Weaving together philosophy, social science and neuroscience research, personal anecdotes and dialogues, A Child at Heart takes a radically different approach to the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood to reveal how rather than lapse into adulthood, we can achieve what the Greeks of old call arete—all-around excellence—when we look to children and youth as a lodestar for our development. Childhood is our primary launching pad, a time of life when learning is more intense than at any other, when we gain the critical knowledge and skills that can help ensure that we remain adaptable. This book weaves together the thinking of philosophers from across the ages who make the unsettling assertion that with the passage of time we are apt to shrink mentally, emotionally, and cognitively. If we follow what has become an all-too-common course, we denature our original nature—which brims with curiosity, empathy, reason, wonder, and a will to experiment and understand—and we regress, our sense of who we are will become fuzzier and everyone in our orbit will pay a price. Mounting evidence shows that we begin our lives with a moral, intellectual, and creative bang, and in this groundbreaking, heavily researched, and highly engaging volume, Christopher Phillips makes the provocative case that childhood isn't merely a state of becoming, while adulthood is one of being, as if we've "arrived" and reached the summit. His life-changing proposition is that if we embrace the defining qualities of youth, we're not destined to become frail, dispirited, or unhinged, we'll grow in a way defined by wonder, curiosity, imaginativeness, playfulness, and compassion—in essence, unlimited potential.
Thomas Jefferson proposed that we revise the Constitution every so often, not just to reflect the changing times but to revive and perpetuate our original revolutionary spirit. Could it be that the Constitution itself is part of the reason that our democracy is on life support, our government gone haywire? To find out, the author, originator of the Socrates Café dialogues, sets off on a cross-country junket to engage Americans of all stripes in an offbeat constitutional convention. Given the opportunity to rewrite the Constitution, a diverse bunch from Burning Man die hards to army veterans, Tea Party acolytes to Orange County slackers, weighs in with some really wild and worthwhile ideas about how our nation should be governed. With Jefferson as his iconoclastic and visionary guide, the author moderates these discussions and complements his participants' ideas by relating them to Jefferson's own experiences with governance and to his great expectations for our democracy. This book is an account of how we might draw from our rebellious past to incite meaningful change today; it is a map for inspiring Jeffersonian activism by tapping into our timely (and timeless) concerns about the need to give our country's democratic framework a makeover.
Christopher Phillips has devoted his life to carrying the torch of Socrates and his quest to “Know Thyself.” Yet upon the death of his beloved father and mentor, the originator of the burgeoning global Socrates Café movement had little choice but to confront the inescapable truth: that there are some things we cannot know for sure. This moving, insightful and ultimately hopeful and helpful blend of memoir and philosophical exploration begins in Phillips’ native stomping grounds of the tiny volcanic island of Nisyros, Greece and unfurls through space and time as the author explores the connections between his immediate circumstances and the eternal wisdom of popular philosophers. – In this personal and probing book, the acclaimed ‘philosopher for the people’ shares lessons gleaned from his intimate and often unexpected encounters with uncommonly perceptive human beings both living and long deceased, in the form of weary travelers and some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Heraclitus to Dr. Cornel West. Along the way, he charts a pathway for sculpting what Shakespeare describes as a “soul of goodness,” which meshes with Plato’s paradigm-shattering conception of the “healthiness of soul.” For those struggling to overcome the hopelessness that can result from grievous loss, setback, or betrayal – what Phillips’ touchstone Percy Blythe Shelley calls life circumstances “darker than death or night” – the author spotlights, with philosophical prescriptions both timely and timeless, how to cultivate a ‘Socratic spirit’ that leads to renewed love, forbearance, and hope at the other end of the tunnel.
