This is an important introduction to and critical interpretation of the work of the major French thinker, Michel Foucault. Through comprehensive and detailed analyses of such important texts as The History of Madness in the Age of Reason, The Birth of...

The philosophical writings are presented together with an essay discussing their composition and notes explaining allusions, ambiguous phrases, and technical terms

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is...

This book is an examination of natural law doctrine, rooted in the classical writings of our respective three traditions: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. Each of the authors provides an extensive essay reflecting on natural law doctrine in his tradition...

Even two hundred years after Abraham Lincoln's death, we, like Walt Whitman, "love the President personally."In a stunning feat of scholarship, insight, and engaging prose, Lincoln's Body explores how a president ungainly in body and downright "ugly" of...

This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral...

This, the 21st volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, is more than Sir Alfred Ayer's final word on the philosophical issues that preoccupied him for more than sixty years; the list of contributors is a roll-call of some of the greatest living...

This study shows how Lenin's life was permanently altered at the age of seventeen by the execution of his brother Alexander, his transformation from a model student in secondary school into a revolutionary at the university, his fascination with...

In this concise and powerful book, one of the world’s leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical views of the era have long been...

For nearly two centuries in the United States, the punishment of crime was largely aimed, in theory and in practice, at prevention, rehabilitation or incapacitation, and deterrence. In the mid-1970s, a sharp-and some argued permanent-shift occurred...

What must affluent people do to alleviate global poverty? This question has occupied moral and political philosophers for forty years. But the controversy has reached an impasse: approaches like utilitarianism and libertarianism either demand too much of...