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: 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: 9780141984124
Title: AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL : Refugees Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours
Author: ZIZEK SLAVOJ
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Today, hundreds of thousands of people, desperate to escape war, violence and poverty, are crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Our response from our protected European standpoint, argues Slavoj Zizek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible; or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions are bad, states Zizek. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackling it.

The refugee crisis also presents an opportunity, a unique chance for Europe to redefine itself: but, if we are to do so, we have to start raising unpleasant and difficult questions. We must also acknowledge that large migrations are our future: only then can we commit to a carefully prepared process of change, one founded not on a community that see the excluded as a threat, but one that takes as its basis the shared substance of our social being.

The only way, in other words, to get to the heart of one of the greatest issues confronting Europe today is to insist on the global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed. Maybe such solidarity is a utopia. But, warns Zizek, if we don't engage in it, then we are really lost. And we will deserve to be lost.

Imprint: PENGUIN BOOKS
RRP: $19.99

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: 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: 9780857897015
Title: ALTRUISM : The Science and Psychology of Kindness
Author: RICARD MATTHIEU
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The concern for the well-being of others could be the saving grace of the 21st century. Matthieu Ricard's Altruism, an erudite, brilliantly ranging synthesis of philosophy, psychology and ages old wisdom, is a radical call to kindness, which has the potential as a new global movement to answer the biggest problems of our time: the economy in the short term, life satisfaction in the mid-term, and the environment in the long term. As the faultlines of inequality and nationalism leave us ever more divided, Ricard challenges us to be better people - and in the process, make the world a better place.
Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who had a promising career in cellular genetics before leaving France to study Buddhism in the Himalayas forty years ago. He is also a bestselling author, translator and photographer, and an active participant in current scientific research on the effects of meditation on the brain. He lives in Tibet and Nepal and is involved in humanitarian projects in both these countries.

Imprint: ATLANTIC BOOKS
RRP: $24.99

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: 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

ISBN: 9781472526038
Title: AMONG THE DEAD CITIES : IS THE TARGETING OF CIVILIANS IN WAR EVER JUSTIFIED
Author: GRAYLING A C
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

Is it ever right to target civilians in a time of war? Or do the ends sometimes justify the means? The twentieth century - the age of 'total war' - marked the first time that civilian populations came to be seen as legitimate military targets. At this policy's most terrible extreme came the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it is an issue that remains relevant today with the needs of the 'War on Terror' used to justify the use of drone strikes.

In Amongst the Dead Cities, A.C. Grayling explores these moral issues in all their complexity with a detailed examination of the Allied bombing of German cities during World War 2. Considering the cases for and against the area bombing and the experiences of the bombed and the bombers, Grayling asks: was the targeting of civilians in Germany a crime?

Now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series, the book includes a new afterword by the author considering the issues in light of later conflicts up to the present day.

Imprint: BLOOMSBURY
RRP: $25.99

ISBN: 9780099583646
Title: ANCIENT GREEKS : TEN WAYS THEY SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD
Author: HALL EDITH
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

They gave us democracy, philosophy, poetry, rational science, the joke. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. They wrote the timeless myths of Odysseus and Oedipus, and the histories of Leonidas's three hundred Spartans and Alexander the Great.

But who were the ancient Greeks? And what was it that enabled them to achieve so much?

Here, Edith Hall gives us a revelatory way of viewing this geographically scattered people, visiting different communities at various key moments during twenty centuries of ancient history.

Identifying ten unique traits central to the widespread ancient Greeks, Hall unveils a civilization of incomparable richness and a people of astounding complexity and explains how they made us who we are today.

A thoroughly readable and illuminating account of this fascinating people This excellent book makes us admire and like the ancient Greeks equally' Independent A worthy and lively introduction to one of the two groups of ancient peoples who really formed the western world' Sunday Times Throughout, Hall exemplifies her subjects' spirit of inquiry, their originality and their open-mindedness'

Imprint: ARROW
RRP: $24.99