Jeremy Stangroom

From the author of Einstein's Riddle comes a collection of ingenious puzzles that will stimulate your brain while also introducing you to science's most intriguing concepts, paradoxes, and unsolved conundrums. How can a cat be both dead and alive? Can you travel back in time to kill your own grandfather? How can a particle also be a wave? And where are the aliens? After guiding readers through warm-up logic puzzles designed to sharpen the wits, Jeremy Stangroom tackles time dilation, wave-particle duality, time travel, and quantum entanglement, along with many other scientific phenomena. Engaging your critical thinking skills while at the same time challenging your sense of reality, Einstein's Twin is a must-have for any avid puzzler's library.

This compendium contains profiles of leaders, such as John Calvin, Ibn al-Arabi, Hillel the Elder, and Gobind Singh, who have had a major impact on religious thought. It also offers discussions of various concepts, such as monotheism, creationism, and deism, which give readers a broader understanding of religion. This book uses a broad non-deistic definition of religion and touches on Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, and more. An instructive, balanced volume on an often-contentious topic.

Philosophy raises some fascinating and mind-boggling questions, thorny existential puzzles that have perplexed and troubled humanity for millennia. This concise book approaches fifty of the most perplexing problems of all time and shows how they have been addressed, if not solved, by some of the greatest minds in history. Readers enjoy lively biographical overviews of some of the most thought-provoking philosophers of the last 2000 years. Each chapter focuses on a featured theory and highlights the most intriguing thinkers working within that particular area and the most brilliant ideas that resulted from their inquiries.

Throughout history, philosophers have devised ingenious thought experiments to find solutions to the most fiendish of problems. The world’s greatest thinkers have grappled with puzzles such as Free Will, Personal Identity and the Problem of Other Minds. Step into this intriguing world and try your own hand at such conundrums. Weigh up the possible outcomes to decide What Will the Crocodile Do?; ask yourself Can You Be Responsible for What is Unavoidable?; shake up your logical thinking and ponder Is It Rational to Believe in Monsters under the Bed? and figure out an honorable solution to Should You Run Over the Fat Man? This book will hone your mental skills, blow your preconceptions out of the water, and make you think twice about your daily decisions.

The Story of Philosophy sees philosophy for what it is: a passionate, exhilarating quest for human understanding that cannot be reduced to dry categories or simple definitions. It's a story with plot twists, a murder, accidental discoveries, disastrous love affairs, geniuses, idiots, monks, and vagabonds. At the heart of it all are the ideas and obsessions that have captured great thinkers from the very beginning. Packed with intriguing anecdotes and fascinating detail, James Garvey and Jeremy Stangroom bring us face to face with the most important philosophers in western history. Rigorous, refreshingly free of academic jargon, and highly accessible, this is the ideal introduction for anyone who wants to gain a new perspective on philosophy's biggest thoughts.

The new book from high profile philosophy writers Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (authors of the hugely successful "Why Truth Matters"), exploring a topical and controversial religious and cultural issue in a highly accessible manner. This fascinating book explores the role that religion and culture play in the oppression of women. Philosophy writers Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom ask probing questions about the way that religion shields the oppression of women from criticism and why many Western liberals, leftists and feminists have remained largely silent on the subject. The lives of women in the industrialized world have improved enormously in the last hundred years, especially so, in social, cultural and political terms, in the last forty. But throughout the rest of the world, a great many women lead lives of misery and sometimes plain horror. They are often considered and treated as the property of men and have few, if any, rights. Such treatment is generally sustained and protected by a combination of religion and culture." Does God Hate Women?" explores instances of the oppression of women in the name of religious and cultural norms and how these issues play out both in the community and in the political arena. Drawing on philosophical concerns such as truth, relativism, knowledge and ethics, Benson and Stangroom assess the current situation and provide a rallying call for a progressive politics that is committed to universal values. This important new book will appeal to anyone interested in issues of global justice, human rights and multiculturalism.

Riddles, paradoxes, and conundrums have been confusing and confounding people since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks. The eponymous riddle, according to legend, was devised by Albert Einstein as a child. He claimed that only about 2% of the population would be able to work out the correct answer. There are no tricks and there is only one answer. It requires the cool application of logic to solve. And a lot of patience. Einstein's Riddle features fifty of the toughest logic problems, lateral thinking puzzles, and tests of mental agility. By turns entertaining and infuriating, the puzzles challenge our preconceptions, tell us about how we reason, and provide a rigorous intellectual workout.

Explore the gray areas in your gray matter with philosophical brainteasers from armchair philosopher and bestselling author of The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, Julian Baggini. Is your brain ready for a thorough philosophical health check? Julian Baggini, the author of the international bestseller The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, and his fellow founding editor of The Philosopher's Magazine Jeremy Stangroom have some thought-provoking questions about your thinking: Is what you believe coherent and consistent, or a jumble of contradictions? If you could design a God, what would He, She, or It be like? And how will you fare on the tricky terrain of ethics when your taboos are under the spotlight? Do You Think What You Think You Think features a dozen philosophical quizzes guaranteed to make armchair philosophers uncomfortably shift in their seats. Fun, challenging, and surprising, this book will enable you to discover the you you never knew you were.

Truth has always been a central preoccupation of philosophy in all its forms and traditions. However, in the late twentieth century truth became suddenly rather unfashionable. The precedence given to assorted political and ideological agendas, along with the rise of relativism, postmodernism and pseudoscience in academia, led to a decline both of truth as a serious subject, and an intellectual tradition that began with the Enlightenment. "Why Truth Matters" is a timely, incisive and entertaining look at how and why modern thought and culture lost sight of the importance of truth. It is also an eloquent and inspiring argument for restoring truth to its rightful place. Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, editors of the successful ButterfliesandWheels. Com website - itself established to 'fight fashionable nonsense' - identify and debunk such nonsense, and the spurious claims made for it, in all its forms. Their account ranges over religious fundamentalism, Holocaust denial, the challenges of postmodernism and deconstruction, the wilful misinterpretation of evolutionary biology, identity politics and wishful thinking. "Why Truth Matters" is both a rallying cry for the Enlightenment vision and an essential read for anyone who has ever been bored, frustrated, bewildered or plain enraged by the worst excesses of the fashionable intelligentsia.

Truth has always been a central preoccupation of philosophy in all its forms and traditions. An inspiring argument for restoring truth to its rightful place, this book takes a look at how and why modern thought and culture lost sight of the importance of truth. It is useful for those enraged by the worst excesses of the fashionable intelligentsia.