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As a rule, societies are rarely inclined to examine their own premises. Instead, people are routinely expected, if not compelled, to endorse the prevailing system of values and beliefs. While this approach may appear useful in terms of maintaining cultural harmony, in truth it constitutes a serious threat to a society's general health and well-being because no society can benefit from having mechanically endorsed views serve as authoritative norms. It is imperative, therefore, that we continuously ratify our cultural premises and that skeptics and contrarians be given pride of place in this...

Profiles of Power: Philosopher-Kings, Princes, and Supermen examines the concept of “power” in the form of three iconic personifications: Plato’s Philosopher-king, Machiavelli’s Prince, and Nietzsche’s Superman. It demonstrates how these thinkers’ response to power was determined by their investigation of the fundamental nature of humankind, the limits of human understanding, and the question of whether the universe is a rationally ordered domain or an unscripted chaos. Given the widely variant settings in which these men lived, their responses are understandably diverse. But...

Hellenic contributions to Western Civilization are acknowledged by all, but the details of their endowment are under-appreciated. This volume seeks to disclose two distinctive features of Western culture uniquely attributable to the ancient Greeks: A human-centered worldview that elevated humans to the threshold of divinity and a philosophical temperament which for the first time in history proffered the unbridled operation of the human mind as a kind of cultural imperative.

Eighteen seminal thinkers who left lasting impressions in such fields as ethics, medicine, religion, politics,...