Philosophy Books

Don Cupitt's ideas cannot easily be translated into practice. Or, can they? In this companion volume to Odyssey on the Sea of Faith, Nigel Leaves tackles Cupitt's major themes of religion and ethics. He debates whether Cupitt's ethics provide an adequate...

This book is a literary English translation of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes as a chorus of different voices (like the book of Job) contesting the meaning of things. A careful introduction delineates the various speakers--Qohelet, editor,...

This volume marks the coming into its own of a discipline in philosophy: theory of desire. It presents discussions whose primary focus is on desire, with secondary mention of its implications for ethics, action, emotion, mind, and so forth.

What if you found out that what you commonly believed about the soul and the body was false? What if you were told that the modern concept of soul and body, held by much of the church today, is mostly influenced by Greek philosophy and its subsequent...

WHAT IS A THING? WHAT IS THE NATURE OF REALITY?There are only 26 letters in the alphabet. But with those 26 letters over one million English language words can be formed. There are only 88 notes on a common keyboard. Place those notes at the disposal of...

Thomas Alexander shows that the primary, guiding concern of Dewey's philosophy is his theory of aesthetic experience. He directly challenges those critics, most notably Stephen Pepper and Benedetto Croce, who argued that this area is the least consistent...

SEARCHING THE SOUL is the fourth volume by Willem J. Ouweneel that provides introductory insight into a significant area of Christian life. Clearly the healthy functioning of our emotional life is profoundly important for each of us, as well as for those...

Musically Sublime rewrites musically the history and philosophy of the sublime. Music enables us to reconsider the traditional course of sublime feeling on a track from pain to pleasure. Resisting the notion that there is a single format for sublime...

A scene of self-sacrifice can never be staged or secured. The work of Friedrich Hölderlin, arguably one of the most profound writers of the German Enlightenment, supports this idea in fascinating ways. Much of Hölderlin's critical reception, however, has...

Jorge Luis Borges is acknowledged as one of the great Spanish writers of the twentieth century. On the broader literary scene, he is recognized as a modern master. His fascination with philosophy - especially metaphysics - sets him apart from his...

This volume is an introduction to those works of György Lukács that have established him as a classic authority in literary criticism: his pre-Marxist The History of the Evolution of Modern Drama (1911), still not available in English, which Eva Corredor...

This book brings together the political thought of Gandhi and Tagore to examine the relationship between politics, truth and conscience. It explores truth and conscience as viable public virtues with regard to two exemplars of ethical politics,...

In this book, Reiss argues in favor of a tight fit between evidence, concept and purpose in our causal investigations in the sciences. There is no doubt that the sciences employ a vast array of techniques to address causal questions such as controlled...

Locke and Leibniz on Substance gathers together papers by an international group of academic experts, examining the metaphysical concept of substance in the writings of these two towering philosophers of the early modern period. Each of these...

Written and set on the banks of the Neva, St Petersburg Dialogues is a startlingly relevant analysis of the human prospect in the twenty-first century. As the literary critic George Steiner has remarked, "the age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine...

The aim of this book is a recovery of interest in the experience of meaning. Jan Zwicky defends the claim that we experience meaning in the apprehension of wholes and their internal structural relations, providing examples of such insight in mathematics...

Philosophy has traditionally engaged the problem of why there is something rather than nothing as a normal causal question. Such an approach, Hunter Brown proposes in Grace and Philosophy, does not do justice to the deep wonder and astonishment that the...

Most scholars have focused on The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir's fiction, concentrating on gender issues but ignoring her broader emancipatory vision. Though Beauvoir's political thinking is not as closely studied as her feminist works, it...

The long tradition of pessimism in philosophy and poetry notoriously laments suffering caused by vulnerabilities of the human body. The most familiar and contemporary version is antinatalism, the view that it is wrong to bring sentient life into...

Network Democracy uses the contemporary tools of ecology and network thinking to unearth the ancient, intellectual ruins of traditional conservative thought. Questioning the West's veneration of freedom, equality, contractual citizenship, economic...

