How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960sMichel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who's who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by...

What is time? The 5th-century philosopher St Augustine famously said that he knew what time was, so long as no one asked him. Is time a fourth dimension similar to space or does it flow in some sense? And if it flows, does it make sense to say how fast?...

It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body?In...

'beauty has purport and significance only for human beings, for beings at once animal and rational' In the Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime, discussing the objectivity of...

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first foreigners to recognize and trumpet the grandness of the American project. His two-volume classic, Democracy in America, published in 1835, not only offered a vivid account of what was then a new nation but...

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state societyFor two thousand years the disparate groups...

From the sierras of New Mexico to the streets of New York and LA by night—”a sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity”—Baudrillard mixes aperçus and observations with a wicked sense of fun to provide a unique insight into the country that...

A leading radical intellectual tackles the many controversial interpretations of Wagner’s workFor over a century, Richard Wagner’s music has been the subject of intense debate among philosophers, many of whom have attacked its ideological—some say racist...

A series of dialogues with the most exciting and controversial German philosopher writing today.Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country for his late 1980s Critique of Cynical Reason, which confronted headlong the “enlightened false...

In this selection of the political writings of Karl Marx that predate the Communist Manifesto, excerpts from the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," "Points on the State and Bourgeois Society" and other writings are newly translated and arranged...

Sixteenth-century classic by brilliant humanist, churchman and scholar envisioned a patriarchal island kingdom that practiced religious tolerance, in which everybody worked, all goods were community-owned, and violence, bloodshed, and vice were...

Around the world, consciousness of the threat to our environment is growing. The majority of solutions on offer, from using efficient light bulbs to biking to work, focus on individual lifestyle changes, yet the scale of the crisis requires far deeper...

Once of central importance to left historians and activists alike, the concept of the “bourgeois revolution” has recently come in for sustained criticism from both Marxists and conservatives. In this comprehensive rejoinder, Neil Davidson seeks to answer...

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the upheaval in German philosophy...

This book makes available for the first time in English―and for the first time in its entirety in any language―an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography...

The Sparks of Randomness, Henri Atlan's magnum opus, develops his whole philosophy with a highly impressive display of knowledge, wisdom, depth, rigor, and intellectual and moral vigor. Atlan founds an ethics adapted to the new power over life that...

The question of how to lead a happy and meaningful life has been at the heart of philosophical debate since time immemorial. Today, however, these questions seem to be addressed not by philosophers but self-help gurus, who frantically champion the...

Twenty years ago, Alain Badiou's first Manifesto for Philosophy rose up against the all-pervasive proclamation of the "end" of philosophy. In lieu of this problematic of the end, he put forward the watchword: "one more step".The situation has...

A Harvard law professor explores the meaning of justice and invites readers on a journey of moral and political reflection, 'to figure out what they think, and why.' Does a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder 'deserve' the Purple Heart?...

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume--and the last book he published--finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography.Commenting on artists such as...