psychiatry to evolution to Communist — seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. We would ourselves become God. This is the theme of a remarkable new book by one of the world's greatest lving philosophers. It is a brilliant and frightening look at the problems and opportunities of a world coming to grips with humankind's now solitary, unaided place in the universe. Gray takes two major examples: the belief that the science-backed Communism of the new USSR could reshape the planet, and the belief among a group of Edwardian intellectuals — popularized through mediums and automatic writing — that there was a non-religious form of life after death. Gray presents an extraordinary cast of philosophers, journalists, politicians, charlatans and mass murderers, all of whom felt driven by a specifically scientific and modern world view. He raises a host of fascinating questions about what it means to be human. The implications of Gray's book will haunt its readers for the rest of their lives.

The Immortalization Commission

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 9781429953917
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (539 download)

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Book Synopsis The Immortalization Commission by : John Gray

Download or read book The Immortalization Commission written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title At the heart of human experience lies an obsession with the nature of death. Religion, for most of history, has provided an explanation for human life and a vision of what comes after it. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such beliefs came under relentless pressure as new ideas—from psychiatry to evolution to communism—seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands: humans could cease to be animals, defeat death, and become immortal. In The Immortalization Commission, the acclaimed political philosopher and critic John Gray takes a brilliant and frightening look at humankind's dangerous striving toward a scientific version of immortality. Probing the parallel faiths of Bolshevik "God-builders," who sought to reshape the planet and psychical researchers, who believed they had evidence of a nonreligious form of life after death, Gray raises fascinating questions about how such beliefs threaten the very nature of what it means to be human. He looks to philosophers, journalists, politicians, charlatans, and mass murderers who all felt driven by a specifically scientific and modern worldview and whose revolt against death resulted in a series of experiments that ravaged whole countries. An urgent examination of Darwin's post-religious legacy, The Immortalization Commission is an important work from "one of Britain's leading public intellectuals" (The Wall Street Journal).

The Immortalization Commission

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141924268
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (419 download)

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Book Synopsis The Immortalization Commission by : John Gray

Download or read book The Immortalization Commission written by John Gray and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN and TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years we turned to religion for answers, but with the twentieth century came ideas from evolution and politics to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands. Such ideas went on to have both trivial and terrible effects: from a sweeping craze of séances to the mass-murders of the Stalinist terror. Gray raises vital questions about the 'truths' science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human.

The Immortalization Commission

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Penguin Books
ISBN 13 : 9780141041889
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (418 download)

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Book Synopsis The Immortalization Commission by : John Gray

Download or read book The Immortalization Commission written by John Gray and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Gray's The Immortalization Commission- The Strange Quest to Cheat Death raises vital questions about the 'truths' science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human. At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years, we turned to religion for our answers, but at the turn of the twentieth centuries ideas from evolution and politics seemed to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands. These ideas would have both trivial and terrible effects, from the nightmares of H. G. Wells's science fiction and the wild, sweeping craze of seances to the murder of millions in the Stalinist terror. 'Our sharpest critic of utopian fantasies skewers the crazed but enduring dream of cheating age, time and death' Boyd Tonkin,Independent 'Elegant ... He is on to something important regarding the delusion that science consists of indefinite progress' Sunday Telegraph 'One of the most important and insightful polemicists currently writing in English... humanism's most vocal critic' Financial Times 'Gray is an engaging writer, an entertaining historian and a controversialist whose opinions can never be taken for granted' New Statesman John Gray has been Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His books include False Dawn- The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black Mass- Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopiaand Straw Dogs- Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. His selected writings, Gray's Anatomy, was published in 2009.

The Silence of Animals

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374229171
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Silence of Animals by : John Gray

Download or read book The Silence of Animals written by John Gray and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An exploration of the failures of reason in human life and the enduring role of myth in science, politics, and morality"--

Black Mass

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 9781429922982
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Mass by : John Gray

Download or read book Black Mass written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the decade that followed the end of the cold war, the world was lulled into a sense that a consumerist, globalized, peaceful future beckoned. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas—most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In Black Mass, celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and indeed coming to define the political center. Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches. Black Mass is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain's leading political thinkers.

