Metaphysics is traditionally one of the four main branches of philosophy, alongside ethics, logic and epistemology. It is an area that continues to attract and fascinate many people, even though it is generally thought to be highly complex and abstract...

This book is no less than a guide to the whole of Western philosophy—the ideas that have undergirded our civilization for two-and-a-half thousand years. Anthony Kenny tells the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and the...

An investigation of how the idea of a public as a central fiction of modern life informs our literature, politics, and culture. Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them...

Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it—time to get serious once again!—Slavoj ŽižekResponding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened...

Baudrillard's essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion piece to any and all of his books and a prescient portrait of our contemporary condition.“The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just...

For readers of E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, an equally irresistible volume that brings history’s greatest philosophers to life“A primer in human existence: philosophy has rarely seemed so lucid, so important, so worth doing and so easy...

Renowned moral philosopher Jonathan Glover confronts the brutal history of the twentieth century to unravel the mystery of why so many atrocities occurred. In a new preface, Glover brings the book through the post-September 11 era and into our own...

What role should a citizen's religious convictions play in political activities? Christopher Eberle is deeply at odds with the dominant orthodoxy among political theorists about the relationship of religion to politics. His argument is that a citizen may...

For a long time, the term ‘ideology’ was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that...

Are you authoritarian or libertarian? Are we morally obligated to end the world? And just what’s wrong with eating your cat? Would You Eat Your Cat? challenges you to examine these and many other philosophical questions. This unique collection of classic...

"In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger—each dealt with in one or more of the essays. There are essays too...

"[Appiah's] work reveals the heart and sensitivity of a novelist. . . .Fascinating, erudite and beautifully written."―The New York Times Book Review In this groundbreaking work, Kwame Anthony Appiah, hailed as "one of the most relevant philosophers...

Alan Paskow first asks why fictional characters, such as Hamlet and Anna Karenina, matter to us and how they are able to emotionally affect us. He then applies these questions to pictorial art, demonstrating that paintings beckon us to view their...

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In the late nineteenth century, Scandinavian urban dwellers developed a passion for a new, utterly modern sort of visual spectacle: objects and effigies brought to life in astonishingly detailed, realistic scenes. The period 1880-1910 was the popular...

In this fundamental text, Hedley Bull explores three key questions: What is the nature of order in world politics? How is it maintained within the contemporary states system? And do desirable and feasible alternatives to the states system exist? Contrary...

In a clear and elegant style, T. M. Scanlon reframes current philosophical debates as he explores the moral permissibility of an action. Permissibility may seem to depend on the agent’s reasons for performing an action. For example, there seems to be an...

Working his way through the various spheres and systems of everyday life—the political, the juridical, the economical, the aesthetic, the biological, among others—he finds that they are all characterized by the same non-equivalence, and hence the same...

Making good decisions under conditions of uncertainty - which is the norm - requires a sound appreciation of the way random chance works. As analysis and modelling of most aspects of the world, and all measurement, are necessarily imprecise and involve...

Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast...