History of Ideas

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring T.W. Adorno (1903-69) was a German philosopher and social and cultural theorist. His work h...

David Hume, philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, was one of the great figures of the European Enlightenment. Unlike some of ...

Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptua...

An exploration of everything Kant's philosophy can teach us about being the best people we can be, from using our human reasoning to its fullest po...

In After Parmenides, Tom Rockmore takes us all the way back to the beginning of philosophy when Parmenides asserted that thought and being are one:...

Ancient and enduring, rich and wide-ranging, the tradition of Confucianism offers profound insights into how we can lead good lives--lives built on...

In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche gives an impassioned analysis of Western religion, specifically Christianity, that confronts its autho...

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is a philosophical treatise published in pamphlet form by ...

A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to todays bitterly divided politicsIndividualism is a defining fe...

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Mobius strip, twisted to have o...

In Divine Audacity, Peter Dillard presents a historically informed and rigorous analysis of the themes of mystical union, volition and virtue that ...

The essays in this volume discuss the visible elements, such as clothing, jewellery, the opulence of the elite, fashion and styles, but they also i...