Coming soon - Philosophy for Life
From the publisher's advanced publicity...
Philosophy For Life is the essential introduction to the history of Western thought, covering key thinkers, both ancient and modern, and the major branches of philosophy. But more than that, it is a toolkit for developing new insights into the world we live in.
In Philosophy For Life you will develop your own critical and creative thinking by exploring the key ideas in Western Philosophy and the arguments that continue to shape our world.
To be published on 5th October.
More information on this title...
New A-Level textbook for AQA RS!
I've been working with John Frye and Debbie Herring on a new textbook for AQA Religious Studies, due for publication in September.
And here's an photo of John Frye himself. It's our first book as co-authors, but we know each other well, having been to King's College London together back in the 1960s.
This book is due to be published on September 29th!
You can pre-order this title on Amazon (and support this website at no cost to yourself) by following this link: AQA A-level Religious Studies Year 2
Also publishing this autumn...
In June 1916, two remarkable religious thinkers found themselves on opposite sides of the battle of Verdun; for both the experience was uniquely formative, but they responded to it very differently. It transformed their ideas of God, their careers and their lives.
A German Lutheran chaplain and a French Jesuit stretcher bearer, although separated by only a few hundred yards of mud and barbed wire, tried to cope with, and make sense of, that horror of death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. They – Paul Tillich and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – reflect a century of thinking about religion, politics, humanism, existential angst and the global future.
Fashionable in the radical days of the 1960s, their ideas, and the experiences that gave rise to them, remain surprisingly relevant in the very different world of 2016, when the old supernatural ‘God’ is still surprisingly alive, in spite of predictions to the contrary, and a new one - in whatever secular form she may eventually appear - struggles to be born. It also happens to be a world in which people continue to slaughter one another for political, religious or ideological reasons, destroying the hope that the Great War of 1914-18 would be a ‘war to end war.’
I'm exploring the impact of the Great War on religious ideas, linking Heidegger, Bultmann, Hitler, Wittgenstein and others to work of the main characters, Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin. It's the story of those two men and their struggles with religious belief, but also of the whole way in which ideas about God and religion have been shaped and re-shaped during the last hundred years.
This photograph was taken at Verdun in 1916 (copied, for purposes of comment, from 'The Teilhard Album'' Collins, 1966). On the extreme right is the French Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He spent the war years serving as a stretcher bearer, and his experience of the horrors of Verdun in 1916 was to transform his idea of God and of the future of humankind.
Thought Experiments in Ethics
Fed up with diverting trolleys, pushing fat men off bridges or killing one hostage to save twenty? Not sure whether you are prepared to be medically hooked up to a famous violinist for nine months or whether that pig really does want to be eaten? Thought experiments have become an common feature of ethical arguments, but how should we treat them and what are their limitations?
Here is the draft text of a talk, given by Richard Baron in June 2017, on this fascinating topic. To download the pdf file, and to see some other stuff on thought experiments, click here.
To see my range of books on Philosophy, Ethics and Religion...
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Used for the introductory course in Ethics at the University of Zacatecas, Mexico, 'Understand Ethics' has been translated into Spanish by three staff at the University.