Philosophy
Indulge in some serious existential questioning, or find great guides to that philosophical theory you've always intended to get a grasp on.
The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
David Malouf
Black Inc. ISBN 9781863955461
Paperback
2011
Price $AU 19.95
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In this elegant treatise, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life? With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life - what it is, and what makes it possible - David Malouf returns to the 'highest wisdom' of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson's way with words, happiness became a 'right', and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt. In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he finds happiness in an unlikely place.
The Happy Life is writing to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia's greatest novelists. This edition includes responses by leading commentators, including Robert Dessaix, Anne Manne, Elizabeth Farrelly and Tim Soutphommasane.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes
Steven Pinker
Allen Lane ISBN 9781863955461
Trade paperback
2011
Price $AU 32.95
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Steven Pinker is one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, and well known author of books including The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. In his riveting, myth-destroying new book he reveals how, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent, over millenia and decades. Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage', and the Hobbesian notion of a 'nasty, brutish and short' life, and ranging over everything from the Enlightenment to warfare, art to religion, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions is actually making us better people.