Bøger af Christopher Phillips

Christopher Phillips dedicou sua vida a carregar a tocha de Sócrates e sua busca por ¿Conhece-te a ti mesmö. No entanto, após a morte de seu amado pai e mentor, o criador do crescente movimento global Sócrates Café teve pouca escolha a não ser confrontar a verdade inescapável: que existem algumas coisas que não podemos saber com certeza. Esta mistura comovente, perspicaz e, em última análise, esperançosa e útil de memórias e exploração filosófica começa na pequena ilha vulcânica de Nísiros, na Grécia, e se desenrola através do espaço e do tempo enquanto o autor explora as conexões entre suas circunstâncias imediatas e a eterna sabedoria dos filósofos populares. Neste livro pessoal e investigativo, o aclamado ¿filósofo do povö compartilha lições aprendidas de seus encontros íntimos e muitas vezes inesperados com seres humanos extraordinariamente perceptivos, vivos e falecidos há muito tempo, na forma de viajantes cansados e alguns dos maiores pensadores da história, de Heráclito ao Dr. Cornel West. Àqueles que lutam para superar a desesperança que pode resultar de uma perda grave, revés ou traição ¿ o que o poeta Percy Bysshe Shelley chama de circunstâncias da vida ¿mais escuras que a morte ou a noite¿ ¿, o autor destaca, com rescrições filosóficas tanto oportunas quanto atemporais, como cultivar um ¿espírito socráticö que leva a um amor renovado, paciência e esperança na outra extremidade do túnel.

World War I was the first great general conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods over land and sea. Yet the armies of the war were too vast in scale, their movements too complex, and the infrastructure upon which they depended too specialized to be operated by professional soldiers alone. In Civilian Specialists at War, Christopher Phillips examines the relationship between industrial society and industrial warfare through the lens of Britain's transport experts. Phillips analyzes the multiple connections between the army, the government, and the senior executives of some of prewar Britain's largest industrial enterprises, revealing that civilian transport experts were a key component of Britain's strategies in World War I. This book also details the application of recognizably civilian technologies and methods to the prosecution of war, and documents how transport experts were constrained by the political and military requirements of coalition warfare.

A magnum opus on the history of the middle border states of the American West in the Civil War era

Energized by the initial optimism surrounding Obama's presidency and, conversely, the fierce partisanship in Congress, Christopher Phillips has set out to engage Americans in discussions surrounding our must fundamental rights and freedoms, with some help from Thomas Jefferson. A radical in his own day, Jefferson believed that the Constitution should be revised periodically to keep up with the changing times. Instead, it has become a sacred, immutable text-and in Phillips's opinion, it's in need of some shaking up.From a high school in West Virginia to People's Park in Berkeley, California; from Burning Man to the Mall of America, Phillips gathered together Americans from all walks of life, moderating dialogues inspired by Jefferson's own populist political philosophy, formulating new Constitutional articles. With contagious passion and conviction, Philips has taken up Jefferson's cause for a truly participatory democracy at a time when our country needs it most.

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.

The decade between the world wars witnessed an astonishing flowering of photography in Europe-- marked particularly by the unprecedented work of such figures as Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Alexander Rodchenko. Alongside the visual experiments ran a fascinating public discussion in which critics, artists, and the photographers themselves struggled to define the nature and possibilities of photography in the modern era. The seventy-one essays and documents collected in this book provide a concise, provocative introduction to the ideas and personalities that animated avant-garde photography during these years of artistic ferment and that continue to influence the medium today. By turns poetic, analytical, and fiercely ideological, these diverse writings give expression to a very wide range of original ideas. Moholy-Nagy calls on photographers to create a powerful abstract vision that will transform our ability to see. Albert Renger-Patzsch argues for a quite different goal, a photography of revelatory realism that lays bare the essence of the subject before the lens. The French writer Pierre Mac Orlan explores psychologically compelling notions: that photography realizes "all that is curiously inhuman" and "creates death for a second." Photography is widely characterized as a modern machine-age art that supersedes the traditional fine arts. In the Soviet Union an extraordinary interchange pits the avant-gardist Rodchenko against opponents who insist that social usefulness is photography's primary responsibility. While shedding important new light on the directions taken by photography during the twentieth century, these essays also illuminate such major movements as Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and the New Objectivity. Most of the selections were not previously available in English and have been translated especially for this volume. Each appears with an informative headnote by Christopher Phillips, who in an introductory essay provides a lucid overview of the period and the context in which the writings first appeared. With its wealth of new material, this collection is an essential resource for all those studying photography or seeking to understand the visual culture of this century. This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition "The New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars, Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 23-December 31, 1989.

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.

"A provocative extension of Jefferson's original plan."-Kirkus Reviews

Nathaniel Lyon was the first Union general to die in the Civil War, killed at the Battle of Wilson's Creek, Missouri. In Damned Yankee, Christopher Phillips portrays Lyon not as the saviour of a border state threatened by secessionist extremists but as an unbalanced, monomaniacal Unionist zealot who purposely, brought war to a fragile state.

An unprecedented analysis of the crucial but underexplored roles the United States and other nations have played in shaping Syria's ongoing civil war Most accounts of Syria's brutal, long-lasting civil war focus on a domestic contest that began in 2011 and only later drew foreign nations into the escalating violence. Christopher Phillips argues instead that the international dimension was never secondary but that Syria's warA was, from the very start, profoundly influenced by regional factors, particularly the vacuum created by a perceived decline of U.S. power in the Middle East. This precipitated a new regional order in which six external protagonists-the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar-have violently competed for influence, with Syria a key battleground.A Drawing on a plethora of original interviews, Phillips constructs a new narrative of Syria's war. Without absolving the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime, the author untangles the key external factors which explain the acceleration and endurance of the conflict, including the West's strategy against ISIS. He concludes with some insights on Syria and the region's future.

By studying the characteristics of those positioned along this fault line during the Civil War, the centrality of the war issue of slavery, which border residents long eschewed as being divisive, became apparent. This book explains how the process of Southernization occurred during and after the Civil War-a phenomenon largely unexplained by historians.Beyond the broader, more traditional narrative of the clash of arms, within these border slave states raged an inner civil war that shaped the military and political outcomes of the war as well as these states' cultural landscapes. Author Christopher Phillips describes how the Civil War experience in the border states served to form new loyalties and communities of identity that both deeply divided these states and distorted the meaning of the war for postwar generations.

A breakout book completing a trilogy of Socratic exploration by the inimitable Johnny Appleseed of philosophy.

How people around the world grapple with the great questions posed by Socrates.