An exemplary collection of work from one of the world’s leading scholars of intellectual history“Földényi . . . stage[s] a broad metaphysical melodrama between opposites that he pursues throughout this fierce, provoking collection (expertly translated by...

"A genial exercise in public philosophy" (Kirkus, starred review) from one of the world's best-known popular philosophers"Simon Critchley is an international treasure—that rare and real philosopher who embraces Rousseau’s ‘feeling of existence,’ David...

A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humour and comedy within Western culture—by one of its greatest exponentsWritten by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the nature of humour and the functions it serves. Why do we laugh?...

Hermeneutics has frequently been dismissed as useful only for literary and textual analysis. Some consider it to be Eurocentric or inherently relativistic and thus unsuited to social critique. Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument...

Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are self-illuminating beings...

Leadership, innovation, diversity, inclusiveness, sharing, accountability―such is the resounding administrative refrain we keep hearing in the contemporary Western university. What kinds of benefits does this refrain generate? For whom? What discursive...

The very idea of humanity seems to be in crisis. Born in the ashes of devastation after the slaughter of millions, the liberal conception of humanity imagined a suffering victim in need of salvation. Today, this figure appears less and less capable of...

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in...

Recognition is one of the most debated concepts in contemporary social and political thought. Its proponents, such as Axel Honneth, hold that to be recognized by others is a basic human need that is central to forming an identity, and the denial of...

Fifty years ago, the two leading German philosophers and sociologists since the Second World War, Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, embarked on a sweeping and contentious debate that would continue for decades. Their coauthored 1971 book Theory of...

Theories of justice are haunted by a paradox: the more ambitious the theory of justice, the less applicable and useful the model is to political practice; yet the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its moral ambition, rendering it unsound...

Is mercy more important than justice?Since antiquity, mercy has been regarded as a virtue. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, mercy had been exiled from political life. In this book, Malcolm Bull analyses and challenges the Enlightenment’s...

A major history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday livesThe Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book,...

A bold new history of postwar political philosophy and of how John Rawls transformed modern liberalismIn the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the...

"In his diaries, the American philosopher and psychologist William James, for whom the personal and the philosophical were never far apart, recounted how in his late twenties he was confronted with existential despair regarding the issue of free will: do...

"Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Our Great Purpose is a short and illuminating...

Timeless advice about how to use humor to win over any audienceCan jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome’s greatest politicians,...

"In this book, classicist Joshua Billings considers classical Greek drama as intellectual history. Developing an innovative approach to dramatic form as a mode of philosophical thought, Billings recasts early Greek intellectual history as a conversation...

Best known for his revolutionary free-market economics treatise The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he investigated the flip side of economic self-interest: the...

In May 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in the fashionable academic journal Social Text. The essay quoted hip theorists like Jacques Lacan, Donna Haraway, and Gilles Deleuze. The prose was thick with the jargon of poststructuralism. And the...