It is the tale of a princess who is cursed by a mean, jealous, witch so that she has no gravity. The book is full of puns, so MacDonald makes much both of her weightlessness, and the lack of gravity in her character. Naturally her parents are upset and try to have her cured, but to no avail (although the efforts of a couple of Chinese philosophers to provide a cure are rendered amusingly). However the Princess is quite happy with her "light" state (of course it is in her nature to be always happy).
Spanning over nine hundred years, Eight Women Philosophers is the first singly-authored work to trace the themes of standard philosophical theorizing and feminist thought across women philosophers in the Western tradition. Jane Duran has crafted a comprehensive overview of eight women philosophers–Hildegard of Bingen, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor Mill, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir–that underscores the profound and continuing significance of these thinkers for contemporary scholars.
This book examines philosophers autobiographies as a genre of philosophical writing. Author J. Lenore Wright focuses her attention on five philosophical autobiographies: Augustine s Confessions, Descartes Meditations, Rousseau s The Confessions, Nietzsche s Ecce Homo, and Hazel Barnes s The Story I Tell Myself. In the context of first-person narration, she shows how the philosophers in question turn their attention inward and unleash their analytical rigor on themselves.
This book is a study of the literary strategies which the first professional philosophers used to market their respective disciplines. Philosophers of fourth-century BCE Athens developed the emerging genre of the "protreptic" (literally, "turning" or "converting"). Simply put, protreptic discourse uses a rhetoric of conversion that urges a young person to adopt a specific philosophy in order to live a good life. The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize a new cultural institution: the school of higher learning (the first in Western history).
Early modern philosophers looked for inspiration to the later ancient thinkers when they rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. The impact of the Hellenistic philosophers on such philosophers as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Locke was profound and is ripe for reassessment. These new essays offer precisely that. Leading historians of philosophy explore the connections between Hellenistic and early modern philosophy by taking account of new scholarly and philosophical advances in these essays. There work provides invaluable point of reference for philosophers, historians of ideas and classicists.
