''Mind blowingly brilliant'' PHILIPPA PERRY''Few other writers have such passion for granular detail, intellectual heft and boundless curiosity'' THE TIMES''As suspenseful and pacy as an episode of peak-era ER'' GUARDIANA near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death―and what might follow―by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger travelled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.This experience spurred Junger―a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical―to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when we are forced to reckon with such existential questions?In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.''Moving, compact, philosophically ambitious … A humbling volume'' OBSERVER‘Stunning … A powerful book that comes as close as anything I’ve read in explaining what it means to be human’ JAMES PATTERSON''An instant classic that filled me with wonder, gratitude and awe'' WILL SCHWALBE''A stunning account I didn’t so much read as inhale, awed and riveted and forever changed'' MICHAEL FINKEL

"In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified "horrifying heresies," but the precise reasons for his expulsion remain a mystery. When he published his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, which was condemned as "the most atheistic book ever written," he began to reveal to the world what his heresies may have been. Yet ever since the eighteenth century, most readers and scholars have assumed that Spinoza was a pantheist--even a "God-intoxicated man," as the poet Novalis put it. After all, how could a person whose books are suffused with talk of God be an atheist? In Spinoza, Atheist, Steven Nadler, one of the world's leading authorities on the philosopher, aims to settle the question and show that that's exactly what he was. Nadler makes a powerful case that there is no real divinity for Spinoza. God is Nature, and isn't an object of worshipful awe or religious reverence but can only be understood through philosophy and science. There is nothing supernatural--no mystery, ineffability, or sublimity. Spinoza does speak of "blessedness" and "salvation," but these, too, are to be understood in natural and rational terms, as the peace of mind and happiness that come from understanding ourselves and the world. Whether Spinoza believed in God is a fascinating and enduring controversy. Spinoza, Atheist promises to transform our understanding of his views and to make clear just how radical a thinker he was and remains."--

This illuminating study of Benjamin’s final essay helps unlock the mystery of this great philosopher Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism—Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an “unclassifiable” philosopher. His essay “On the Concept of History” was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. In this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay, Michael Löwy argues that it remains one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century. Looking in detail at Benjamin’s celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy highlights the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin’s philosophy of history.

Includes 20 distinguished contemporary writers who have connected with nature & learned why we are inextricably attached to it. In "Against Nature," Joyce Carol Oates explains why writers generally resist nature as a topic. Diane Ackerman swims with a right whale & her calf. John McPhee explores the mystery of the Loch Ness monster & the people who obsess over it. Sherry Simpson looks at the conflict-riddled business of trapping & killing Alaskan wolves. Also, essays by: Mark Doty, Barry Lopez, Vaclav Havel, Bill Bryson, Deborah Archer, Sue Ellen Campbell, Leslie Leyland Fields, John Hales, Hal Herring, Edward Hoagland, Kurt Hoelting, Paul Lindholdt, Leslie Roberts, Lucy Wilson Sherman, & Sandi Wisenberg.

