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The Meaning of Things

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Language
  
English

Media type
  
Print

ISBN
  
978-0297607588

Author
  
A. C. Grayling

Publisher
  
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

3.9/5
Goodreads

Publication date
  
August 9, 2001

Pages
  
196

Originally published
  
9 August 2001

Page count
  
196

The Meaning of Things t1gstaticcomimagesqtbnANd9GcRENDnblx2zJ9QlI

Similar
  
A C Grayling books, Ethics books

The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life, published in the U.S. as Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age, is a book by A. C. Grayling. First published in 2001, the work offers popular treatments of philosophical reasoning, weaving together ideas from various writers and traditions. It consists of short essays on a variety of subjects which, although deeply rooted in philosophy, are everyday phenomena encountered, recognized, and understood by everyone.

Contents

Contents

Part I: Virtues and Attributes
Moralising — Tolerance — Mercy — Civility — Compromise — Fear — Courage — Defeat — Sorrow — Death — Hope — Perseverance — Prudence — Frankness — Lying — Perjury — Betrayal — Loyalty — Blame — Punishment — Delusion — Love — Happiness

Part II: Foes and Fallacies
Nationalism — Racism — Speciesism — Hate — Revenge — Intemperance — Depression — Christianity — Sin — Repentance — Faith — Miracles — Prophecy — Virginity — Paganism — Blasphemy — Obscenity — Poverty — Capitalism

Part III: Amenities and Goods
Reason — Education — Excellence — Ambition — Acting — Art — Health — Leisure — Pace — Reading — Memory — History — Leadership — Travel — Privacy — Family — Age — Gifts — Trifles

Quotations

  • Defeat is always an opportunity, even when, as far too often happens, what is genuinely the better cause has been crushed by the worse. [...] But nothing happens without a lesson to offer, or without opening other routes into the future.
  • Hatred [...] is dislike and antipathy inflamed to a high degree and inspired by beliefs which stimulate a set of other emotions in the hater, chief among them fear, ignorance, jealousy, anger and disgust. But note that all these emotions, and especially the first three, are about the hater; thus hating says more about haters than what they hate. It shows weakness, for it is a crude emotion which turns fears and anxieties outward to fix them on something else.
  • What underlies talk of virginity is a profound and often hidden moral angst about purity and pollution—and therefore also sentiments of temptation and desire. If our religions had decided that ears or wisdom teeth were spiritually significant, we should feel the same anxieties regarding them as with the hymen; and moral concern would be devoted to them instead.
  • Editions

    The 2001 hardcover edition of The Meaning of Things was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. A paperback edition was published in 2002 by Phoenix, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group. The American edition hardcover edition was published by Oxford University Press in 2002.

    References

    The Meaning of Things Wikipedia