The essential guide to geopolitics in the modern Middle East The Middle East is in crisis. The shocking events of the war in Gaza have rocked the entire region. More than a decade ago, the Arab Spring had raised hopes of a new beginning but instead ushered in a series of civil wars, coups, and even harsher autocracies. Tensions were exacerbated by the meddling of outsiders, as regional and global powers sought to further their interests. The United States, for so long the dominant actor, had stepped back, leaving a vacuum behind it to be fought over. Christopher Phillips explores geopolitical rivalries in the region, and the major external powers vying for influence: Russia, China, the EU, and the US. Moving through ten key flashpoints, from Syria to Palestine, Phillips argues that the United States’ overextension after the Cold War, and retreat in the 2010s, has imbalanced the region. Today, the Middle East remains blighted by conflicts of unprecedented violence and a post-American scramble for power – leaving its fate in the balance.
Weaving together philosophy, social science and neuroscience research, personal anecdotes and dialogues, The Philosophy of Childing takes a radically different approach to the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood to reveal how rather than lapse into adulthood, we can achieve what the Greeks arete—all-around excellence—when we look to children and youth as a lodestar for our development. Childhood is our primary launching pad, a time of life when learning is more intense than at any other, when we gain the critical knowledge and skills that can help ensure that we remain adaptable. This book weaves together the thinking of philosophers from across the ages who make the unsettling assertion that with the passage of time we are apt to shrink mentally, emotionally, and cognitively. If we follow what has become an all-too-common course, we denature our original nature—which brims with curiosity, empathy, reason, wonder, and a will to experiment and understand—and we regress, our sense of who we are will become fuzzier and everyone in our orbit will pay a price. Mounting evidence shows that we begin our lives with a moral, intellectual, and creative bang, and in this groundbreaking, heavily researched and highly engaging volume, Christopher Phillips makes the provocative case that childhood isn’t merely a state of becoming, while adulthood is one of being, as if we’ve “arrived” and reached the summit. His life-changing proposition is that if we embrace the defining qualities of youth, we’re not destined to become frail, dispirited, or unhinged, we’ll grow in a way defined by wonder, curiosity, imaginativeness, playfulness, and compassion—in essence, unlimited potential.
A bracing, rollicking read about the spark that ignites when people start asking meaningful questions." —O Magazine Christopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. "Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day-care centers, elementary and high schools, and churches, forming lasting communities of inquiry" (Utne Reader). Phillips not only presents the fundamentals of philosophical thought in this "charming, Philosophy for Dummies-type guide" (USA Today); he also recalls what led him to start his itinerant program and re-creates some of the most invigorating sessions, which come to reveal sometimes surprising, often profound reflections on the meaning of love, friendship, work, growing old, and others among Life's Big Questions. "How to Start Your Own Socrates Café" guide included.
Christopher Phillips has brought to life a man, a story, and a voice lost in the din of competing post-Civil War narratives that each claim a timeless divide between North and South. William Barclay Napton (1808-1883) was an editor, lawyer, and state supreme court justice who lived in Missouri during the tumultuous American nineteenth century. He was a keen observer of the nation's sectional politics just as he was a participant in those of his border state, the most divided of any in the nation, in the decades surrounding the Civil War. This book tells the story of one man's civil war, lived and waged within the broader conflict, and the long shadows both cast. But Napton's story moves beyond the Civil War just as it transcends the formal political realm. His is a fascinating tale of identity politics and their shifting currents, by which the highly educated former New Jerseyite became the owner or trustee of nearly fifty slaves and one of the most committed and thoughtful of the nation's proslavery ideologues. That a "northerner" could make such a life transition in the Border West suggests more than the powerful nature of slavery in antebellum American society. Napton's story offers provocative insights into the process of southernization, one driven more by sectional ideology and politics than by elements of a distinctive southern culture. Although Napton's tragic Civil War experience was a watershed in his southern evolution, that evolution was completed only after he had constructed a politicized memory of the bitter conflict, one that was suffered nowhere worse than in Missouri. This war-driven transformation ultimately defined him and his family, just as it would his border state and region for decades to come. By suffering for the South, losing family and property in his defense of its ideals and principles, he claimed by right what he could not by birth. Napton became a southerner by choice. Drawn from incomparable personal journals kept for more than fifty years and from voluminous professional and family correspondence, Napton's life story offers a thoughtful and important perspective on the key issues and events that turned this northerner first into an avowed proslavery ideologue and then into a full southerner. As a prominent jurist who sat on Missouri's high bench for more than a quarter century, he used his politicized position to give birth to the New South in the Old West. Students, teachers, and general readers of southern history, western history, and Civil War history will find this book of particular interest.
