Spanish Peaks Library District

Contains an examination of the Bible that reveals its contradictions and attacks religious superstition.

Written in the 12th century in Arabic by a faithful Jewish man, "The Guide for the Perplexed" is a work that explores the contradiction a very intelligent mind clearly saw between the tradition in which he was raised to believe and the growing philosophy of Arabian and Western culture. In Maimonides' time, there was an emerging disparity between the Law and a new level of philosophical sophistication, which he attempts to bridge in this work, primarily...

Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it, yet we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves--and we lack a conscientious appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory." Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here....

Analects of Confucius is a collection of sayings and ideas attributed to the Chinese philosopher Confucius and his contemporaries, traditionally believed to have been compiled and written by Confucius' followers. It is believed to have been written during the Warring States period (475 BC—221 BC), and it achieved its final form during the mid-Han dynasty (206 BC—220 AD). By the early Han dynasty, the Analects was considered merely a "commentary"...

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing...

A treatise in which eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant attempts to reconcile empiricism and rationalism.

"A history of the Flat Earth movement and a look at the recent boom in conspiratorial thinking in America"--

Michael Howard (1922–2019) was a leading British military historian who held professorships at the University of Oxford and Yale University. His many books included The Franco-Prussian War and War in European History. Peter Paret (1924–2020) was professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His many books include Clausewitz in His Time, The Cognitive Challenge of War (Princeton), and Clausewitz and the State (Princeton)....

The City of God is a book of Christian philosophy presenting human history as a conflict between what Augustine calls the Earthly City and the City of God-a conflict that is destined to end in victory for the latter. The City of God is marked by people who forego earthly pleasure to dedicate themselves to the eternal truths of God, now revealed fully in the Christian faith. The Earthly City, on the other hand, consists of people who have immersed...

"In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the "attention economy" to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don't have time to spend? In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem...