365 essays, each about 365 words, on Uncle Sam's Birth Right and Genealogy, the U.S. Constitution's philosophical and historical presuppositions and implications, or Philosophy for Dummies.

365 essays, each about 365 words, on Uncle Sam's Birth Right and Genealogy, the U.S. Constitution's philosophical and historical presuppositions and implications, or Philosophy for Dummies.

365 essays, each about 365 words, on Uncle Sam´s birthright, Genealogy, and Orientation, the Constitution´s historical and philosophical presuppositions and implications, or Philosophy for Dummies.

365 essays, each about 365 words, on Uncle Sam´s birthright, Genealogy, and Orientation, the Constitution´s historical and philosophical presuppositions and implications, or Philosophy for Dummies.

Though some might dispute it, Freud -- along with Marx, Darwin and Einstein -- ranks among the intellectual fathers of the 20th century.  We all talk about the meaning of our dreams, make "Freudian" slips, appreciate the power of unconscious desires and accept the influence of childhood experiences on adult behavior.  Nevertheless, despite his pervasive influence and all the words that have been written about him, the real importance of Freud´s work has been obscured.  He asks what may be the most pressing question of the age that we live in: how can we win power in our own soul?

As we move through the first years of a new millennium, it sometimes appears that the world has become too large, too complex and more dangerous and inhospitable every day.  We seem beset by nightmares: fascism, communism, tribalism, nationalism, racism and the other -isms that have prevented us, as individuals and as societies, from thinking clearly and acting with humanity.  We paid dearly for our nightmares in the 20th century and the end is not in sight.  We feel increasingly challenged to preserve -- or gain -- a minimum sense of community, security and well being in the midst of the globalized struggle of billions of others to do the same.  In this struggle, our political systems -- the governments that oversee our domestic and foreign affairs and the organizations that connect us internationally -- often seem overwhelmed by the effort to stave off ever-threatening crises and disasters of one kind or the other.  No place, no one, no system appears immune to difficulty.  At a time when the major ideological and systemic competitors to Western liberal-democracy and free-market capitalism have collapsed, neither democracy nor the market appear to offer, by themselves, the answers we need to our many problems.

Freud offers a way to understand ourselves that makes clear the need for a revolution within the soul if we are to rid ourselves of the nightmares and gain the capacity to live our lives with reason and humanity.  His focus on helping the individual banish the irrational has roots deep in Western civilization in the classic Greek concern with "living the good life."  Freud approaches this ultimately practical question from the perspective of one who wishes to help the individual achieve psychic health.  Freud does not define health as "happy" or "well-adjusted."  Nor is it contingent on physical well being.  Health is the capacity to determine, consciously and rationally, one´s own approach to life -- our relationship to the external world around us and to the internal wellsprings of our individual mental and emotional existence.  Psychic health is a prerequisite to living the good life, to using what we have at hand -- to the best of our ability -- to complete our existence as human beings.

Plato and Freud: Statesmen of the Soul seeks to show how Freud´s work recalls Socrates´ invitation, in the Republic, to establish within ourselves the rule of reason without which we cannot live well and achieve just and well-ordered societies.  Plato showed Socrates engaging individuals in dialogue one by one in order to help them understand the need to reorder their souls and subject the disorder within to the control of intellect and reason.  Plato´s Socratic dialogues offer a powerful model of political change through changing individuals, soul by soul.  For Plato, the nature of the soul was intrinsically a political matter.  He sought to put political power into the hands of intellect, and thereby into the hands of those individuals whose souls are justly ordered by intellect.  Those thus ordered would be "philosophers" -- which in Greek meant simply "lovers of wisdom."  Through the ability of these "philosophers" to perceive the good and, consequently, to act rightly, the state too would be guided by the good.

Plato and Freud: Statesmen of the Soul seeks to escape the previous mistranslations and misunderstandings of Freud´s key terms and lays out for the first time what he was really trying to tell us.  Freud -- like Plato -- looked to help the individual establish order within the soul (in German, seele).  Freud saw a soul divided into three: the I (das Ich), the It (das Es) and the Over-I (das Uberich).  He believed that neurosis and dreams revealed a conflict within the soul between these three elements, only one of which -- the part experienced as "I" -- represented the individual himself.  This conflict was about the ultimate political power, the ability to author -- to "write" -- the contents of the soul and thereby determine what the individual did and desired.  Freud developed psychoanalysis to help the individual resolve the psychic conflict in favor of his I.  He rebuffed all other claims to authorship of the individual.  Freud saw the Over-I as the chief culprit, maintaining the I in the dependent relationship of childhood.  The dependent self looks to the Over-I -- the internal agent of externally derived meaning -- and the It -- the fixated meanings of the biological and infantile past -- for purpose and direction.  The unhealthy individual cannot determine the contents of his own desires; his intellect is enslaved to the passions while the Over-I -- the internal garrison of repressive culture -- holds the soul´s territory for external authority.

Freud offers us a peek at our potential, one unclouded by illusion and therefore hopefully more in tune with our needs.  Standing with Freud we can discern a new being, the real us.  The healthy human being is one who knows that he determines his own place in nature and that his relationship to the cosmos is as creator.  His goals are of his own making and he understands that the limits on his power can be only momentary.  He has moved beyond good and evil but feels deeply a need for the companionship and love of others.  He is the raw material for the next phase of human history.

Mind Grenades” is heavy on Liberal opinion and light on the divisive grievances which blind much of the public, the voters, to the commonality of purpose of the equitable, and thus more stable, society.

It deals with privilege, taxation, abortion, affirmative opportunity and, mostly, with how Americans come to feel about themselves, feel “not enough” to be humanist practicing democrats, through the failings of their earliest nurturance, as day-old and week-old infants.

It offers opinions you are not likely to have heard before.

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The year is 1952. Selective Service and the military draft are uppermost in the minds of many eighteen to twenty-two year-olds. College students in good academic standing are granted deferments. Melvin Heath, a younger-ministerial student at Bradbury College has one. Driven by doubts about his ``calling to the ministry,'' Melvin drops out of college before the end of his fourth semester to join the U.S. Air Force. He sets out on a religious odyssey that takes him through military training, a rewarding tour of duty in Europe, a return to Bradbury College to resume his preparation for the seminary, disillusionment leading to a final break with Bradbury and the denomination, and his transfer to the engineering school of the state university to finish his education. His hunger for truth and understanding carries him along in his search for a resolution of the inner conflict that torments him.

The year is 1952. Selective Service and the military draft are uppermost in the minds of many eighteen to twenty-two year-olds. College students in good academic standing are granted deferments. Melvin Heath, a younger-ministerial student at Bradbury College has one. Driven by doubts about his ``calling to the ministry,'' Melvin drops out of college before the end of his fourth semester to join the U.S. Air Force. He sets out on a religious odyssey that takes him through military training, a rewarding tour of duty in Europe, a return to Bradbury College to resume his preparation for the seminary, disillusionment leading to a final break with Bradbury and the denomination, and his transfer to the engineering school of the state university to finish his education. His hunger for truth and understanding carries him along in his search for a resolution of the inner conflict that torments him.

A thought provoking and sometimes chilling recount of one man's struggle to find inner philosophical peace within the fabric of today's society.From his homeland of Venezuela through the countries of Mexico, Canada and finally the United States, Eduardo Paris delves into the political, philosophical and legal bubbling cauldrons that most of us would only dare to enter.In part one, his straightforward and sometimes humorous approach in making the reader challenge their own moral thought process is enlightened by correlations to prominent political, legal and philosophical thinkers of past and present.Part two of the book delves into the author’s outlook, in tongue in cheek style, of what “a good politician” should do if he or she were elected into office. Readers are forced to examine their thoughts on the current state of world affairs and compare them to the author’s views regarding these troubled political times.“To Save or to Destroy the Nation” is a well written book, bound to stir your moral and philosophical preconceptions.

"""We are all torn between tribal moralities, which stress differences and dangers, and imperial ethics, which attempt to overcome differences and defuse dangers. We are all tempted to break--or at least cheat on--the Social Contract."" The provocative thesis of Tribe and Empire is that the nation is an unstable halfway house between the paranoid tribe, which sees all other tribes as actual or possible enemies, and the open-ended empire, which sees all people as potential subjects or citizens. Indeed, the modern nation is made up, on the one hand, of increasingly moralistic tribes from the Ku Klux Klan to the National Organization of Women that have rejected the Social Contract, and on the other, of imperial organizations from Amnesty International to Microsoft that seek to expand the Contract beyond the limits of the nation. In order to throw light upon these processes in the modern nation state, the book examines the political development of various North and South American Indian groups from the Social Contract perspective of the 17th century philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau."

"""We are all torn between tribal moralities, which stress differences and dangers, and imperial ethics, which attempt to overcome differences and defuse dangers. We are all tempted to break--or at least cheat on--the Social Contract."" The provocative thesis of Tribe and Empire is that the nation is an unstable halfway house between the paranoid tribe, which sees all other tribes as actual or possible enemies, and the open-ended empire, which sees all people as potential subjects or citizens. Indeed, the modern nation is made up, on the one hand, of increasingly moralistic tribes from the Ku Klux Klan to the National Organization of Women that have rejected the Social Contract, and on the other, of imperial organizations from Amnesty International to Microsoft that seek to expand the Contract beyond the limits of the nation. In order to throw light upon these processes in the modern nation state, the book examines the political development of various North and South American Indian groups from the Social Contract perspective of the 17th century philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau."