Many people believe that pleasure and desire are obstacles to reasonable and intelligent behavior. In The Pleasure Center, Kringelbach reveals that what we desire, what pleases us - in fact, our most base, animalistic tendencies - are actually very important sources of information.

They motivate us for a good reason. And understanding that reason, taking that reason into account, and harnessing and directing that reason, can make us much more rational and effective people.

Deeper than Reason takes the insights of modern psychological and neuroscientific research on the emotions and brings them to bear on questions about our emotional involvement with the arts. Robinson begins by laying out a theory of emotion, one that is supported by the best evidence from current empirical work on emotions, and then in the light of this theory examines some of the ways in which the emotions function in the arts.

In Socrates Dissatisfied, Weiss argues against the prevailing view that the Laws are Socrates' spokesmen. She reveals and explores many indications that Socrates and the Laws are, both in style and substance, adversaries: whereas the Laws are rhetoricians who defend the absolute authority of the Laws, Socrates is a dialectician who defends-in the Crito no less than in the Apology-the overriding claim of each individual's own reason when assiduously applied to questions of justice. It is only for the sake of an unphilosophical Crito, Weiss suggests, that Socrates invents the speech of the Laws.

Perhaps the French philosopher's masterpiece, which is concerned with an extraordinary question: What does it mean to be mad?

Will Durant - The Story of Civilization 07 - The Age of Reason Begins
7th in the Civilization series - The Durants take on the linchpin of modern European history, the religious strife and scientific progress between the 1550s and 1650s.
VII. The Age of Reason Begins (1961)
1. The English Ecstasy: 1558-1648
2. The Faiths Fight For Power: 1556-1648
3. The Tentatives of Reason: 1558-1648