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Lila

Author: Robert Pirsig

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2013-11-06

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0307764214

In this bestselling new book, his first in seventeen years, Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, takes us on a poignant and passionate journey as mysterious and compelling as his first life-changing work. Instead of a motorcycle, a sailboat carries his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus down the Hudson River as winter closes in. Along the way he picks up a most unlikely traveling companion: a woman named Lila who in her desperate sexuality, hostility, and oncoming madness threatens to disrupt his life. In Lila Robert M. Pirsig has crafted a unique work of adventure and ideas that examines the essential issues of the nineties as his previous classic did the seventies.

On Quality

Author: Robert M. Pirsig

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 006308466X

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Featuring long-awaited selections from Robert M. Pirsig's unpublished writings, from before and after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an original collection illuminating the central theme of Pirsig's thought: “Quality” “The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment." —Robert M. Pirsig, 1962 More than a decade before the release of the book that would make him famous, Robert M. Pirsig had already caught hold of the central theme that would animate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “Quality,” a concept loosely likened to “excellence,” “rightness,” or “fitness” that Pirsig saw as kindred to the Buddhist ideas of “dharma” or the “Tao.” As he later wrote in Zen, “Quality is the Buddha.” Though he was revered by fans who considered him a guru, the famously private Pirsig published only two books and consented to few interviews and almost no public appearances in later decades. Yet he wrote and thought almost continually, refining his “Metaphysics of Quality” until his death in 2017. Now, for the first time, readers will be granted access to five decades of Pirsig’s personal writings in this posthumous collection that illuminates the evolution of his thinking to an unprecedented degree. Skillfully edited and introduced by Wendy K. Pirsig, Robert’s wife of four decades, the collection includes previously unpublished texts, speeches, letters, interviews, and private notes, as well as key excerpts from Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance and his second book, Lila. Since its publication in 1974, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has established itself as a modern classic of popular philosophy; selling millions of copies and inspiring a generation, while serving as a perennial touchstone for the generations that follow. On Quality is a remarkable contribution to our understanding of one of the most influential thinkers and writers of our time.

Zen and Now

Author: Mark Richardson

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2009-09-08

Total Pages: 5

ISBN-13: 0307373150

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On the Trail of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen and Now is the story of a story that will appeal to the 5 million readers of the original and serve as an initiation to a whole new generation. Since its original publication in 1968, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values has touched whole generations of readers with its serious attempt to define “quality” in a world that seems indifferent to the responsibilities that quality brings. Mark Richardson expands that journey with an investigation of his own – to find the enigmatic author of Zen and the Art, ask him a few questions, and place his classic book in context. The result manages to be a biography of Pirsig himself – in the discovery of an unknown life of madness, murder and eventual resolution – and a splendid meditation on creativity and problem-solving, sanity and insanity.

Lila's Child

Author: Dan Glover

Publisher: Dan Glover

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 9781403356208

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Secular Faith revolves around the friendship of two men, one Christian and the other atheist. The difference in their perspectives, where faith and reason seem to diverge, forms the underlying tension that propels the storyline. When an unlikely sequence of fortune and misfortune seems divinely influenced and leads them to interpret events differently, it produces conflicting judgments on how to react, and their friendship is put to the test. Counteracting the wedge that pushes them apart is the human drive to grasp the spiritual meaning of existence. Because it is not enough to agree to disagree, each is driven to bring the other to his view in order to affirm that it represents truth. Their actions are influenced not by a God who intervenes in the matters of mankind, but by belief of whether or not He does. Ultimately they discover that a man is defined by his actions and not by what he believes to be true. Morality exists to guide actions, not thoughts. The story of Tom Dagney and Christopher Pierce represents the struggle between belief and non-belief within men who, by their very nature, doubt that which they profess to believe, and struggle to understand this dichotomy. How belief translates into behavior proves far more intriguing than scholarly debate about philosophical perspectives. Caring about what people think pales compared to the passions aroused by how they live. This story of friendship, love, envy, tragedy, and redemption gives breath to philosophy and life to the struggle to identify human purpose. Above all Secular Faith exemplifies that, without a doubt, a man who puts aside his faith to serve his friends will always be a better man than one who puts aside his friends to serve his faith.

Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Author: Ron Di Santo

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 1990-11-19

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0688060692

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When Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published in 1974, it caused a literary sensation. An entire generation was profoundly affected by the story of the narrator, his son, Chris, and their month-long motorcycle odyssey from Minnesota to California. A combination of philosophical speculation and psychological tension, the book is a complex story of relationships, values, madness, and, eventually, enlightenment. Ron Di Santo and Tom Steele have spent years investigating the background and underlying symbolism of Pirsig’s work. Together, and with the approval of Robert Pirsig, they have written a fascinating reference/companion to the original. Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance serves as a metaphorical backpack of supplies for the reader’s journey through the original work. With the background material, insights, and perspectives the authors provide, Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is destined to become required reading for new fans of the book as well as those who have returned to it over the years.

Secular Buddhism

Author: Stephen Batchelor

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0300223234

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An essential collection of Stephen Batchelor's most probing and important work on secular Buddhism As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism, and the practice occurs within secular contexts such as hospitals, schools, and the workplace. Is it possible to recover from the Buddhist teachings a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious without compromising the integrity of the tradition? Is there an ethical framework that can underpin and contextualize these practices in a rapidly changing world? In this collected volume of Stephen Batchelor's writings on these themes, the author explores the complex implications of Buddhism's secularization. Ranging widely--from reincarnation, religious belief, and agnosticism to the role of the arts in Buddhist practice--he offers a detailed picture of contemporary Buddhism and its attempt to find a voice in the modern world.

The Eye of the Prophet

Author: Kahlil Gibran

Publisher: North Atlantic Books

Published: 2008-01-29

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9781556436970

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The Eye of the Prophet is a luminous collection of Gibran's writings translated from Arabic into French and now into English. Here the author is the poetic, philosophical moralist, grounded in Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity, seeking the best in people, refusing to separate humankind from the natural world. Ordinary work and life, he says, has the potential to be inherently noble, if we can learn to enact our affairs with the sublimity of nature's creations. Gibran’s descriptions celebrate the dignity and freedom of animals, birds, the seasons, oceans, clouds. His is a poet’s eye; he abhors the “tentacles of government” and calls on citizens to question all ideologies. In this book he writes about life’s great moments and passages (The First Kiss, The First Glance, The Mystery of Love, Youth); eternal essences (Earth, The Nature of Woman, Marriage, Love, Truth, Poetry), and grapples with nationalism, religion, and spiritual growth. The Eye of the Prophet blends Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist ideals into a great spiritual tapestry that transcends all cultural divisions. With its vibrant, rhythmic language, it speaks to our challenging times as a worthy companion to The Prophet.

Lila

Author: Robert M. Pirsig

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 9780553078732

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Phaedrus has traded in his motor cycle for a sailboat, his traveling companion, son Chris, for Lila, a woman he met in a bar, and his focus on values for a concentration on morals.

The Evolution of Morality

Author: Richard Joyce

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2007-08-24

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0262263254

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Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.

On the Basis of Morality

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 2019-08-15

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1624668496

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This edition originally published by Berghahn Books. Schopenhauer's treatise on ethics is presented here in E. F. J. Payne’s definitive translation, based on the Hubscher edition (Wiesbaden, 1946-1950). This edition includes an Introduction by David Cartwright, a translator’s preface, biographical note, selected bibliography, and an index. For convenient reference to passages in Kant's work discussed by Schopenhauer, Academy edition numbers have been added.