Philosophy

ISBN: 9781921421570
Title: 100 GREAT BOOKS OF LIBERTY : ESSENTIAL INTRODUCTION TO THE GREATEST IDEA OF WESTERN CIVILISATION
Author: BERG CHRIS (ED)
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Dozens of Australia's best thinkers, writers and commentators reassess the books that provide the foundation for liberty and democracy in Australia and around the world. From Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, Australian freedom has been influenced by the greatest ideas from around the world. Australian authors.



Imprint: CONNORCOURT
RRP: $34.99

ISBN: 9780857625069
Title: 101 DILEMMAS FOR THE ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHER
Author: CHALINE ERIC
Format: HARD COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

This thought-provoking, interactive, and entertaining introduction to ethics will bring you face to face with some tough moral choices. It presents you with 101 imaginative scenarios - sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic, and sometimes uncomfortably realistic - which will force you to re-examine your most cherished assumptions about right and wrong. Including: Paul, the torturer with a conscience; Sally, who can prevent enormous suffering for the price of a latte; and Paul, who is handy with his sts but not a killer, surely.
101 DILEMMAS FOR THE ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHER is packed with problems, puzzles, quizzes and questions, as well as ethical ideas and insights from history's greatest philosphers.

Imprint: IVY
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9781473655423
Title: 50 PHILOSOPHY CLASSICS : Your Shortcut to the Most Important Ideas on Being Truth and Meaning
Author: BUTLER-BOWDON TOM
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The greatest philosophy books distilled, in the relaunch of the bestselling 50 Classics series.

For over 2000 years, philosophy has been our best guide to the experience of being human, and the true nature of reality.

From Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, Confucius, Cicero and Heraclitus in ancient times to 17th century rationalists Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, from 20th-century greats Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Baudrillard and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary thinkers Michael Sandel, Peter Singer and Slavoj Zizek, 50 PHILOSOPHY CLASSICS explores key writings that have shaped the discipline and had an impact on the real world.

Philosophy can no longer be confined to academia, and 50 PHILOSOPHY CLASSICS shows how powerful it can be as a tool for opening our minds and helping us think. Whether you are fascinated or daunted by the big questions of how to think, how to be, how to act and how to see, this is the perfect introduction to some of humanity's greatest minds and their landmark books.

Imprint: NICHOLAS BREALEY
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9781925322521
Title: ACCIDENTAL DEATH : When Things May Not be as They Seem
Author: BOWLES ROBIN
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

Accidental Death explores the reality of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations when an accident upends their lives.

This collection of stories centres on the idea of 'accidental death', and the upheaval caused in the lives of those who lose a loved one in this way. Several of the cases examined here turned out, on investigation, not to be accidents at all. Some were crimes. Some remain unexplained; others were shown to be just what they appeared to be. What connects them is what happens to those involved- suddenly, grieving people are thrown into the spotlight. There is no privacy and nowhere to hide. Like it or not, and often through no fault of their own, these people become part of an investigation, subject to the scrutiny of police, media, the courts, and the court of public opinion.

Featuring a range of meticulously researched cases - from the tragic story of Akon Guode, jailed in 2017 for driving her children into a lake, to the accidental death of cricketer Phillip Hughes - Australia's 'queen of true crime' delves deep into the criminal justice system. With Bowles's trademark compassion and forensic attention to detail, Accidental Death explores the reality of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations when an accident upends their lives.

Imprint: SCRIBE
RRP: $35.00

ISBN: 9780674986862
Title: ADORNO AND EXISTENCE
Author: GORDON PETER E
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

From the beginning to the end of his career, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, verging on polemic. In Kierkegaard he saw an early paragon for the late flowering of bourgeois solipsism; in Heidegger, an impresario for a “jargon of authenticity” cloaking its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch. Even in the straitened rationalism of Husserl’s phenomenology Adorno saw a vain attempt to break free from the prison-house of consciousness.

Most scholars of critical theory still regard these philosophical exercises as marginal works—unfortunate lapses of judgment for a thinker otherwise celebrated for dialectical mastery. Yet his persistent fascination with the philosophical canons of existentialism and phenomenology suggests a connection far more productive than mere antipathy. From his first published book on Kierkegaard’s aesthetic to the mature studies in negative dialectics, Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise.

Ultimately, Adorno saw in them an instructive if unsuccessful attempt to realize his own ambition: to escape the enchanted circle of idealism so as to grasp “the primacy of the object.” Exercises in “immanent critique,” Adorno’s writings on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger present us with a photographic negative—a philosophical portrait of the author himself. In Adorno and Existence, Peter E. Gordon casts new and unfamiliar light on this neglected chapter in the history of Continental philosophy.