Straw Dogs

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466895756
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (668 download)

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Book Synopsis Straw Dogs by : John Gray

Download or read book Straw Dogs written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British bestseller Straw Dogs is an exciting, radical work of philosophy, which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. John Gray argues that this belief in human difference is a dangerous illusion and explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned. The result is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question our deepest-held beliefs. Will Self, in the New Statesman, called Straw Dogs his book of the year: "I read it once, I read it twice and took notes . . . I thought it that good." "Nothing will get you thinking as much as this brilliant book" (Sunday Telegraph).

Feline Philosophy

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374718792
Total Pages : 99 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Feline Philosophy by : John Gray

Download or read book Feline Philosophy written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats—and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.

The Soul of the Marionette

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374261180
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Soul of the Marionette by : John Gray

Download or read book The Soul of the Marionette written by John Gray and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published in 2015 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, Great Britain"--Title page verso.

Seven Types of Atheism

Author : John Gray
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374714266
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Seven Types of Atheism by : John Gray

Download or read book Seven Types of Atheism written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the provocative author of Straw Dogs comes an incisive, surprising intervention in the political and scientific debate over religion and atheism When you explore older atheisms, you will find that some of your firmest convictions—secular or religious—are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thought. For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often vaguely understood “science.” John Gray’s stimulating and enjoyable new book, Seven Types of Atheism, describes the complex, dynamic world of older atheisms, a tradition that is, he writes, in many ways intertwined with and as rich as religion itself. Along a spectrum that ranges from the convictions of “God-haters” like the Marquis de Sade to the mysticism of Arthur Schopenhauer, from Bertrand Russell’s search for truth in mathematics to secular political religions like Jacobinism and Nazism, Gray explores the various ways great minds have attempted to understand the questions of salvation, purpose, progress, and evil. The result is a book that sheds an extraordinary light on what it is to be human.

The God Argument

Author : A. C. Grayling
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408837439
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis The God Argument by : A. C. Grayling

Download or read book The God Argument written by A. C. Grayling and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to deal with all the arguments against religion and, equally important, to put forward an alternative - humanism

The Year of Living Biblically

Author : A. J. Jacobs
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743291484
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (432 download)

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Book Synopsis The Year of Living Biblically by : A. J. Jacobs

Download or read book The Year of Living Biblically written by A. J. Jacobs and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the author's quest to live one year in literal compliance with biblical rules, from being fruitful and multiplying to growing a beard and avoiding mixed-fiber clothing.

The Serpent's Promise

Author : Steve Jones
Publisher : Doubleday Canada
ISBN 13 : 0385670648
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (856 download)

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Book Synopsis The Serpent's Promise by : Steve Jones

Download or read book The Serpent's Promise written by Steve Jones and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique contribution to the God/religion debate: a scientific take on the Bible that doesn't take sides. Many of the subjects studied by physicists or by biologists are found in the texts of the world's religions: the origins of the universe, of life and of mankind; fate, sex, age and death; and the prospects of eternal life or of fiery doom. The Bible is a handbook for understanding Nature and, in its own way, it succeeds. As a factual account, of course, it is out of date, but many of its statements can be rephrased in modern terms. Distinguished geneticist Steve Jones has done that: written a rivetingly accessible work on recent advances in our understanding of ourselves, using the Bible as a framework. His narrative is structured around the Good Book's grand themes, from Genesis to Revelations, and weaves a series of unexpected facts into a coherent whole. The struggle of rationalism with its opposite has, after decades of torpor, returned to centre stage. Polemics against and in favour of religion and atheism fill the shelves. Instead of adding to that pile, Steve Jones stands back and take a fresh look at that issue in a volume that is not an attack or a defence but which explores scriptural motifs--Creation, the Garden of Eden, original sin, the Exodus, virgin birth, the Resurrection, and the Last Judgment--using the methods and results of the latest scientific research. It is a remarkably quick jump, shows Professor Jones, from Adam to astrophysics. Although some of the questions raised are beyond the capabilities of science, at least a scientist can ask them in a new way. Steve Jones shows there is a better route to understanding the universe than through doctrine.

