The Administration of Fear
Paul Virilio
Semiotext(e), PB, 9781584351054
In this new and lengthy interview, Paul Virilio shows us how the 'propaganda of progress,' the illuminism of new technologies, provide unexpected vectors for fear in the way that they manufacture frenzy and stupor. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence that capitalism has accelerated into ... More/Buy
The Book of Mormon: A Biography
Paul Gutjahr
Princeton University Press, HB, 9780691144801
Late one night in 1823 Joseph Smith, Jr. was reportedly visited in his family's farmhouse in upstate New York by an angel named Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni told him of a buried stack of gold plates that were inscribed with a history of the Americas' ancient peoples, and which would restore the pure Gospel message as Jesus had delivered it ... More/Buy
The Church and Its Reign
Giorgio Agamben
Seagull Books, HB, 9780857420244
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris and Atilde; Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of ... More/Buy
Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique
Thomas Lemke
Paradigm Publishers, PB, 9781594516382
The French philosopher Michel Foucault is by now the most cited author in the social sciences and humanities. This book discusses one of his central notions that attracted enormous interest inside and outside academia: governmentality. It reconstructs its emergence in Foucaultas analytics of power and shows its trajectory in his work. The book explores the theoretical strengths and critical perspectives the ... More/Buy
Haggadah
Jonathan Safran Foer (ed)
Hamish Hamilton, HB, 9780241143605
Read each year around the Seder table, the Haggadah recounts through prayer and song the extraordinary story of Exodus, when Moses led the ancient Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to wander through the desert for forty years before reaching the Promised Land. In this new version of the traditional Haggadah text, Jonathan Safran Foer brings together some of the most ... More/Buy
Heidegger
John Richardson
Routledge, PB, 9780415350716
John Richardson centres his account on Heidegger's persistent effort to change the very kind of understanding or truth we seek. Beginning with an overview of Heidegger's life and work, he sketches the development of Heidegger's thought up to the publication of Being and Time. He shows how that book takes up Husserl's method of phenomenology and adapts it. He then introduces ... More/Buy
The I Ching: A Biography
Richard Smith
Princeton University Press, HB, 9780691145099
The I Ching originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago. In 136 BCE the emperor declared it a Confucian classic, and in the centuries that followed, this work had a profound influence on the philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science, technology, and medicine of various cultures throughout East Asia. Jesuit missionaries brought knowledge of the ... More/Buy
Meaning in Life and Why It Matters
Susan Wolf
Princeton University Press, PB, 9780691154503
Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the ... More/Buy
The Paradox of Love
Pascal Bruckner
Princeton University Press, HB, 9780691149141
The sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought - birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. But as Pascal Bruckner, one of France's leading writers, argues in this lively and provocative reflection on the contradictions of modern love, our ... More/Buy
The Philosophy of Metareality: Creativity, Love and Freedom
Roy Bhaskar
Routledge, PB, 9780415507660
The Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom is the third of three books elaborating Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of metaReality, which appeared in rapid succession in 2002. A big, rich book teaming with ideas, The Philosophy of MetaReality is undoubtedly the magnum opus of Bhaskar's spiritual turn. Building on a radical new analysis of the self, human agency and society, Roy ... More/Buy
Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century
Tracy B Strong
University of Chicago Press, HB, 9780226777467
From Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively ... More/Buy
The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism
Tariq Ramadan
Penguin, PB, 9780141038025
In a world so full of different beliefs and viewpoints, how can we find peace in our shared humanity? The Quest for Meaning will take you on a journey to discover the profound truths that bind us all together. Acclaimed thinker and philosopher Tariq Ramadan explores universal ideas such as love, respect, truth and tolerance, and examines questions such as how ... More/Buy
The Revolution of Everyday Life
Raoul Vaneigem
Verso Books, PB, 9781844678914
First published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, The Revolution of Everyday Life is a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the "society of the spectacle" from the point of view of individual experience. A leading member of the Situationist International, Raoul Vaneigem names and defines the alienating mundanities of consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to ... More/Buy
Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor
Ted Cohen
Princeton University Press, PB, 9780691154466
In Thinking of Others, Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity - as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. To be able to see oneself as someone else, whether the someone else is a ... More/Buy
Voltaire: A Life
Ian Davidson
Profile, PB, 9781846682322
We think of Voltaire as the epitome of the Enlightenment; in his own time he was also the most famous and controversial figure in Europe. Davidson tells the whole, rich story of his life (1694-1778) - his early imprisonment in the Bastille; exile in England and his mastery of English; an obsession with money, of which he made a huge amount; ... More/Buy
Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s
Richard Wolin
Princeton University Press, PB, 9780691154343
Michel 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 China's Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless expos of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful ... More/Buy