Imprint: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
RRP: $39.99

ISBN: 9781780936598
Title: AESTHETIC THEORY
Author: ADORNO THEODOR W
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation Aart is the sedimented history of human misery'.

Imprint: BLOOMSBURY
RRP: $29.99

ISBN: 9781847396273
Title: AGE OF ABSURDITY : WHY MODERN LIFE MAKES IT HARD TO BE HAPPY
Author: FOLEY MICHAEL
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness and fulfilment. The bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture. This knotty dilemma is the subject of The Age of Absurdity - a wry and accessible investigation into how the desirable states of wellbeing and satisfaction are constantly undermined by modern life.

Michael Foley examines the elusive condition of happiness common to philosophy, spiritual teachings and contemporary psychology, then shows how these are becoming increasingly difficult to apply in a world of high expectations. The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships and perpetual youth. In conclusion, rather than denouncing and rejecting the age, Foley presents an entertaining strategy of not just accepting but embracing today's world - finding happiness in its absurdity.

Imprint: SIMON & SCHUSTER
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9780262533379
Title: AGONY OF EROS
Author: HAN BYUNG-CHUL
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian.

In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.

In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the 'inferno of the same.'? Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources - Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the 'pornographication'? of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of rros in today's 'burnout society.'? To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself.

Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society. This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say'as Rimbaud desired it 'the 'reinvention'? of love.' from the foreword by Alain Badiou

Imprint: MIT PRESS
RRP: $24.99

ISBN: 9781350009110
Title: ALTHUSSERS LESSON
Author: RANCIERE JACQUES
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson appeared in 1974, just as the energies of May 68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière's analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis in 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared 'dead and buried on the barricades of May 68'? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the '60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew. Encompassing the book's distinctive combination of theoretical analysis and historical description is a question that has guided Rancière's thought ever since: how do theories of subversion become the rationale for order?

Imprint: BLOOMSBURY
RRP: $29.99

ISBN: 9781844676828
Title: AMERICA
Author: BAUDRILLARD JEAN
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

In America, France's leading philosopher of postmodernism took to the freeways to produce a collection of traveler's tales from the land of hyperreality. From the sierras of New Mexico to the streets of New York and LA by night-- a sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensityA"--Baudrillard mixes apercus and observations with a wicked sense of fun to provide a unique insight into the country that dominates the world. In this new edition, leading cultural critic and novelist Geoff Dyer offers a thoughtful and perceptive take on the continuing resonance of Baudrillard's book in Obama's America.

Imprint: VERSO
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9780374537203
Title: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY : A LOVE STORY
Author: KAAG JOHN
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

In American Philosophy, John Kaag--a disillusioned philosopher at sea in his marriage and career--stumbles upon a treasure trove of rare books on an old estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that once belonged to the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. The library includes notes from Whitman, inscriptions from Frost, and first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As he begins to catalog and preserve these priceless books, Kaag rediscovers the very tenets of American philosophy--self-reliance, pragmatism, the transcendent--and sees them in a twenty-first-century context.

Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy. After studying under Harvard's Philosophical Four--William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and George Herbert Palmer--he held the most prestigious chair at the university for the first three decades of the twentieth century. And when his teachers eventually died, he collected the great books from their libraries (filled with marginalia) and combined them with his own rare volumes at his family's estate. And there they remained for nearly eighty years, a time capsule of American thought.

Part intellectual history, part memoir, American Philosophy is an invigorating investigation of American pragmatism and the wisdom that underlies a meaningful life.

Imprint: FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX
RRP: $24.99

ISBN: 9780415689700
Title: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE BASICS
Author: STANLICK NANCY
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

American Philosophy: The Basics introduces the history of American thought from early Calvinists to the New England Transcendentalists and from contract theory to contemporary African American philosophy. The key question it asks is: what it is that makes American Philosophy unique? This lively and compelling book moves through key periods in the development of American thought from the founding fathers to the transcendentalists and pragmatists to contemporary social commentators. Readers are introduced to: Some of the most important thinkers in American history including Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Paine, Charles Sanders Pierce, Thomas Kuhn, Cornel West and many more Developments in five key areas of thought: epistemology, metaphysics, religion and ethics, social philosophy, and political philosophy The contributions of American women, African-Americans and Native Americans. Featuring suggestions for further reading and assuming no prior knowledge of philosophy, this is an ideal first introduction for anyone studying or interested in the history of American thought.

Imprint: ROUTLEDGE
RRP: $29.95