Practicing Excellence: Restoring Civility, Faith & Trusted Leadership in the Public Square by Dr. Anthony Randall presents a compelling exploration of the challenges facing contemporary society and the need to pursue a life of practicing excellence as trusted leaders of character. It has reached global acclaim, as it won the International Impact Book Award in Social Change and has been adopted into the curriculum of a graduate program at Emory University.

In the book, Dr. Randall observes that America's civic public square, founded upon the virtues of classic liberalism, is being eroded by the destructive forces of incivility. These vices baffle the clear mind, burden the soul, and neutralize the courageous action of leaders who settle for mediocrity out of fear of being canceled or criticized for pursuing a life of excellence.

Dr. Randall calls for decisive action to teach and empower leaders of strong moral character to serve as trusted professionals in their communities, marketplaces, and the public square. By doing so, he aims to restore civility, faith, and trusted leadership by fostering a growth mindset through the teaching, training, and coaching of leaders of character to build high performance cultures grounded in character development, moral and ethical decision-making, and emotionally intelligent leadership that enhances human flourishing.

Additionally, he highlights the importance of faith-both in a personal and communal context-as a guiding principle for transformational leadership. He asserts that leaders who embody these values can inspire trust and collaboration among constituents, ultimately leading to more effective governance and a more engaged citizenry.

Practicing Excellence calls on readers to take action and reflect deeply on the principles shared through personal stories, historical lessons, research, and practical advice, then actively implement these insights to lead a more excellent life.

Prepare to align your passion, purpose, and precision ... to practice in a more excellent way, and contribute to transforming leaders and forging excellence in the world around you.

The masterpiece of the father of modern philosophy

A seminal text of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) made history by bringing together two opposing schools of thought: rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in reason, and empiricism, which traces all our knowledge to experience. Published here in a lucid reworking of Max Müller's classic translation, the Critique is a profound investigation into the nature of human reason, establishing its truth, falsities, illusions, and reality.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives-to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Jack Halberstam proposes low theory as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one's way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children's films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

What is knowledge? How does it differ from mere belief? Do you need to be able to justify a claim in order to count as knowing it? How can we know that the outer world is real and not a dream?

Questions like these are ancient ones, and the branch of philosophy dedicated to answering them - epistemology - has been active for thousands of years. In this thought-provoking Very Short Introduction, Jennifer Nagel considers these classic questions alongside new puzzles arising from recent discoveries about humanity, language, and the mind. Nagel explains the formation of major historical theories of knowledge, and shows how contemporary philosophers have developed new ways of understanding knowledge, using ideas from logic, linguistics, and psychology. Covering topics ranging from relativism and the problem of scepticism to the trustworthiness of internet sources, Nagel examines how progress has been made in understanding knowledge, using everyday examples to explain the key issues and debates

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to--by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience--we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice.

Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes.

Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures.

Practicing Excellence: Restoring Civility, Faith & Trusted Leadership in the Public Square by Dr. Anthony Randall presents a compelling exploration of the challenges facing contemporary society and the need to pursue a life of practicing excellence as trusted leaders of character.

It has earned global recognition, as the winner of the International Impact Book Awards for Social Change and has been adopted into a graduate program at Emory University.

Dr. Randall observes that America's civic public square, founded upon the virtues of classic liberalism, is being eroded by the destructive forces of incivility. These vices baffle the clear mind, burden the soul, and neutralize the courageous action of leaders who settle for mediocrity out of fear of being canceled or criticized for pursuing a life of excellence.

Dr. Randall calls for decisive action to teach and empower leaders of strong moral character to serve as trusted professionals in their communities, marketplaces, and the public square. By doing so, he aims to restore civility, faith, and trusted leadership by fostering a growth mindset through the teaching, training, and coaching of leaders of character to build high performance cultures grounded in character development, moral and ethical decision-making, and emotionally intelligent leadership that enhances human flourishing.

Additionally, he highlights the importance of faith-both in a personal and communal context-as a guiding principle for transformational leadership. He asserts that leaders who embody these values can inspire trust and collaboration among constituents, ultimately leading to more effective governance and a more engaged citizenry.

Practicing Excellence calls on readers to take action and reflect deeply on the principles shared through personal stories, historical lessons, research, and practical advice, then actively implement these insights to lead a more excellent life.

