Topics in philosophy Books

A constitutionalist reading of Plato's political thought.Plato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek...

A deep investigation of neoliberalism's proselytizers in Eastern Europe and the Global SouthWhere does free market ideology come from? Recent work on the neoliberal intellectual movement around the Mont Pelerin Society has allowed for closer study of the...

The emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences, as revealed through images in scientific atlases-a story of how lofty epistemic ideals fuse with workaday practices.Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In...

How Robespierre's career and legacy embody the dangerous contradictions of democracy.Maximilien Robespierre (17581794) is arguably the most controversial and contradictory figure of the French Revolution, inspiring passionate debate like no other...

When the Clyde Ran Red paints a vivid picture of the heady days when revolution was in the air on Clydeside. Through the bitter strike at the huge Singer Sewing machine plant in Clydebank in 1911, Bloody Friday in Glasgow's George Square in 1919, the...

Art and physics collide in this expansive exploration of how knowledge can be translated across disciplinary communities to activate new aesthetic and scientific perspectives.Leaning Out of Windows shares findings from a six-year collaboration by a group...

An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by an expert "fictive-art" practitioner.In her groundbreaking book, internationally recognized multimedia artist and writer...

Are we free or determined? Are things really the way they appear to be? What's the difference between right and wrong? Can God's existence be demonstrated?Discovering Philosophy looks at these and other fundamental questions that have bedeviled thinkers...

In this synthetic introduction to the history of the philosophy of art, Nol Carroll elucidates and analyzes selected writings on art by Plato, Aristotle, Hutcheson, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Bell. Carroll's narrative tracks...

It is often asserted that postmodernism emerged from 'leftist' Nietzsche-interpretations, but this claim and its implications are rarely explored. Deconstructing Postmodernist Nietzscheanism investigates how Deleuze and Foucault read Nietzsche and apply...

Andy Blunden's Hegel Marx & Vygotsky, Essays in Social Philosophy presents his novel approach to social theory in a series of essays. Blunden aims to use the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky and the Soviet Activity Theorists to renew Hegelian...

Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued, produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a particular time, in a particular place, is dominated,...

In Towards a Productive Aesthetics: Contemporary and Historical Interventions in Blake and Brecht, Keith O'Regan mobilises a constellative approach to compare the political-aesthetic strategies of William Blake (1757-1827) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)...

The German Left and Aesthetic Politics examines the articulation of contending materialist aesthetic practices within the ideological fractures of the German Left between the Second and Third International. It is hinged on the major literary critical...

Empiriomonism is Alexander Bogdanov's scientific-philosophical substantiation of Marxism. In Books One and Two, he combines Ernst Mach's and Richard Avenarius's neutral monist philosophy with the theory of psychophysical parallelism and systematically...

Perhaps no philosopher is more of a conundrum than Nietzsche, the solitary rebel, poet, wayfarer, anti-revolutionary Aufklarer and theorist of aristocratic radicalism. His accusers identify in his 'superman' the origins of Nazism, and thus issue an...

Ever since Plato'sRepublicewish scholars, thinkers, and popularizers have contributed notably to this genre, strikingly few have turned their attention to the history of Jewish leaders-that is, leaders specifically of the Jewish people-in particular.And...

The death of a person is a tragedy while the explosion of a lifeless galaxy is a mere firework. The moral difference is grounded in the nature of humans: humans have intrinsic worth, a worth that makes their fate really matter. This is the worth that the...

The liberal arts are dying. They are dying because most Americans don't see the point of them. Americans don't understand why anyone would study literature or history or the classics-or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the...

Written by a successful venture capitalist (and university dropout), this book is part memoir, part guide for the next generation of innovators who seek an alternative to the traditional path in higher education."Part adventure tale, part manifesto,...

The George Floyd riots that have precipitated great changes throughout American society were not spontaneous events. Americans did not suddenly rise up in righteous anger, take to the streets, and demand not just that police departments be defunded but...

We are living in the midst of an American Awakening, without God and without forgiveness. The first two Awakenings brought religious renewal; the third-the social gospel movement and its aftermath (1880-1910)-invoked the authority of religion to bring...

American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary ways of life. American conservatives rally around the founders' Constitution, as amended, and as grounded in the...