Understanding the culture of living with hymnbooks offers new insight into the histories of poetry, literacy, and religious devotion. It stands barely three inches high, a small brick of a book. The pages are skewed a bit, and evidence of a small handprint remains on the worn, cheap leather covers that don’t quite close. The book bears the marks of considerable use. But why—and for whom—was it made? Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers.
“[Phillips takes] philosophy out of the ivory tower and into the street.”—Los Angeles Times Christopher Phillips goes to the heart of philosophy and Socratic discourse to discover what we’re all looking for: the kind of love that makes life worthwhile. That is, love not defined only as eros, or erotic love, but in all its classical varieties. Love of neighbor, love of country, love of God, love of life, and love of wisdom—each is clarified and invigorated in Phillips’s Socratic dialogues with people from all walks of life and from all over the world.
Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community. He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.
An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. This book examines the rise and fall of the new math as a marker of the period's political and social ferment.
An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players. Tracing baseball’s story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest fields to introduce numerical analysis, and new methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to replace scouting with scoring. But that’s not how things turned out. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, Scouting and Scoring reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science, and offers an entirely fresh understanding of baseball.
Nathaniel Lyon (1818–1861) was the first Union general to die in the Civil War. Killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, he became the North’s first war hero, famed as the man who saved Missouri for the Union. In Damned Yankee, chosen by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book in 1991, Christopher Phillips portrays Lyon not as the savior of a border state threatened by secessionist extremists but as an unbalanced, monomaniacal Unionist zealot who purposely—and perhaps unnecessarily—brought war to a fragile state whose populace had voted overwhelmingly to stay out of the conflict. Phillips meticulously examines Lyon’s role in the Camp Jackson affair, his quest to oust the pro-southern governor of Missouri, and his campaign to eliminate the secessionist element in the state. He contends that Lyon’s actions in Missouri in 1861 were congruent with his dogmatic personality and troubled past. Damned Yankee is a complex, often shocking, portrait of one of the most controversial figures of the Civil War and a sobering study of how the faults of men may greatly affect history.
Christopher Philips-known for promoting the art of Socratic inquiry to adults and older children around the world-now turns his attention to the very young. Ceci Ann approaches her day with an open and questioning mind. Why? Why not! This winsome model for thoughtful conversations will encourage young readers toward critical thinking in the years ahead.
How people around the world grapple with the great questions posed by Socrates. What is virtue? What is moderation? What is justice? What is courage? What is good? What is piety? Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others on these six great questions would help him become a more excellent human being. Following in Socrates's footsteps, Christopher Phillips—"Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree" (Utne Reader)—investigates these same questions, beginning in the marketplace of modern-day Athens. He goes on to investigate the timely responses and outlooks of people from different cultures and backgrounds around the world: from Greece and Spain to Japan and Korea, Mexico City, and Chiapas, where the region's indigenous people struggle for fundamental human rights. Phillips also traveled throughout the United States, holding dialogues in diverse communities from New York City to the Navajo Nation. Introducing us to less familiar thinkers in non-Western traditions who were kindred spirits of Socrates, Phillips enlarges our perspectives on life's fundamental questions, creating an innovative world survey of philosophy.
An unprecedented analysis of the crucial but underexplored roles the United States and other nations have played in shaping Syria’s ongoing civil war “One of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published.”—Patrick Cockburn, Independent Syria’s brutal, long-lasting civil war is widely viewed as a domestic contest that began in 2011 and only later drew foreign nations into the fray. But in this book Christopher Phillips shows the crucial roles that were played by the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar in Syria’s war right from the start. Phillips untangles the international influences on the tragic conflict and illuminates the West’s strategy against ISIS, the decline of U.S. power in the region, and much more. Originally published in 2016, the book has been updated with two new chapters.
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