History of Ideas

In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most important of all revolutions...a revolution in sentiments'. Inspi...

What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intel...

Democracy today is widely regarded as an ideal form of government. Yet in practice it sometimes seems a sham, a political puppet show in which hidd...

Existentialism is backCarpe diem seize the day is one of the oldest pieces of life advice in Western history. But its true spirit has been hijack...

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fatef...

In 1872, a woman known only as 'An Ernest Englishwoman' published an open letter entitled 'Are women animals?', in which she protested the fact tha...

'Neither a travel book, nor a vast prose poem, nor a history, nor philosophy, nor voyage of discovery, but often all at once' Independent on Sunda...

The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Mi...

This comprehensive and authoritative statement of fundamental principles of sociological analysis integrates approaches that are often seen as mutu...

How did the value of freedom become so closely associated with the institution of the market? Why did the idea of market freedom hold so little app...

In the autumn of 1502 three giants of the Renaissance period - Cesare Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli - set out on one of the mos...

Athanasius Kircher (160280) was acknowledged to be the most learned man of his age. By profession a Jesuit priest, he made himself an authority on ...

Many studies relate modern science to modern political and economic thought. Using one shift in order to explain the other, however, has begged the...

Medieval western theologians considered the Johannine comma (1 John 5:7-8) the clearest biblical evidence for the Trinity. When Erasmus failed to f...

In the Western world, coffee consumption is around one-third that of tap water. After petroleum, coffee is the second-most traded commodity in the ...

This book is no less than a guide to the whole of Western philosophy--the ideas that have undergirded our civilization for two-and-a-half thousand ...

Machiavelli's influence on modern politics and the importance of his thought for the development of modern political ideas has long been universall...

In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time wi...

''[A] splendidly entertaining book, fizzing with character and incident'' Spectator____________''In philosophy, one must start from scratch - &...

The forgotten garden that inspired Charles Darwin becomes the modern-day setting for an exploration of memory, family, and the legacy of genius. Da...

David and Mary Norton present the definitive scholarly edition of one of the greatest philosophical works ever written. This first volume contains ...

This book examines the role of Greek-speaking intellectuals in nation-formation processes during the Greek Enlightenment. The author explores how s...

In Forms of Life, Andreas Gailus argues that the neglect of aesthetics in most contemporary theories of biopolitics has resulted in an overly restr...

Toward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismi...

Philosophy is a discipline committed to helping us live wiser and less sorrowful lives. This book artfully draws together forty of the greatest and...