History & Surveys

Isaiah Berlin's intellectual biography of Karl Marx has long been recognized as one of the best concise accounts of the life and thought of the man who had, in Berlin's words, a more "direct, deliberate, and powerful" influence on mankind than any other...

Rene Girard shows that all desires are contagious-and the desire to be thin is no exception. In this compelling new book, Girard ties the anorexia epidemic to what he calls mimetic desire: a desire imitated from a model. Girard has long argued that, far...

In Living toward Virtue, Paul Woodruff shows how we can set about living ethically through self-questioning, which enables us to avoid moral injury by getting clear about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Self-questioning also helps us recognize...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780486202174Author Charles S. PeirceFormat PaperbackPage Count 400Imprint Dover Publications Inc.Publisher Dover Publications Inc.Weight(grams)...

Wittgenstein is one of the most important and influential twentieth-century philosophers in the western tradition. In his Philosophical Investigations he undertakes a radical critique of analytical philosophy's approach to both the philosophy of language...

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE), though often despised for his materialism, hedonism, and denial of the immortality of the soul during many periods of history, has at the same time been a source of inspiration to figures as diverse...

Value pluralism is the idea, most prominently endorsed by Isaiah Berlin, that fundamental human values are universal, plural, conflicting, and incommensurable with one another. Incommensurability is the key component of pluralism, undermining familiar...

A masterful overview of the philosophy of language from one of its most important thinkersIn this book one of the world's foremost philosophers of language presents his unifying vision of the field-its principal achievements, its most pressing current...

Martin Heidegger - philosophy's 'hidden king', or leading exponent of a dangerously misguided secular mysticism. Heidegger has been acclaimed as the most powerfully original philosopher of the twentieth century. Profoundly influential on deconstruction,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781774378458Author Hermes TrismegistusFormat HardbackPage Count 90Imprint Royal ClassicsPublisher Royal ClassicsWeight(grams) 304gDimensions(mm) 229mm *...

This lucid and accessible dictionary presents technical terms that Wittgenstein introduced into philosophical debate or transformed substantially, and also topics to which he made a substantial contribution. Hans-Johann Glock places Wittgenstein's ideas...

Proclus' Elements of Theology is a concise summa of the Neoplatonic system in its fully developed form; and for the student of late Greek thought second in importance only to the Enneads of Plotinus. Professor Dodds has provided a critical text based on...

On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781585421923Author Ronald GrossFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Jeremy P TarcherPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 1g

Cicero is one of the most important and influential thinkers within the history of Western philosophy. For the last thirty years, his reputation as a philosopher has once again been on the rise after close to a century of very low esteem. This Companion...

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher and one of the most original European thinkers of the twentieth century. As a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, he had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307743749Author James RommFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 266gDimensions(mm) 201mm * 132mm...

Known as the "patron saint of all outsiders," Simone Weil (1909-43) was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught...

Nietzsche was surprisingly neglected by most English-language moral philosophers until recently. This volume capitalizes on a growth of interest in Nietzsche's work on morality from two sides - from scholars of the history of philosophy and from...

This is an excellent translation. It achieves a very high standard of accuracy and readability, two goals very difficult to attain in combination when it comes to such a master of prose and philosophical argument as Plato. Because of this the book is...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780920219447Author Chuck ChakrapaniFormat PaperbackPage Count 188Imprint Stoic Gym PublicationsPublisher Stoic Gym PublicationsWeight(grams)...

The major work and Adorno's culminating achievement. Negative Dialectics is a critique of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, and a visionary elaboration of the author's own vision of dialectics.About the AuthorTheodor W. Adorno (1903-69) was...

Organized around eight themes central to aesthetic theory today, this book examines the sources and development of Kant's aesthetics by mining his publications, correspondence, handwritten notes, and university lectures. Each chapter explores one of...

From slave to sage.Epictetus was a crippled Greek slave of Phrygia during Nero's reign (AD 54-68) who heard lectures by the Stoic Musonius before he was freed. Expelled with other philosophers by the emperor Domitian in 89 or 92, he settled permanently...

Spanning over a thousand years from Homer to Saint Augustine, Classical Thought encompasses a vast range of material in succinct style, while remaining clear and lucid even to those with no philosophical or Classical background The major philosophers...

Like the first Hackett edition of the Augustine's Confessions, the second edition features F. J. Sheed's remarkable translation of this classic spiritual autobiography with an Introduction by noted historian of late antiquity Peter Brown. New to this...

Some people bounce back in response to setbacks; others break. We often think that these responses are hardwired but this is not the case. William B. Irvine combines key lessons from the ancient Stoics with modern psychological techniques to develop a...

More than 100,000 copies sold in France A fascinating new journey through Greek mythology that explains the myths' timeless lessons and meaning Heroes, gods, and mortals. The Greek myths are the founding narratives of Western civilization: to...

Parmenides of Elea was the most important and influential philosopher before Plato. Patricia Curd here reinterprets Parmenides' views and offers a new account of his relation to his predecessors and successors.In the traditional interpretation,...

The central thesis of this book is that skepticism was instrumental to the defense of orthodox religion and the development of the identity of the Church of England. Examining the presence of skepticism in non-fiction prose literature at four...

Negotiations traces the intellectual journey of a man widely acclaimed as one of the most important French philosphers. A provocative guide to Deleuze by Deleuze, the collection clarifies the key critical concepts in the work of this vital figure in...

The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817-78) published this work in two volumes in 1845-6. This is a reissue of an 1892 printing, which brought the volumes into one book. Lewes wrote widely on literature, science and philosophy, and was also...

This book offers a lucid and highly readable account of Wittgenstein's philosophy, framed against the background of his extraordinary life and character. Woven together with a biographical narrative, the chapters explain the key ideas of Wittgenstein's...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679601753Author Friedrich NietzscheFormat HardbackPage Count 368Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 386gDimensions(mm)...

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates...

Philosophical Logic is a clear and concise critical survey of nonclassical logics of philosophical interest written by one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. After giving an overview of classical logic, John Burgess introduces five...

'Once upon a time there were just the gods; mortal beings did not yet exist.' We are used to thinking of myths as stories, and modern myths as made up and fictitious. For the ancient Greeks, however, a myth was a story that unveiled reality, and for...

Written in political exile during the Second World War and first published in 1945, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as a 'vigorous and profound...

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has a long-standing reputation as one of the key books in the history of Western philosophy, but many are unsure just what it is about. Even the words in the title are disputed: What sense of "phenomenology" is being used?...

Glenn Alexander Magee's pathbreaking book argues that Hegel was decisively influenced by the Hermetic tradition, a body of thought with roots in Greco-Roman Egypt. Magee traces the influence on Hegel of such Hermetic thinkers as Baader, Boehme, Bruno,...