This book is the first to systematically reconstruct Foucault's political and philosophical thought across his career, arguing that Foucault had a consistent but ever-growing political and philosophical viewpoint.

Philosophy Through Science Fiction offers a fun, challenging, and accessible way in to the issues of philosophy through the genre of science fiction. Tackling problems such as the possibility of time travel, or what makes someone the same person over...

This book provides an original treatment of the concept of good and beauty in ancient Egypt. It seeks to examine the dimensions of nefer, the term used to describe the good and the beautiful, within the context of ordinary life. Because the book is...

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student...

In the past decade there has been an explosion of feminist theory - in many cases depending on theoretical foundations borrowed from men. Andrea Nye critically examines the ambivalent relationship between feminists and male theory.

Written three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the...

When people of good faith and sound mind disagree deeply about moral, religious, and other philosophical matters, how can we justify political institutions to all of them? The idea of public reason-of a shared public standard, despite disagreement-arose...

This is the first book in English profiling the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of "coloniality", understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the...

This is a study of the great, and curiously underappreciated, engagement of a medieval European Jewish community with the philosophic tradition. The lucid description of southern French Jewry's multigenerational cultivation of - and acculturation to...

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most renowned film directors of recent years. Talk to Her is one of the most discussed and controversial of all his films. Dealing principally with the issue of rape, it also offers profound insights into the nature of love...

In this volume, essays by an international roster of contributors evaluate the political philosophy of contemporary philosopher Hillel Steiner. The study concludes with a response by Steiner himself.

First published in 1964, this is a short collection of both literary and philosophical essays. Whilst two essays consider Greek literature written at the point at which the Athenian empire was breaking apart, another group explore the background from...

Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction fills the need for an original, contemporary examination of peace that is challenging, informative, and empowering. This well-researched, fully documented, and highly accessible textbook moves beyond...

The ideas of C. D. Broad have affected the work of moral philosophers throughout the twentieth century to the present day. First published in 1971, this edited volume contains Broad's best essays on the philosophical problems of Ethics, mostly written...

First published in English in 1935, this is a critical appraisal of contemporary thought in the post-World War One era in the light of Marxism.

The Global Horseracing Industry offers a broad-ranging examination of the contemporary horseracing industry, from economic, social, ethical and environmental perspectives. The book draws on in-depth, mixed-method research into the racing and...

This reissue, first published in 1971, provides a brief historical account of the Theory of Logical Types; and describes the problems that gave rise to it, its various different formulations (Simple and Ramified), the difficulties connected with...

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust's...

First published in 1971, Professor Putnam's essay concerns itself with the ontological problem in the philosophy of logic and mathematics - that is, the issue of whether the abstract entities spoken of in logic and mathematics really exist. He also deals...

Whereas the relationship between truth and propositional content has already been intensively investigated, there are only very few studies devoted to the task of illuminating the relationship between truth and illocutionary acts. This book fills that...

Why trust science? Why should science have more authority than "other ways of knowing?" Is science merely a social construct? Or even worse: a tool of oppression? This book boldly takes on these and other explosive questions-lodged by ideologues on the...

The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Human Enhancement provides readers with a philosophically rich and scientifically grounded analysis of human enhancement and its ethical implications. A landmark in the academic literature, the volume covers human...

Integrity in the Private and Public Domains explores the issue of public and private integrity in politics, the media, health, science, fund-raising, the economy and the public sector. Over twenty essays by well-known figures such as Amelie Rorty, David...

In this book, Clare Connors sets out to answer the question: What is the pervasive character of the world?, tracing a genealogy of the idea of force through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Sex work studies have seen an expansion in publications over the past decade, drawing together disciplines from across the social sciences, namely sociology, criminology and social policy. There has, however, been a tendency for research and writing to...

This collection of essays brings together Zygmunt Bauman and a number of internationally distinguished legal scholars who examine the influence of Bauman's recent works on social theory of law and socio-legal studies. Contributors focus on the concept of...

Research in the humanities and social sciences thrives on critical reflections that unfold with each research project, not only in terms of knowledge created, but in whether chosen methodologies served their purpose.  Ethics forms the bulwark of any...

Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of...