Most American young people, like their ancestors, harbor desires for a worthy life: a life of meaning, a life that makes sense. But they are increasingly confused about what such a life might look like, and how they might, in the present age, be able to...

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased...

Americans have never been more divided, and we're ripe for a breakup. The bitterness, the gridlock, the growing tolerance of violence, invite us to think that we'd be happier were we two different countries. In all the ways that matter, save for the...

Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscientist, single-handedly generated the New Atheism with his best-selling book The End of Faith, which quickly became a huge best-seller following its release in 2004.Harris went on to write several more...

Microchips, government-replaced bird drones, QAnon and vaccine tracers: these are just a few of the most common conspiracies we have heard over and over again throughout most of 2020-2021's news cycles. There are common categories of conspiracy...

Y'all Means All is a celebration of the weird and wonderful aspects of a troubled region in all of their manifest glory! This collection is a thought-provoking hoot and a holler of "we're queer and we're here to stay, cause we're every bit a piece of the...

One hundred years after his death, Peter Kropotkin is still one of the most inspirational figures of the anarchist movement. It is often forgotten that Kropotkin was also a world-renowned geographer whose seminal critique of the hypothesis of competition...

Readers of Vaneigem's now-classic work The Revolution of Everyday Life, which as one of the main contributions of the Situationist International was a herald of the May 1968 uprisings in France, will find much to challenge them in these pages written in...

Was anarchism in areas outside of Europe an import and a script to be mimicked? Was it perpetually at odds with other currents of the Left? The authors in this collection take up these questions of geographical and political peripheries. Building on...

A comprehensive introduction to formal logic, Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction is a rigorous yet accessible text, appropriate for students encountering the subject for the first time. Abundant, carefully crafted exercise sets accompanied by a...

From academic writing to personal and public discourse, the need for good arguments and better ways of arguing is greater than ever before.This timely fifth edition of A Rulebook for Arguments sharpens an already-classic text, adding updated examples and...

This richly annotated, scrupulously accurate, and consistent translation of Aristotle's De Animafits seamlessly with other volumes in the series.Sequentially numbered endnotes provide the information most needed at each juncture, whilea detailed Index of...

The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution-the product of compromises and an artifact of its time-and made it more democraticWho wrote the Constitution? That's obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in...

Washington's progressive champion explains how we can achieve a truly inclusive America that works for all of usIn November 2016, Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Indian American woman to serve in that...

A designer of Japanese gardens contemplates wildness, humanity, beauty, the liquid state of the world.From his vantage point as a garden designer and writer based in Kyoto, Marc Peter Keane examines the world around him and delivers astonishing insights...

Gramsci's works, in particular his Prison Notebooks, are a real 'workshop' of activity. Even though these texts were the product of a great mind and an organic conception of the world, the particular context in which they are written poses challenges for...

Widely seen as among the most influential Italian thinkers of all time, Antonio Gramsci's highly original Marxism continues to be studied across the globe, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gramsci and Languages offers an explanation of this...

C.L.R. James was a leading figure in the independence movement in the West Indies, and the black and working-class movements in both Britain and the United States. As a major contributor to Marxist and revolutionary theory, his project was to discover,...

In this collection of fables, Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming shares the stories that have influenced him most as a martial artist and lifelong student of the Dao. They bring the Dao to life for readers of all generations. Whoever we are, wherever we're going,...

The Warrior's Manifesto is a concise and potent declaration of principles that outline what it means to be a warrior. It is a brief, dramatic statement on the what, the why, and the way. These are not mere abstractions. Warriors must understand and...

This provocative book exposes the intolerance of the transgender movement and explores the the troubles that arise when scientific realities are open to interpretation through a political lens--and the dangers we all face when when good-faith, fact-based...

Throughout history, kings and emperors have promised "freedoms" to their people. Yet these freedoms were really only permissions handed down from on high. The American Revolution inaugurated a new vision: people have basic rights to life, liberty, and...

An original, beautifully produced work that explores the 'star demons' and their correspondences in magic and astrology as revealed in the medieval grimoires and classical esoteric texts.Includes:A translucent, velum dust...

A thinking person's guide to a better life. Ward Farnsworth explains what the Socratic method is, how it works, and why it matters more than ever in our time. Easy to grasp yet challenging to master, the method will change the way you think about life's...

For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent...