Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory―Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic...

“The best new book I’ve read.”―Richard Dawkins, New York Times Book Review Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical...

W. E. B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student at the University of Berlin. But Du Bois was also American to his core, scarred but not crippled by the racial humiliations of his homeland. In Lines of Descent, Kwame Anthony Appiah traces...

Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Politics. Philosophy & Critical Theory. Introduction by Jack Halberstam. In this series of essays, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports,...

Eight renowned thinkers take philosophy to the streets in interviews drawn from a Toronto International Film Festival premiereExamined Life boldly takes philosophy out of the dark corners of the academy and into the streets, reminding us that great ideas...

How ideas such as civilization and progress have been used as a smoke screen for western dominance, by the world-renowned sociologist.Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intervention around the world has been justified by appeals to notions of...

2012 New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year Slate.com 2012 Staff Pick In this astonishing and profound work, an irreverent sleuth traces the riddle of existence from the ancient world to modern times. Whether framed philosophically as “Why is there a...

The Philosopher's Banquet is the first sustained study of Plutarch's Table Talk, a Greek prose text which is a combination of philosophical dialogue (in the style of Plato's Symposium) and miscellany. The form of Table Talk was imitated by several later...

Peter H. Denton explores Bertrand Russell's attempt to articulate the kind of world he thought possible and the world he feared in the aftermath of World War I. Two concerns were fundamental to Russell's work between 1919 and 1938: the philosophical...

Philosophical debates over the fundamental principles that should guide life-and-death medical decisions usually occur at a considerable remove from the tough, real-world choices made in hospital rooms, courthouses, and legislatures. David Orentlicher...

Daniel Dennett's "brilliant" exploration of human consciousness — named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times — is a masterpiece beloved by both scientific experts and general readers (New York Times Book Review).Consciousness...

Jurgen Habermas has developed the theory of communicative action primarily in the context of critical social and political theory and discourse ethics. The essays collected in this volume, however, focus on the theory's implications for epistemology and...

A philosopher and political thinker describes a new political grammar free of modernist assumptions.In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the...

Judith Butler follows Edward Said’s late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to...

This is a major reinterpretation of ancient philosophy that recovers the long Greek and Roman tradition of philosophy as a complete way of life--and not simply an intellectual discipline. Distinguished philosopher John Cooper traces how, for many ancient...

Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership...

The essays collected in this new volume reveal Isaiah Berlin at his most lucid and accessible. He was constitutionally incapable of writing with the opacity of the specialist, but these shorter, more introductory pieces provide the perfect starting-point...

The foundational text of libertarian thought, named one of the 100 Most Influential Books since World War II (Times Literary Supplement)First published in response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia has become...

For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiou’s account of cinema. He contends that...

In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late...