Prepare to align your passion, purpose, and precision ... to practice in a more excellent way, and contribute to transforming leaders and forging excellence in the world around you.

Cybernetics for the 21^st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject - which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Poland, China and Japan. The reconstruction shows the various paths of cybernetics and their socio-political implications, which remain unfamiliar to us today. It reveals more than what we thought we knew -- and yet we hardly know - and allows us to understand where we are and to reflect on the future of technology, ecology and planetary politics.

With texts by Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, Daisuke Harashima, N. Katherine Hayles, Yuk Hui, Dylan Levi King, Michal Krzykawski, David Maulen de los Reyes, Andrew Pickering, Dorion Sagan and Mathieu Triclot.

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning

In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.

Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.

Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.

Designer Alan Moore invites us to rethink not only what we produce - whether it's a website, a handmade chair, or a business - but how and why.

So much goes unnoticed. We multi-task, switch between screens, work faster. When was the last time you paused to consider a beautifully-made object or stunning natural landscape? Yet this is when our spirits lift, our soul is restored.

With examples including Pixar, Apple, and Blitz Motorcycles, we are encouraged to ask: Is it useful and considered? Is it a thing of beauty? Do Design will inspire you to:

• Improve your creative process
• Raise the quality and craft of your work
• Consider the experience as much as the product
• Adopt simplicity, utility and honesty as guiding principles

We are creative beings. We love to make things. This book will inspire you to create better things, for better reasons. Things that people will love - for a long time to come. Some say beauty is a luxury. But what if it is key to creating a better world for us all?

A philosopher explores the transformative role of wonder and awe in an uncertain world

Wonder and awe lie at the heart of life's most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable us to engage with the world as if we are experiencing it for the first time.

Drawing on the latest psychological insights on emotions, Helen De Cruz argues that wonder and awe are emotional drives that motivate us to inquire and discover new things, and that humanity has deliberately nurtured these emotions in cultural domains such as religion, science, and magic. Tracing how wonder and awe unify philosophy, the humanities, and the sciences, De Cruz provides new perspectives on figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, William James, Rachel Carson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Abraham Heschel. Along the way, she explains how these singular emotions empower us to be open-minded, to experience joy and hope, and to be resilient in the face of personal troubles and global challenges.

Taking inspiration from Descartes's portrayal of wonder as that sudden surprise of the soul, this illuminating book reveals how wonder and awe are catalysts that can help us reclaim what makes life worth living and preserve the things we find wonderful and valuable in our lives.

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences -- and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.

From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences -- from anatomy to crystallography -- are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles.

Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology.

As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity -- or truth-to-nature or trained judgment -- is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity -- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

From the winds of Mars to a baby's first laugh, a prolific philosopher-composer reflects on the profound imperative of sound in everyday life.

Experiencing Sound presents its subject as fundamental to all experience--sensation, perception, and understanding. Lawrence Kramer turns on its head the widespread notion that vision takes pride of place among the senses and demonstrates how paying attention to sound can transform how we make meaning out of experience.

Through a series of brief, lyrical forays, Kramer shows that sound, whether heard or unheard, is the object of a primary need and an essential component in the sensation of being alive and the perception of time. It is something that we may suffer--or be made to suffer--as well as enjoy. Like its predecessor The Hum of the World, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, literature, art, media, and history, from classical antiquity to the present, as it invites us to experience sound anew.

In his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argues that human knowledge is limited by the capacity for perception. He attempts a logical designation of two varieties of knowledge: a posteriori, the knowledge acquired through experience; and a priori, knowledge not derived through experience. Kant maintains that the most practical forms of human knowledge employ the a priori judgments that are possible only when the mind determines the conditions of its own experience. This accurate translation by J. M. Meiklejohn offers a simple and direct rendering of Kant's work that is suitable for readers at all levels.

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the sophistry and illusionof religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash.
The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the superstition of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

More than a century after its composition, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus--Wittgenstein's first masterwork, and the only book he published during his lifetime--endures as the definitive modern text on what logic can and cannot do. Since its first English-language publication in 1922, this profoundly enigmatic work has inspired philosophers and non-philosophers alike.

Consisting of 525 hierarchically numbered statements, each one self-evident, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is imbued, as translator Damion Searls writes, with the kind of cryptic grandeur and awe-inspiring opacity we might expect--might want--from such an iconic philosopher. Yet earlier translations, in their efforts to excessively copy German phrasing and syntax, range from stilted, even redolently Victorian, to downright impenetrable.

With this new translation and insightful introduction on the language of the book, Searls finally does justice to Wittgenstein's masterpiece, capturing the fluid and forceful prose of the original without sacrificing any of its philosophical rigor. Indeed, in freeing the translation from the grip of the German language--revisiting, especially, the nouns and impersonal verbs that don't convey in English the precision and intensity of the German--Searls renders Wittgenstein's philosophy clearer and more accessible than ever before.

Featuring a preface by eminent Wittgenstein scholar Marjorie Perloff, this bilingual, facing-page edition promises to become the standard for generations to come.

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a 'five-pound note' with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch.

In The Construction of Social Reality, eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement. Searle shows that brute reality provides the indisputable foundation for all social reality, and that social reality, while very real, is maintained by nothing more than custom and habit.

This book further-cements his thematic contention that the imagination is a flame, the flame of the psyche. - Joanne Stroud. Chapters include Poetic Images of the Flame in Plant Life, ''The Solitude of the Candle Dreamer, and The Light of the Lamp. THE BACHELARD TRANSLATIONS are the inspiration of Joanne H. Stroud, Director of Publications for The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, who in 1981 contracted with Jose Corti to publish in English the untranslated works of Bachelard on the imagination. Gaston Bachelard is acclaimed as one of the most significant modern French thinkers. From 1929 to 1962 he authored twenty-three books addressing his dual concerns, the philosophy of science and the analysis of the imagination of matter. The influence of his thought can be felt in all disciplines of the humanities - art, architecture, literature, language, poetics, philosophy, and depth psychology. His teaching career included posts at the College de Bar-sur-Aube, the University of Dijon, and from 1940 to 1962 the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne. One of the amphitheaters of the Sorbonne is called L'Amphi Gaston Bachelard, an honor Bachelard shared with Descartes and Richelieu. He received the Grand Prix National Lettres in 1961-one of only three philosophers ever to have achieved this honor. The influence of his thought can be felt in all disciplines of the humanities-art, architecture, literature, poetics, psychology, philosophy, and language.

If we all want happiness and pleasure so much, then why are we so bad at getting it?

Pleasure feels amazing! Anxiety, however, does not. The Ancient Greek Philosopher Epicurus rolled these two strikingly intuitive claims into a simple formula for happiness and well-being--pursue pleasure without causing yourself anxiety. But wait, is that even possible? Can humans achieve lasting pleasure without suffering anxiety about failure and loss? Epicurus thinks we can, at least once we learn to pursue pleasure thoughtfully.

In Living for Pleasure, philosopher Emily Austin offers a lively, jargon-free tour of Epicurean strategies for diminishing anxiety, achieving satisfaction, and relishing joys. Epicurean science was famously far ahead of its time, and Austin shows that so was its ethics and psychology. Epicureanism can help us make and keep good friends, prepare for suffering, combat imposter syndrome, build trust, recognize personal limitations, value truth, cultivate healthy attitudes towards money and success, manage political anxiety, develop gratitude, savor food, and face death.

Readers will walk away knowing more about an important school of philosophy, but moreover understanding how to get what they want in life--happiness--without the anxiety of striving for it.

This book addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time: How can we design for, with, and in service of the complex world we live in? How can we be useful as designers in a rapidly changing world due to technological, political, and social processes, as well as climate change and nature destruction?

Designers have some beneficial skills for planning with complex systems in mind, yet some old habits need to be overcome. Design's traditional purpose and role has been to solve problems, find order, organize, and simplify. Yet, the concept of designing complexity goes against these established beliefs because complexity cannot be designed away. So, instead, we present ways to live with, influence, and benefit from complex systems.

There is no one right way presented in this book. Instead, many experiences, approaches, and perspectives are collected and presented. The process this book offers is a methodology called Systems Oriented Design (SOD). SOD is a design methodology and practice primarily geared toward understanding and working with complex systems. Several systems theories influence it, yet it remains true to its origin, the core of designing. SOD is a living and adaptable methodology. Though it is based on design thinking and design methodology, it is easily adapted and applied by anybody working with complex change processes.