The Virtuous Citizen

Author : Tim Soutphommasane
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139561103
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (395 download)

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Book Synopsis The Virtuous Citizen by : Tim Soutphommasane

Download or read book The Virtuous Citizen written by Tim Soutphommasane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be a citizen in a multicultural society? And what role must patriotism play in defining our relationship with our country and fellow citizens? In The Virtuous Citizen Tim Soutphommasane answers these questions with a critical defence of liberal nationalism. Considering a range of contemporary political debates from Europe, North America and Australia, over issues including multiculturalism, national history, civic education and immigration, Soutphommasane argues that a love of country should be valued alongside tolerance, mutual respect and public reasonableness as a civic virtue. A liberal form of patriotism, grounded in national identity, is, if anything, essential for political stability in a diverse society. This book is required reading not only for political theorists and philosophers but also for researchers and professionals in political science, sociology, history and public policy.

Storming the Heavens

Author : Daniel Peris
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801434853
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (348 download)

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Book Synopsis Storming the Heavens by : Daniel Peris

Download or read book Storming the Heavens written by Daniel Peris and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A member of the first generation of scholars allowed access to formerly closed Soviet archives, Daniel Peris offers a new perspective on the Bolshevik regime's antireligious policy from 1917 until 1941. He focuses on the activities of the League of the Militant Godless, the organization founded by the regime in 1925 to spearhead its efforts to promote atheism and he presents the League's propaganda, activities, and personnel at both the central and the provincial levels. On the basis of his research in archives in rural Pskov and industrial Iaroslavl', as well as in the central party and state archives in Moscow, Peris emphasizes the transformation of the ideological agenda formulated in Moscow as it moved to its intended audience. Storming the Heavens places the League within the broader context of a Bolshevik political culture that often acted at cross purposes to undermine the regime's stated goals. The League's lack of success, argues Peris, reflects the bureaucratic orientation of Bolshevik political culture, particularly in how it pursued the radical social vision of 1917. His book provides a framework for undertanding secularization in revolutionary contexts as well as contributing to the on-going reassessments of the Bolshevik era.

Transitional and Retrospective Justice in the Baltic States

Author : Eva-Clarita Pettai
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107049490
Total Pages : 391 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Transitional and Retrospective Justice in the Baltic States by : Eva-Clarita Pettai

Download or read book Transitional and Retrospective Justice in the Baltic States written by Eva-Clarita Pettai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An empirically rich and conceptually informed study of the politics of transitional justice in post-communist Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Friendship

Author : A. C. Grayling
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300198574
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Friendship by : A. C. Grayling

Download or read book Friendship written by A. C. Grayling and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A central bond, a cherished value, a unique relationship, a profound human need, a type of love. What is the nature of friendship, and what is its significance in our lives? How has friendship changed since the ancient Greeks began to analyze it, and how has modern technology altered its very definition? In this fascinating exploration of friendship through the ages, one of the most thought-provoking philosophers of our time tracks historical ideas of friendship, gathers a diversity of friendship stories from the annals of myth and literature, and provides unexpected insights into our friends, ourselves, and the role of friendships in an ethical life. A. C. Grayling roves the rich traditions of friendship in literature, culture, art, and philosophy, bringing into his discussion familiar pairs as well as unfamiliar-Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Huck Finn and Jim. Grayling lays out major philosophical interpretations of friendship, then offers his own take, drawing on personal experiences and an acute awareness of vast cultural shifts that have occurred. With penetrating insight he addresses internet-based friendship, contemporary mixed gender friendships, how friendships may supersede family relationships, one's duty within friendship, the idea of friendship to humanity, and many other topics of universal interest. "