Book by Anshen, Ruth

" The human race is the only one that knows it must die, and it knows this only through its experience. " - Voltaire A timeless study of the 'Experience of Death' by a thinker who was to die early in a German concentration camp. He writes with a freshness and vitality rarely met with in works of philosophy. Also includes "The Moral Problem of Suicide". One of the great masterpieces of 20th Century philosophy, its investigation and analysis of the "Experience of Death" is as searching and significant as that of Martin Heidegger in 'Being and Time'. For many years unavailable and therefore underestimated, this publication includes the two works by Landsberg that accompany each other the best: 'The Experience of Death' and 'The Moral Problem of Suicide'. Editor Edouard d'Araille here presents a revised version of Margaret Kerr's accurate translation. Paul-Louis Landsberg was a philosopher who was closely associated with the group of Parisian thinkers embracing Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Mounier and others. He has been classified as an Existentialist thinker, due both to the subject matter of his work and realistic, humanistic approach he takes. However, it should be borne in mind that Landsberg is Christian in faith, and he approaches the topics of death and suicide both from a Christian and a secular point-of-view. It is especially interesting to see how he tackles the controversial issue of suicide from the standpoint of Christianity - an act seen by some branches of that religion as a mortal sin, making its agent unworthy of Christian burial. FEATURES - This Living Time(TM) Press edition of Paul-Louis Landsberg's masterpiece includes: The Complete Texts of these key works - ' The Experience of Death ' and ' On the Moral Problem of Suicide ' A Biographical Sketch of Paul-Louis Landsberg Textual Annotations to both works, included at the end of the volume A Select Bibliography of his philosophical works B&W illustration as a frontispiece to the work (relating to the ' Intermezzo in the Bull Ring ') The core contents of the two philosophical essays are as follows: The Experience of Death I. The State of the Question II. The Limitations of Scheler's Answer III. Individualism and the Experience of Death IV. The Death of a Friend, and the Experience of "Repetition" V. The Ontological Basis VI. The Death of a Friend, according to the Fourth Book of the Confessions of St. Augustine VII. The Forms of Experience of Death VIII. Intermezzo in the Bull Ring IX. The Christian Experience of Death The Moral Problem of Suicide 1. Traditional Arguments 2. A Personal View Though both of these works are deeply personal and it is true that Landsberg is a Christian by denomination, in no way does he implore the reader to take up his own faith and he presents ideas and perspectives that are of equal interest to the atheist. The reader will find it valuable to read Heidegger's analysis of death in 'Being and Time' alongside this book, as it presents a wholly atheistic existential analysis that contrasts interestingly with this one. " What is the meaning of death to the human being as a person? The question admits of no conclusion, for we are dealing with the very mystery of man, taken from a certain aspect. Every real problem in philosophy contains all the others in the unity of mystery. It is necessary, therefore, to set a limit and seek a basis in experience for any possible answer: there are always problems of the utmost importance left on one side. Our enquiry would seem inevitable in the present state of philosophy, for we are far from having a metaphysics of death, as we have of life. " - Paul-

The Philosophy of Existence, among the first translations into English of the Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel, is composed of four distinct essays--"On the Ontological Mystery"; "Existence and Human Freedom"; "Testimony and Existentialism"; and "An Essay in Biography." Together, the essays articulate the integral elements, constitutive terminology, and characteristic anthropology of Marcel's philosophy of existence, and describe its marked differences with the atheist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, and its subtle--yet crucial--departures from the existentialism of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Provocative and penetrating, The Philosophy of Existence provides an analysis of enduring relevance on modern man and the modern condition, worthy of repeated readings.

We are desperately in need of a new Story-specifically a new Story of Value, an Outrageous Love Story-as a way to meet the outrageous pain of the world. This is the only true response to the current meta-crisis, the amalgamation of interlocking political, educational, spiritual, ecological, and cultural crises that threatens not merely the total disruption of all social systems, but either the death of humanity or the death of our humanity. This series of oral essays outlines the contours of a new Story of Value. Most importantly, they clearly show how we-both individually and collectively-can transform our lives and become an "imaginal cell," an ontological activist, for the sake of the whole. Through profound "writual" practices like writing a Sacred Autobiography and composing Outrageous Love Letters, we start to move from a pathologized life to a mythic life. We begin to play our instruments as part of Unique Self Symphony. We become Homo amor, the New Human and the New Humanity, irreducibly unique incarnations of Eros, of the Intimate Cosmos that lives in, as us, and through us-for the sake of Reality itself. These oral essays are based on talks delivered by Marc at the Eros Mystery School at Kasteel de Berckt in Baarlo, Netherlands, August 2019.

Twenty-five years ago Olivia Sealy was kidnapped for ransom. Today she has no memory of the terrible event, yet an uneasy feeling still haunts her--a fear that is realized when an infant's skeleton is found and a connection is made to Olivia's past. As news of the discovery makes headlines, Olivia and the people close to her suddenly become targets for a murderer bent on revenge. Still stunned by the revelation and its implications, Olivia puts her trust in Trey Bonney, the detective assigned to the case. But neither counts on a madman who may hold the answer to the twenty-five-year-old mystery--a secret someone hoped was buried for good.