Despite the flood of self-help guides and our current therapeutic culture, feelings of alienation and spiritual longing continue to grip modern society. In this book, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn offers a fresh solution: a return to classic philosophy and the cultivation of an inner life. The ancient Roman philosopher Cicero wrote that philosophy is ars vitae, the art of living. Today, signs of stress and duress point to a full-fledged crisis for individuals and communities while current modes of making sense of our lives prove inadequate. Yet, in this time of alienation and spiritual longing, we can glimpse signs of a renewed interest in ancient approaches to the art of living. In this ambitious and timely book, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn engages both general readers and scholars on the topic of well-being. She examines the reappearance of ancient philosophical thought in contemporary American culture, probing whether new stirrings of Gnosticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Platonism present a true alternative to our current therapeutic culture of self-help and consumerism, which elevates the self’s needs and desires yet fails to deliver on its promises of happiness and healing. Do the ancient philosophies represent a counter-tradition to today’s culture, auguring a new cultural vibrancy, or do they merely solidify a modern way of life that has little use for inwardness—the cultivation of an inner life—stemming from those older traditions? Tracing the contours of this cultural resurgence and exploring a range of sources, from scholarship to self-help manuals, films, and other artifacts of popular culture, this book sees the different schools as organically interrelated and asks whether, taken together, they can point us in important new directions. Ars Vitae sounds a clarion call to take back philosophy as part of our everyday lives. It proposes a way to do so, sifting through the ruins of long-forgotten and recent history alike for any shards helpful in piecing together the coherence of a moral framework that allows us ways to move forward toward the life we want and need.

How nuclear policy is made and by whom. Nolan is visiting professor at the Brookings Institution. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Presiding over the liturgy takes more than following instructions. Good presiding is artful presiding. It is knowledgeable and inspirational. It faithfully grasps the church’s heritage and gives it personal expression. In Ars Celebrandi, Father Paul Turner offers a guide for priests in preparing for and celebrating the Mass. Building on a liturgy which adheres to the liturgical books, Turner examines styles of presiding and reflects on principles that will help the presider to foster active participation of the faithful.

A moving meditation on grief, memory, and the way we return to ourselves after experiencing loss.

Lemegeton, also known as The Lesser Key of Solomon the King or Clavicula Salomonis Regis, is a 17th century demonology Grimoire written by an anonymous author. It contains names of spirits/demons, other sacred names, sigils/seals, invocations and summoning techniques, spells, prayers, rituals and occult knowledge that has been obtained by the author, material which dates between the early 15th and the late 17th century. The Grimoire is divided in five parts called The Books. These are: Ars Goetia (or Goetia), Ars Theurgia Goetia (or Theurgia), Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria. Note from the Publisher: The illustrations in this book come from enhanced scans of the original seals. The scans have been painted over by hand using black ink and then re-scanned in order to improve the texture and make the lines and letters more legible, as some of the pages and illustrations of the book have deteriorated due to the manuscript's age, and they appear faded or broken. The original manuscript can be found in the British Museum.

Ars Topica is the first full-length study of the nature and development of topoi, the conceptual ancestors of modern argument schemes, between Aristotle and Cicero. Aristotle and Cicero configured topoi in a way that influenced the subsequent tradition. Their work on the topos-system grew out of an interest in creating a theory of argumentation which could stand between the rigour of formal logic and the emotive potential of rhetoric. This system went through a series of developments and transformations resulting from the interplay between the separate aims of gaining rhetorical effectiveness and of maintaining dialectical standards. Ars Topica presents a comprehensive treatment of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s methods of topoi and, by exploring their relationship, it illuminates an area of ancient rhetoric and logic which has been obscured for more than two thousand years. Through an interpretation which is philologically rooted in the historical context of topoi, the book lays the ground for evaluating the relevance of the classical approaches to modern research on arguments, and at the same time provides an introduction to Greek and Roman theory of argumentation focussed on its most important theoretical achievements.