Leading a Human Life


Book Description

In this provocative new study, Richard Eldridge presents a highly original and compelling account of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, one of the most enduring yet enigmatic works of the twentieth century. He does so by reading the text as a dramatization of what is perhaps life's central motivating struggle—the inescapable human need to pursue an ideal of expressive freedom within the difficult terms set by culture. Eldridge sees Wittgenstein as a Romantic protagonist, engaged in an ongoing internal dialogue over the nature of intentional consciousness, ranging over ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. The picture of the human mind that emerges through this dialogue unsettles behaviorism, cognitivism, and all other scientifically oriented orthodoxies. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, akin to writing a poem, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and skepticism. Eldridge's careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work will influence all subsequent scholarship on it.




Leading a Human Life


Book Description

Beginning from the Kantian and post-Kantian efforts to maintain a connection between intentionality and conscience, but without assuming any dogmatic metaphysical system, Richard Eldridge argues in Leading a Human Life that human persons are caught up in a continuing effort to bring their intentionality and powers of practical reason to full and fit expression. Contrary to the claims of both dogmatism and naturalism, human life remains haunted by the question, "How might I, in interaction with those around me, effectively form and choose a life of expressive freedom?".




The Human Life


Book Description




Living a Human Life


Book Description

Living a Human Life enables us to comprehend the top-level process concerning how all humans make our emotional and behavioral responses to the never-ending sequence of situations we meet during our lives. That comprehension enables us to live our unique human lives in a way that brings all of us together so that each understands how to work with others and so that our unique qualities work toward the ideal of benefiting others. Author Edward Averill draws attention to the analogy that each human cell in one’s body is needed to work with other cells to play its unique part to keep the whole body healthy; just as all individual humans need to keep the body of humanity healthy. Humans are individually unique: we have inherited bodily conditions, innate predispositions, and environments where we actively express our emotions under the control of our thinking capability. A principle conceptual realization is that these differences develop the current content in our minds, which directs how one’s life-force energy expresses one’s behavioral and emotional responses to encountered situations.




Fully Human


Book Description

HGTV cofounder Susan Packard launches the next chapter in emotional intelligence (EQ), and shows you how to increase your personal satisfaction and productivity--in work and life--via her three-step path toward EQ Fitness. Emotions can sink us, or they can power us like fuel to succeed. Many of us show up for work, and life, feeling lonely even in a room full of people, or bringing unproductive emotions into work, like anger or fear. You don't have to feel this way. Susan Packard offers an accessible new guidebook to grow your emotional fitness, and it's arrived just in time, as technology is quickly becoming our main interface for communication. No matter where you are in your career, success is an inside job. Packard lays out how to develop interdependent work relationships, and for leaders, how to build healthy company cultures. Packard introduces us to successful people, and companies, that are rich with 'connector' emotions like hope, empathy and trust-building. She tackles unconventional topics, like how workaholism keeps us emotionally adolescent, and how forgiveness belongs in the workplace too. Packard shares her EQ Fit-catalyzed success at HGTV and the stories of the executives she coaches in mindfulness and other emerging techniques, and she teaches an 'inside out' practice of self-discovery, which helps you uncover unproductive emotions, and dispel them. The best leaders balance power and grace, and everyone can effectively use resilience--an ability to endure tough situations and make tough decisions, and vulnerability, a willingness to open up, change, and admit when we need help. She offers new tools to bring our strongest emotional selves to work each day.




The Five Graces of Life and Leadership


Book Description

Five simple qualities that captures the essence of outstanding leadership today In today’s world, leadership is all about establishing community and connectivity so everyone can be part of something bigger than themselves. To have the grace to create this kind of leadership, we need greater self-awareness and genuine connection to others. In The Five Graces of Life and Leadership, CEO of the celebrated consulting firm Korn Ferry delivers a meaningful and thought-provoking exploration of leadership, emphasizing the five kinds of grace that leaders absolutely must have to lead their teams in today’s evolving workscape. In the book, you’ll learn how to the best leaders make their teams feel comforted, safe, and secure that they’re headed in the right direction. It includes insightful discussions on each of the five indispensable graces, including: Gratitude—the attitude that elevates our spirits, boosts morale, and lifts our hearts Resilience—the quality that allows us to achieve beyond our wildest dreams Aspiration—the knowledge that we can make tomorrow better than today Courage—the ability to understand and move beyond our fears Empathy—the understanding needed to connect with others from their perspectives The perfect book for managers, executives, and other business leaders doing their best to lead their teams through some of the most rapidly changing business and social environments we’ve seen in our lifetimes, The Five Graces of Life and Leadership is a can’t miss book on the human side of leadership at work, at home and anywhere else.




The Laws of Human Nature


Book Description

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.




A Significant Life


Book Description

“A tour de force. It is a thoughtful, subtle, beautifully written discussion of what it takes to live a meaningful life.” —Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice Throughout history most of us have looked to faith, relationships, or deeds to give our lives purpose. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about meaning, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey—and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life alongside rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them. May starts by looking at the fundamental fact that life unfolds over time, and as it does so, it begins to develop certain qualities, certain themes. Our lives can be marked by intensity, curiosity, perseverance, or many other qualities that become guiding narrative values. These values lend meanings to our lives that are distinct from—but also interact with—the universal values we are taught to cultivate, such as goodness or happiness. Offering a fascinating examination of a broad range of figures—from music icon Jimi Hendrix to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, from cyclist Lance Armstrong to The Portrait of a Lady’s Ralph Touchett to Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler—May shows that narrative values offer a rich variety of criteria by which to assess a life, specific to each of us and yet widely available. They offer us a way of reading ourselves, who we are, and who we might like to be.




Is Human Life Absurd? A Philosophical Inquiry into Finitude, Value, and Meaning


Book Description

Belliotti unravels the paradoxes of human existence to reveal paths for crafting meaningful, significant, valuable, even important lives. He argues that human life is not inherently absurd; examines the implications of mortality; contrasts subjective and objective meaning, and evaluates contemporary renderings of meaningful human lives.




Levels of Organic Life and the Human


Book Description

The groundbreaking classic of twentieth-century German philosophy now available in English—with an introduction by J.M. Bernstein. Helmuth Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life and the Human, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources to offer a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics—simply put, interactions between a thing’s insides and the surrounding world. Living things are classed and analyzed by their “positionality,” or orientation to and within an environment. According to Plessner’s radical view, the human form of life is excentric—that is, the relation between body and environment is something to which humans themselves are positioned and can take a position. This “excentric positionality” enables human beings to take a stand outside the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology. A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a range of vital current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition.