Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery. Without quite realizing it, they were shaping...

Peter Adamson aims ultimately to present a complete history of philosophy, more thoroughly but also more enjoyably than ever before. He offers an accessible, humorous, and detailed look at the emergence of philosophy with the Presocratics, the probing questions of Socrates, and the first full flowering of philosophy with the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle. The story is told 'without any gaps', discussing not only such major figures...

A fictionalized biography of the 18th-century German poet, Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, who wrote under the nom de plume, Novalis. The novel centers on his philosophy ("My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it") and on his romance with Sophie von Kuhn, 12, who became his muse, but who died of tuberculosis before they could marry.

Lectures by Dr. David Christian, Professor of History at San Diego State University. Surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the universal scales of cosmology.

A veteran "New York Times" war correspondent presents a thought-provoking reflection on how life is lived during times of war, and tackles the ugly truths about humanity's love affair with war, offering a sophisticated, intelligent meditation on the subject that is also gritty, powerful, and unforgettable. Hedges, a long-time foreign correspondent for The New York Times, draws on his own experiences in Latin America, Bosnia, and elsewhere; treatments...

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle,...

Presents an introduction to the history of Western civilization's religious and philosophical traditions.

Americans pride themselves on being doers rather than thinkers, but ideas are at the very root of what it means to be an American. Behind this nation's diverse views on religion, education, social equality, democracy, and other vital issues is a long-running intellectual debate about the right ordering of the human, natural, and divine worlds. Indeed, America is an enduring hotbed of ideas. Such great thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson,

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Philosophical examination of the wide range of decisions all of us encounter in pursuing our lives. Professor Grim places the accent on individual choice covering questions about evolution and ethics, about whether punishment is justified by retribution or by deterrence and about the differing lessons drawn from life's worst horrors by both religious and anti-religious traditions.