Essays

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...

As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos. ...

How to be Free is Tom Hodgkinson's manifesto for a liberated life.Modern life is absurd. How can we be free?If you've ever wondered why you bother to go to work, or why so much consumer culture is crap, then this book is for you. Looking to history,...

From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life - a lucid exploration of the state in which most of us spend most of our lives'De Botton's...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780451531865Author Ralph Waldo EmersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 576Imprint Signet ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 267g

A Short History of Decay (1949) is E. M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid 20th-century Europe. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the...

One of the foundation-stones of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes' Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings is translated from the Latin with an introduction by Desmond M. Clarke in Penguin Classics.Descartes was prepared to go to any lengths in his...

How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781951570262Author Marcus AureliusFormat PaperbackPage Count 140Imprint Sde ClassicsPublisher Sde ClassicsWeight(grams) 168gDimensions(mm) 203mm * 133mm *...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss embarks on a rollicking intellectual journey, following in the footsteps of history's greatest thinkers and showing us how each-from Epicurus to Gandhi, Thoreau to Beauvoir-offers practical...

Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony...

'Why do I know a few more things? Why am I so clever altogether?'Self-celebrating and self-mocking autobiographical writings from Ecce Homo, the last work iconoclastic German philosopher Nietzsche wrote before his descent into madness.One of 46 new books...

This is one of the few records published by Gurdjieff in which he offers guidance to his 'community of seekers', the pupils from many countries who joined him in Paris and New York.The first section is mainly autobiographical, relating material crucial...

Regarded as the founder of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus (AD 204-70) was the last great philosopher of antiquity, producing 0works that proved in many ways a precursor to Renaissance thought. Plotinus was convinced of the existence of a state of supreme...

'No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity.' In these dialogues and essays the Stoic philosopher Seneca outlines his thoughts on how to live in a troubled world. Tutor to the young emperor Nero, Seneca wrote...

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...

'Punchy and compassionate' OBSERVERA collection of gorgeously written and timely pieces in which prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships.In "We Kin" he...

Phaedrus is widely recognized as one of Plato's most profound and beautiful works. It takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus and its ostensible subject is love, especially homoerotic love. This new translation is accompanied by an...

A countercultural icon of the 1960s, John Michell (1933-2009) was perhaps best known for his books on sacred geometry, Earth mysteries, and unusual phenomena. He was also beloved and reviled for his radical, idealistic, yet classically traditional views...

A CAREER-SPANNING COLLECTION OF INSPIRING, REVELROUS ESSAYS ABOUT ART AND ARTISTS'Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have' Guardian'A polyphonic assemblage . . ...

'It's you who are the dogs...'What makes us happy? For over 800 years the Cynic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome argued that the answer lay in a simple, self-sufficient life.About the AuthorRobert Dobbin was born in New York City in 1958. He...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781890951252Author Gilles DeleuzeFormat PaperbackPage Count 104Imprint Zone BooksPublisher Zone BooksWeight(grams) 227gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 8mm

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590179109Author Andrew DavisFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint NYRB PoetsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams) 110gDimensions(mm)...

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, John Locke (1632-1704) provides a complete account of how we acquire everyday, mathematical, natural scientific, religious and ethical knowledge. Rejecting the theory that some...

Plato, Allan Bloom wrote, is "the most erotic of philosophers," and his Symposium is one of the greatest works on the nature of love ever written. This new edition brings together the English translation of the renowned Plato scholar and translator, Seth...

In this frank and damning expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God...

Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of...

A brilliant and addictive collection of brand-new essays on modern culture - from 'the pre-eminent and most widely read critic of her generation' The Times Included as a 2024 highlight in the Observer, Stylist, the Skinny, BBC Online and the Independent...

In her debut book, A. V. Marraccini explores how we inhabit works of art, and how our sense of longing informs and changes our relationship to them. Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of...

These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir Hojoki, Chomei recounts his decision to withdraw from worldly affairs and live as a hermit in a tiny hut in...

A fully illustrated, beautifully produced edition of Junichiro Tanizaki's wise and evocative essay on Japanese culture. 'We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another...