In her new novel, Antje Rávic Strubel gives us a highjacked plane and a difficult, if not impossible, quest for the truth. She has taken a real story as her inspiration: in 1978 a Tupolew 134 was hijacked by two citizens from East Germany who were on a flight from Gdansk to West Berlin. The ...

The world is completely out of joint and most of us haven't even noticed. However there are some people who are only too well aware of this predicament: terrorists and heads of state. They are taking advantage of the cracks in failing states for their own gain-and the number of failed and ...

The yo-yo effect is something many have painfully experienced at first hand after a diet, but are you also familiar with the big-fish-little-pond effect, the Mona Lisa syndrome and the TINA syndrome? There are countless psychological principles and phenomena we know little about, and yet on a ...

Art as a million dollar project

In our capitalist society, works of art represent the ultimate status symbol. The art market is booming, prices are rocketing. Why is it that people are willing to spend millions of dollars on works by van Gogh, Klimt, Keith Haring or Gerhard Richter ...

Compassion is the inner barrier to the inhumane. In Liverpool, two eleven-year-old boys abducted a two-year-old and murder him. This crime could have been avoided if passers-by who heard the child scream had intervened. Arno Gruen asserts that these passers-by placed themselves on the side of the ...

This series on the philosophy of passions is a search for a free time in the truest sense of the word, when the everyday ego takes "time out" and loses itself in the passionate pursuit of sports, hobbies or tricks. The authors describe their passions subjectively, likably and self-ironically, even ...

Many members of the older generation remember how the Nazis determined the course of their childhood without having understood it at the time. What did the sons and daughters of Jewish parents go through?

Inge Deutschkron grew up in Berlin and personally experienced the consequences of ...

Preface by Gaetano Benedetti

The concept of autonomy, which does not mean power and superiority but full conformity of a human being to his feelings and needs, is an important factor of modern psychology. If this autonomy is lacking - more often the rule than the exception - ...

Much reflection by many disparate thinkers has been devoted to the complex issue of evil in the world, and psychologists have devised different theories to explain the destructiveness of man. But rarely has anyone dissected the causes with such rigorousness as Arno Gruen. He demonstrates how ...

Contents:

Eastern philosophy (Upanishades, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism) - Antiquity (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicure) - Patristic - Scholasticism - Arab philosophy - The Enlightenment (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu) - Idealism (Kant, Fichte, ...

16-year-old Flora is found by the lakeside, bleeding from multiple cuts. She claims to have no memory of what's happened to her. What's more, the different witness statements don't add up to any kind of coherent picture of events, leaving the police with no leads to follow.

Wanda can't believe what's happening! Dad's girlfriend Inge has finally given birth to a lovely baby boy, and Wanda is just getting used to the idea that she has a brother, when it turns out he's not the only one: it seems Mama's boyfriend, Bertfried, also has a son. His name is Wassily, he's ...