A cultural history of the soul

This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and North America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements.

An archaeology of the political

Elías José Palti argues that the dimension of reality known as the political is not a natural, transhistorical entity. Instead, the horizon of the political arose in the context of a series of changes that affirmed the power of absolute monarchies in seventeenth-century Europe and was successivel...

Between two worlds

Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on--and powerful reinterpretation of--the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes's Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes's seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring othe...

Bizarre-privileged items in the universe

An imaginative new theory of likeness that ranges widely across history and subjects, from physics and evolution to psychology, language, and artA butterfly is like another butterfly. A butterfly is also like a leaf and at the same time like a paper airplane, an owl’s face, a scholar flying from ...

Critique of bored reason

In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity. Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philoso...

Critique of journalistic reason

This book examines philosophy’s recurrent preoccupation with journalism. It shows how modern European philosophy's preoccupation with the news inflects theories of history, time, and language.

Debord, time and spectacle

A detailed philosophical study of the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International that helps to uncover a philosophy of praxis that remains useful today.

Food philosophy

This book is an introduction to the philosophical dimensions of food. David M. Kaplan shows how the different branches of philosophy contribute to a broader understanding of food and emphasizes how different narratives help us navigate the complex world of food.

Foucault today

Bringing Foucault into in the 21st century – offering new perspectives for studying this French classic in contemporary philosophy and cultural studies.

Harry potter and philosophy

Harry Potter has put a spell on millions of readers, and they all want to find out more about the deeper meaning of his adventures. In Harry Potter and Philosophy, 17 experts in the field of philosophy unlock some of Hogwarts' secret panels, uncovering surprising insights that are enlightening bo...

Idolatry and representation

Although Franz Rosenzweig is arguably the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, his thought remains little understood. Here, Leora Batnitzky argues that Rosenzweig's redirection of German-Jewish ethical monotheism anticipates and challenges contemporary trends in religious s...

Irrationality

From sex and music to religion and politics, a history of irrationality and the ways in which it has always been with us—and always will beIn this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump, Justin Smith argues that irrationality ...

Leibnizing

Richard Halpern argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Marking time

In Marking Time, Paul Rabinow presents his most recent reflections on the anthropology of the contemporary. Drawing richly on the work of Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Niklas Luhmann, and, most interestingly, German painter Gerhard Richter, Rabinow offers a set of conceptual tools for scholars exa...

Marx’s experiments and microscopes

A fresh account of Marx 's unique synthesis between dialectical and conventionally scientific inquiry.

Needful structures

Based on a novel, complementary reading of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Siegler develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the intricate machinations of sociotechnical systems from a perspective on situated human-technology interaction.

Nietzsche

This book presents Badiou’s seminar on Nietzsche’s late works, which for the first time addresses what would become one of his central concepts: anti-philosophy and its adversarial yet intimate relationship with philosophy.

Old whigs

The virtue of prudence suffuses the writings of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln, yet the demands of statecraft compelled both to take daring positions against long odds: Burke against the seemingly inexorable march of the French Revolution, Lincoln against disunion at a moment when the Northern ...

On purpose

A brief, accessible history of the idea of purpose in Western thought, from ancient Greece to the presentCan we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and even Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which profoundly shook the idea, was una...

Open to reason

Open to Reason traces Muslims’ long intellectual and spiritual history of questioning to show how Islamic philosophy has always engaged critically with texts and ideas both inside and outside its tradition. Through a rich reading of classical and modern Muslim philosophers, Souleymane Bachir Diag...

Philosophers on art from kant to the postmodernists

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each ...

Philosophers on film from bergson to badiou

Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou is an anthology of writings on cinema and film by many of the major thinkers in continental philosophy. The book presents a selection of fundamental texts, each introduced by the editor, Christopher Kul-Want, who places the philosophers within a histori...

Philosophical analysis in the twentieth century, volume 1

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date. As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is ...

Philosophical analysis in the twentieth century, volume 2

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date. As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is ...

Philosophical logic

A brief account of philosophical logic from one of the world's leading authoritiesPhilosophical 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 log...

Philosophy and poetry

This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry.

Philosophy of language

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 questions, and its most promising future dire...

Polish minds that shaped world philosophy

This is the story about twenty-eight Polish philosophers who shaped both the continental and the analytical traditions of world philosophy. Each is portrayed and discussed with three key words.

Postcolonial bergson

At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson’s philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson’s thought in a postcolonial context.

Red hamlet

The first full-length biography of the influential Russian revolutionary, philosopher, physician, and rival to Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov.

Reforming modernity

Reforming Modernity is a sweeping intellectual history and philosophical reflection built around the work of the philosopher Abdurrahman Taha. Wael B. Hallaq explores how Taha’s philosophical project sheds light on recent intellectual currents in the Islamic world and puts forth a formidable crit...

Seinfeld and philosophy

Senses of the subject

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler’s philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and F...

Situating existentialism

This anthology provides a history of the systemization and canonization of existentialism, a quintessentially antisystemic mode of thought. Situating existentialism within the history of ideas, it features new readings on the most influential works in the existential canon, exploring their format...

Spinoza's ethics

An authoritative edition of George Eliot's elegant translation of Spinoza's greatest philosophical workIn 1856, Marian Evans completed her translation of Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics while living in Berlin with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. This would have become the first editio...

State of nature, stages of society

Takes the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The age of questions

A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the nineteenth centuryIn the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interroga...

The analytic tradition in philosophy, volume 2

An in-depth history of the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, from a leading philosopher of languageThis is the second of five volumes of a definitive history of analytic philosophy from the invention of modern logic in 1879 to the end of the twentieth century. Scott Soames, a leading philos...

The banality of heidegger

Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks. Nancy refers to a philosophical or “historial” anti-Semitism marked, nonetheless, by the “banality” of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. Heidegger’s thought is placed in the b...

The best of all possible worlds

In the spring of 1672, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz arrived in Paris, home of France's two greatest philosopher-theologians of the period, Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas de Malebranche. The meeting of these three men represents a profoundly important moment in the h...

The event of music history

Brings musicology to the cutting edge of debates in the postmodern philosophy of history.This book presents a new theory of how to write music history, and offers an exemplar of this new theory in action, in a series of four chapter-length reflexions on Beethoven's heroic style. The first book-le...

The internet is not what you think it is

An original deep history of the internet that tells the story of the centuries-old utopian dreams behind it—and explains why they have died todayMany think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology. But is it? In The Internet Is Not Wha...

The pathologies of individual freedom

This is a penetrating reinterpretation and defense of Hegel's social theory as an alternative to reigning liberal notions of social justice. The eminent German philosopher Axel Honneth rereads Hegel's Philosophy of Right to show how it diagnoses the pathologies of the overcommitment to individual...

The patriot

Revitalizes Alexander Kluge's classic 1979 film, showing it to be not just great storytelling but also an exploration of the poetic force of Frankfurt School Critical Theory.Alexander Kluge achieved his breakthrough at the 1966 Venice Biennale with his first feature, Yesterday Girl (Abschied von ...

The pragmatics of intercultural communicative competence

This book presents a pragmatic perspective on the development of intercultural communicative competence by language learners in the foreign language classroom and in study abroad contexts. The book concludes with a reflection on what it means to be an intercultural speaker and the benefits for th...

The pragmatism reader

A wide-ranging anthology of key pragmatist writingsThe Pragmatism Reader is the essential anthology of this important philosophical movement. Each selection featured here is a key writing by a leading pragmatist thinker, and represents a distinctively pragmatist approach to a core philosophical p...