Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439118426
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.
Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: ERNEST. BECKER
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781788164269
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the 'why' of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie - man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. The book argues that human civilisation is a defence against the knowledge that we are mortal beings. Becker states that humans live in both the physical world and a symbolic world of meaning, which is where our 'immortality project' resides. We create in order to become immortal - to become part of something we believe will last forever. In this way we hope to give our lives meaning.In The Denial of Death, Becker sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates decades after it was written.
Author: Luigi Giussani
Publisher: Slant Books
ISBN: 1639821074
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 71
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Book Description
In 1980, two men sit down to record a conversation. They have much in common: both are passionate, articulate thinkers. But their differences are just as striking: Giovanni Testori is a well-known writer-and an openly gay man. Luigi Giussani is a Catholic priest who has attracted so many students with his striking way of re-proposing the Christian message that he's unwittingly started a movement (which came to be known as Communion and Liberation). Testori, who has recently returned to the Catholic faith, begins with a provocative suggestion: modern people have lost contact with the existential and religious experience of birth, of an origin in love-the love of one's parents and the love of God. From here, the dialogue ranges widely, taking on the root causes of modern despair and alienation, the link between suffering and hope, the significance of memory, and what it means to encounter the presence of God in one another. Profound but accessible, The Meaning of Birth is a resonant and bracing exploration of life's most fundamental questions.
Author: David Benatar
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442258322
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
Life, Death, and Meaning is designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy.
Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Author: Rosemary Gordon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429913044
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Dying and creating or, could we put it the other way round, creating and dying? Rosemary Gordon has chosen the first, the challenging title and the one that stimulates the reader to find out how they inter-relate. There are essential links between the facts and the concepts. C. G. Jung devoted much attention to the psychology of death, re-birth and transformation: the author acknowledges her debt to him, to his creative spirit and to the depth of his understanding. As she is a working analytical psychologist, much of the material in her. But she is also a theorist: the human and the academic come together.Many Westerners in the course of their daily lives conceal their fears of death and so they deprive themselves of the possibility of getting into touch with the hidden sources of creativeness. Patients in analysis communicate some of their deepest feelings and thoughts about preparing for death, and grieving, and dying.
Author: Julian Young
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135020906
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
What is the meaning of life? In today's secular, post-religious scientific world, this question has become a serious preoccupation. But it also has a long history: many major philosophers have thought deeply about it, as Julian Young so vividly illustrates in this thought-provoking second edition of The Death of God and the Meaning of Life. Three new chapters explore Søren Kierkegaard’s attempts to preserve a Christian answer to the question of the meaning of life, Karl Marx's attempt to translate this answer into naturalistic and atheistic terms, and Sigmund Freud’s deep pessimism about the possibility of any version of such an answer. Part 1 presents an historical overview of philosophers from Plato to Marx who have believed in a meaning of life, either in some supposed ‘other’ world or in the future of this world. Part 2 assesses what happened when the traditional structures that give life meaning began to erode. With nothing to take their place, these structures gave way to the threat of nihilism, to the appearance that life is meaningless. Young looks at the responses to this threat in chapters on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Foucault and Derrida. Fully revised and updated throughout, this highly engaging exploration of fundamental issues will captivate anyone who’s ever asked themselves where life’s meaning (if there is one) really lies. It also makes a perfect historical introduction to philosophy, particularly to the continental tradition.
Author: Sheldon Solomon
Publisher:
ISBN: 1400067472
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Demonstrates how an unconscious fear of death motivates nearly all human goals, behaviors, and cultures, examining the role of mortality awareness in prompting social unrest and war.
Author: Paul Kalanithi
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812988418
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
