In Freedom and the End of Reason, Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant’s philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy’s larger history. He persuasively argues that the whole of...

Individualist and communitarian. Anarchist and totalitarian. Classicist and romanticist. Progressive and reactionary. Since the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been said to be all of these things. Few philosophers have been the subject of...

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 Prince, a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli is widely regarded as the single most influential book on politics—and in particular on the the politics of power—ever written.In this...

“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...

A new, authoritative introduction to Rosa Luxemburg's most important works.

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,...

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...

The definitive sequel to New York Times bestseller How the Scots Invented the Modern World is a magisterial account of how the two greatest thinkers of the ancient world, Plato and Aristotle, laid the foundations of Western culture—and how their rivalry...

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...

For the first time in Penguin Classics: Nietzsche’s accessible exploration of key ideas in his landmark Beyond Good and Evil—in a lucid new translationFriedrich Nietzsche claimed that the purpose of On the Genealogy of Morals was to call attention to his...

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...

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns...

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...

The story of one of the most important—and incendiary—books in Western historyWhen it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published—"godless," "full of abominations," "a book...