Essays

One of the most significant works of Western philosophy, Hume's Treatise was published in 1739-40, before he was thirty years old. A pinnacle of English empiricism, it is a comprehensive attempt to apply scientific methods of observation to a study of...

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER BLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers - a guide to what everybody is talking about today 'Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing...

Republic is the central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher. Essentially an inquiry into morality, Republic also contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. It is also a literary masterpiece: the...

Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of cultural and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as...

The feminist book they tried to ban in France 'A delightful book' Roxane Gay Women, especially feminists and lesbians, have long been accused of hating men. Our instinct is to deny it at all costs. (After all, women have been burnt...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679783220Author Ralph Waldo EmersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 880Imprint Modern Library IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 612gDimensions(mm)...

A classic collection of Bertrand Russell's more controversial works, reaffirming his staunch liberal values, Unpopular Essays is one of Russell's most characteristic and self-revealing books. Written to "combat... the growth in Dogmatism", on first...

'To create today means to create dangerously'This new collection contains some of Camus' most brilliant political writing as he reflects on moral responsibility and the role of the artist in the world. Letters to a German Friend, written and published...

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER'Honest, funny and dripping with witty aphorisms. Extremely entertaining and enlightening [...] all the way to journey's end' Herald One of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The...

Kant's profound and challenging investigation into the nature of human reason is the central text of modern philosophyIn his landmark work Kant argues that reason is the seat of certain concepts that precede experience and make it possible, but we are...

'Who since Weber, or perhaps even Hobbes, has done as much to show why power is such a profound, elusive and treacherous presence throughout our experience?' The Times Higher EducationThe third and final volume of the Essential Works of Foucault series,...

Widely regarded as the father of modern Western philosophy, Descartes sought to look beyond established ideas and create a thought system based on reason. In this profound work he meditates on doubt, the human soul, God, truth and the nature of existence...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781787375772Author Prof Benjamin JowettFormat PaperbackPage Count 90Imprint Scribe PublishingPublisher Scribe PublishingWeight(grams) 132gDimensions(mm)...

Selection includes The Portrait of Mr W.H., Wilde's defence of Dorian Gray, reviews, and the writings from 'Intentions' (1891): 'The Decay of Lying, 'Pen, Pencil, Poison', and 'The Critic as Artist'.Wilde is familiar to us as the ironic critic behind the...

Bernard Williams was one of the most important philosophers of the past fifty years, but he was also a distinguished critic and essayist with an elegant style and a rare ability to communicate complex ideas to a wide public. This is the first collection...

'No brief survey can do justice to the richness, complexity and detail of Foucault's discussion' New York Review of BooksThe second volume of Michel Foucault's pioneering analysis of the changing nature of desire explores how sexuality was perceived in...

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC at which the guests - including the comic poet Aristophanes and, of course, Plato's mentor Socrates - each deliver a short speech in praise of love...

Exploring the question of what exactly makes good people good, Protagoras and Meno are two of the most enjoyable and accessible of all of Plato's dialogues. Widely regarded as his finest dramatic work, the Protagoras, set during the golden age of...

City of God is an enduringly significant work in the history of Christian thought, by one of its central figuresWritten as an eloquent defence of the faith at a time when the Roman Empire was on the brink of collapse, this great theological and...

In these two devastating late works, Nietzsche offers a powerful attack on the morality and the beliefs of his timeNietzsche's Twilight of the Idols is a 'grand declaration of war' on reason, psychology and theology, which combines highly charged...

Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in the whole of Europe, who changed Western thought with his examinations of reason and the nature of reality. In these writings he investigates human progress, civilization, morality and why, to...

'One of the most influential books about the natural world ever published' Paul Kingsnorth, Guardian'There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,' begins Aldo Leopold's totemic work of ecological thought. Ranging from lyrical...

'Perhaps the most entertaining work of philosophy ever written ... the first really systematic and serious attempt to say what love is' John Armstrong, GuardianIn the course of a lively drinking party, a group of Athenian intellectuals exchange views on...

Influencing philosophers such as Sartre and Camus, and still strikingly modern in its psychological insights, Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death explores the concept of 'despair' as a symptom of the human condition and describes man's struggle to fill...

In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing up in front of the profession for whom he is a 'mentally ill person' suffering from...

Provocative essays on real-world ethical questions from the world's most influential philosopherPeter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. He is also one of its most controversial. The author of important books such as...

Explore ideas, consider the big questions and learn life lessons in your garden. Gardening is an innately thoughtful as well as practical pastime: planning ahead, imagining how plants will grow, deciding what will make a 'good' garden, wondering at the...

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched...

A collection of writings by the author of the 2022 Booker Prize-shortlisted Treacle Walker 'His work has a symphonic quality unique in fiction' THE TIMES ...

A perceptive introduction to the mind of one of German's greatest writers, in a new translation for the first time in 150 years'The best German book there is' Nietzsche By the turn of the nineteenth century, the poet, novelist and thinker Johann...

Here's an accusation - Sherlock Holmes never deduced anything. When it comes to language, it all depends on what your definition of 'is' is. And one for the existentialists - you haven't lived until you think about death all the time. Daniel...

No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the...

Raymond Williams' seminal exploration of the history of meaning of some of the most important words in the English language. First published in 1976, and expanded in 1983, KEYWORDS reveals how the meanings of 131 words - including 'art',...

Translated by John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan. With an Introduction by Stephen Watt. The ideas of Plato (c429-347BC) have influenced Western philosophers for over two thousand years. Such is his importance that the twentieth-century...

In The World of Sex, Henry Miller, one of the most scandalous writers of the 20th century explains his literary project Henry Miller's bold, explicit novels scandalized readers and remade the literature of his day. In this uncompromising literary...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789358480658Author G K ChestertonPage Count 196Imprint Happy Hour BooksPublisher Happy Hour Books

'These hours of solitude and meditation are the only time of the day when I am completely myself' Reveries of the Solitary Walker is Rousseau's last great work, the product of his final years of exile from the society that condemned his political and...

'Language is a body, a living creature ... and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate'. John Berger's work has revolutionized the way we understand visual language. In this new book he writes about language itself, and how it...

One of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard explores the concept of...

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched...