The Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, the Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus at Penn State University, and a past president of the Metaphysical Society of America, Rosen is eminently versed in all things philosophical, and as such he's already written 13 books, including Hermeneutics as Politics, The Question of Being, and Plato's Symposium. The Examined Life, however, is unusual in that it's geared towards the amateur scholar of philosophy. Rosen and a team of distinguished scholars selected 35 excerpts from 23 of the Western world's great philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche, Kant and Wittgenstein. He then arranged the excerpts by discipline: "Social and Political Philosophy," "Philosophy of Religion," "Philosophy of Art and Culture," "Metaphysics," "Epistemology," and "Philosophy of Science." And for each section, an expert editor has written a provocative introduction offering insight and perspective into the philosophers' works. Rosen writes, "My intention has been to introduce the intelligent nonspecialist to the universality, but also to the urgency, of philosophy." If you seek such an introduction to Western philosophy, or a recap of what you learned years ago but have long since forgotten, Rosen's anthology is a thoughtful, readable, and well-organized place to start. --Stephanie Gold