Philosophy

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: 9781784781996
Title: ABSOLUTE RECOIL : TOWARDS A NEW FOUNDATION OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALSIM
Author: ZIZEK SLAVOJ
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

At the outset of the twentieth century, Lenin argued that materialism has to change its form with each new scientific discovery. Today, argues Slavoj Zizek in this major new work, we should apply this stricture to Lenin himself. Philosophical materialism has not yet risen to the challenge of relativity theory and quantum physics, or breakthroughs like Freudian psychoanalysis-and we need hardly mention the failure of actually existing Communism. In Absolute Recoil, Zizek proposes a new foundation for dialectical materialism that answers these fundamental challenges.

Imprint: VERSO
RRP: $24.99

ISBN: 9781788730822
Title: ADORNO FOUCAULT AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE WEST
Author: COOK DEBORAH
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period in our history. To assess these resources, it examines the work of two of the twentieth century's more prominent social theorists: Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault. Although Adorno was situated squarely in the Marxist tradition that Foucault would occasionally challenge, Cook demonstrates that their critiques of our current predicament are complementary in important respects. Among other things, they converge in their focus on the historical conditions–economic in Adorno and political in Foucault–that gave rise to the racist and authoritarian tendencies that continue to blight the West. But this book will also show that as Adorno and Foucault plumb the economic and political forces that have shaped our identities, they offer remarkably similar answers to the perennial question: What is to be done?

Imprint: VERSO
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: 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: 9780141185286
Title: AGE OF REASON
Author: SARTRE JEAN-PAUL
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The first volume in his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason is a philosophical novel exploring existentialist notions of freedom, translated by Eric Sutton with an introduction by David Caute in Penguin Modern Classics.

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, rises the distant threat of the coming of the Second World War.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was an iconoclastic French philosopher, novelist, playwright and, widely regarded as the central figure in post-war European culture and political thinking. Sartre famously refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 on the grounds that 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution'. His most well-known works, all of which are published by Penguin, include The Age of Reason, Nausea and Iron in the Soul.

Imprint: PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
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: 9780374537203
Title: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
Author: KAAG JOHN
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

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

ISBN: 9780099583646
Title: ANCIENT GREEKS : TEN WAYS THEY SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD
Author: HALL EDITH
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

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