Deepest Human Life

Regular price €18.50
Regular price €18.99 Sale Sale price €18.50
A01=Scott Samuelson
accessible
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Scott Samuelson
automatic-update
beginner
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HPQ
Category=QDTQ
classical
classroom
college
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
easy to understand
educational
epicurus
eq_isMigrated=2
getting started
happiness
higher ed
human nature
humanity
intellect
intellectual
introduction
introductory
Language_English
morals
PA=Available
philosopher
philosophical
philosophy
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
self love
socrates
softlaunch
starter
stoic
student
teacher
textbook
thinker
thinking
understandable
understanding
university

Product details

  • ISBN 9780226272771
  • Weight: 340g
  • Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
  • Publication Date: 03 Apr 2015
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

Sometimes it seems like you need a PhD just to open a book of philosophy. We leave philosophical matters to the philosophers in the same way that we leave science to scientists. Scott Samuelson thinks this is tragic - for our lives as well as for philosophy. In The Deepest Human Life, he takes philosophy back from the specialists and restores it to its proper place at the center of our humanity, rediscovering it as our most profound effort toward understanding, as a way of life that anyone can live. Exploring the works of some of history's most important thinkers in the context of the everyday struggles of his students, he guides us through the most vexing quandaries of our existence and shows just how enriching the examined life can be. Samuelson begins at the beginning: with Socrates, working his most famous assertion - that wisdom is knowing that one knows nothing - into a method, a way of approaching our greatest mysteries. From there he springboards into a rich history of philosophy and the ways its journey is encoded in our own quests for meaning. He ruminates on Epicurus against the sonic backdrop of crickets and restaurant goers in Iowa City. He follows the Stoics into the cell where James Stockdale spent seven years as a prisoner of war. He spins with al-Ghazali first in doubt, then in the ecstasy of the divine. And he gets the philosophy education of his life when one of his students, who authorized a risky surgery for her son that inadvertently led to his death, asks with tears in her eyes if Kant was right, if it really is the motive that matters and not the consequences. Through heartbreaking stories, humanizing biographies, accessible theory, and evocative interludes like "On Wine and Bicycles" or "On Zombies and Superheroes," he invests philosophy with the personal and vice versa. The result is a book that is at once a primer and a reassurance - that the most important questions endure, coming to life in each of us.
Scott Samuelson lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where he teaches philosophy at Kirkwood Community College and is a movie reviewer, television host, and sous-chef at a French restaurant on a gravel road.