Topics in philosophy Books

How the utopian tradition offers answers to today's environmental crisesIn the face of Earth's environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won't save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound...

A provocative new history of liberalism that also provides a road map for today's liberalsFreedom from Fear offers a striking new account of the dominant political and social theory of our time: liberalism. In a pathbreaking reframing of the historical...

An expanded and updated edition of a classic work on human rights and global justiceSince its original publication, Basic Rights has proven increasingly influential to those working in political philosophy, human rights, global justice, and the ethics of...

Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome's greatest politicians, speakers, and lawyers, Cicero was also reputedly one of...

Tracing the origins of modern political thought through three sets of arguments over history, morality, and freedom.In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by...

The Art of Wandering is a history of that curious hybrid, the writer as walker. From the Ancient world to the modern day, the role of the walker continues to evolve, from philosopher and pilgrim, vagrant and visionary, to experimentalist and radical...

A powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of thought and their speculative ideasWhat sort of thinking is needed to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish...

Meditation is often presented as the key Buddhist method. However, it is actually only one means of this path of liberation. Karmapa Thaye Dorje sketches out the essential points to enter on this path in a way that is both modern and accessible...

There is a wonderfully weird but real world out there, and we are a part of it. It is time for physics to take life seriously.Can we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness and the wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf...

Utopia poses a question. Not simply in the sense of a problem to be resolved and at the same time eliminated . . . but in the sense that, within the economy of the human condition, utopia, the aim of social alterity of all social otherness is ceaselessly...

Once we came out of the jungle and found time to think of something besides food, sex, and shelter, we confronted the fundamental questions: what are we? Who are we? Is a person a body, a soul? How do we access the external world if we are nothing but...

"One of the most provocative new books of the year, and, for me, mindblowing." -Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind"Kripal makes many sympathetic points about the present spiritual state of America. . . . [He]...

The manifesto that launched the Situationist International (SI) into the public eye and sparked an uprising is back-with the story of its creation and the histories of its publication told like never before.When the Situationist International was a...

Mario Tronti was the principal theorist of the radical political movement of the 1960s known in Italy asoperaismoand in the Anglophone world as Italian workerism, a current which went on to inform the development of autonomist Marxism. His "Copernican...

Reconnecting to the Earth is a wake up call for anyone who is feeling that there is something not quite right with our world. Our all-consuming industrial civilization has led us down a destructive path that has compromised our soil, food, water, and...

"Are you an intrepid explorer of the unknown? Do you enjoy having your mind twisted in ways you never thought possible? Are you ready to leap down the rabbit hole and emerge in undiscovered territory? Well then . . . The Convoluted Universe [series] is...

The ultimate question is no longer "who am I" or "why am I here." These questions were answered in the earliest civilizations by philosophers and priests. Today we live in an age of such rapid advances in technology and science that the ultimate question...

How the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. Hearing has traditionally been regarded as the second sense-as somehow less rational and less modern than the first sense, sight. Reason and Resonance explodes this myth by...

An argument that anyone can pursue political agency and resistance through photography, even those with flawed or nonexistent citizenship.In this compelling work, Ariella Azoulay reconsiders the political and ethical status of photography. Describing the...

Adapted from Dr. John Gottman's Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, this book helps adults identify their parenting and care giving style. It explains the five important steps in "emotion coaching" children to ensure that children are guided to...

Why should we adopt animals?What's the problem with organic meat?What are the economics of plant-based foods?What about honey?What is the relationship between veganism and feminism?What is vegansexualism?Veganism is on the rise. Plant-based foods and...

This book is a comprehensive investigation of lying in everyday life. What exactly is a lie, and how does lying differ from related phenomena such as 'bullshit' or being truthful? Lars Svendsen also investigates the ethics of lying -...

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West's direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing 'morality' or 'authenticity'; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency...

Henry at Work invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing...

There are times when we've all felt that we haven't been treated as we deserve-that we've been misjudged, shortchanged, or given a raw deal. And, at one time or another, other people have probably felt that we've treated them just as unfairly. How to Do...

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the greatest guides to human flourishing ever written, but its length and style have left many readers languishing. How to Flourish is a carefully abridged version of the entire work in a highly readable and...

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...

In Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition, Roland Boer presents key moments in the 2,000 year tradition of Christian communism. Defined by the two features of alternative communal practice and occasional revolutionary action, Christian...

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...