"For millennia, we have viewed thinking and feeling as fundamentally opposed processes. According to this persistent, age-old belief, to truly live well we must marshal our logical and rational capacities to master our emotions. This perceived dichotomy lies at the heart of our historical pursuits in theology, philosophy, and psychology. But extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience, including neuroimaging and other related technologies,...

Reality is an investigation of the world around and inside you, seen and unseen. It explores our internal concepts of reality, the real-world reality around us and the role of a supernatural reality; both from the viewpoint of the scientist and the Christian theologian. Reality explores how randomness is the ultimate limit of understanding in science and should be regarded, as holy to the theologian. This randomness also extends to how change, over...

"Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it explain why there seems to be so much irrationality in the world, including, let's be honest, in each of us? These are the goals of Steven Pinker's follow-up to Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates's "new favorite book of all time"). Humans today are often portrayed as cavemen out of time, poised to react to a lion in the grass with a suite of biases, blind spots, fallacies, and illusions. But this, Pinker...

How can confusing directions actually help us? Why can large bonuses make CEOs less productive? Why is there such a big difference between what we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy? In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality...

Kant seeks to define the nature of reason itself and builds his own unique system of philosophical thought with an approach known as transcendental idealism.

An analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has created an environment dangerously hostile to reason. We live in an age when the 30-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in...

V. 1. From the ancient world to the Age of Enlightenment / Colin Brown.

In the End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs -- even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction we cannot expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he...

"Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces...