Showing titles in Philosophy

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the World. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities. In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the World of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes' classic work.

"The Prince" is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (Of Principalities). However, the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. This was done with the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII, but "long before then, in fact since the first appearance of The Prince in manuscript, controversy had swirled about his writings".

In the years between her first public lecture in 1961 and her last in 1981, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces are gathered together in book form for the first time. Written in the last decades of Rand's life, they reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor.

“It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil.” Deep issues of conscience are explored in Ayn Rand’s dystopian tale of a man who dares to fight against a system that invades his very mind and identity.

Claimed to be one of the first works of modern philosophy, this unabridged version of The Prince is read by Emma Topping. This classic of political writing is Machiavelli's most notorious work. A treatise on gaining and maintaining political power, this is the work that inspired the use of the term "Machiavellian".

A panoramic view of the cosmos must begin with the tension of a single political moment. In Quantum History, Slavoj Žižek brings together Hegelian dialectics, Lacan psychoanalysis and quantum mechanics to rethink history, reality and political possibility. Taking up Lenin’s challenge to...

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is not just one of the greatest philosophical texts in the English language; it is one of the most important works in the history of Western political thought. Almost every major tradition in the centuries after Hobbes—from radical democracy to authoritarianism—has been influenced by its arguments. Written in exile in a period of dramatic developments—civil war and regicide—Leviathan is in some ways the product of its own special circumstances. And yet, at the same time, it deals with fundamental issues that matter to all of us today.

In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking 10 of the most common objections to Marxism - that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on - he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are.

Kant's Prolegomena, although a small book, is without doubt the most important of his writings, writes the translator, Paul Carus. Prolegomena means, literally, prefatory or introductory remarks, and it furnishes us with a key to his main work, The Critique of Pure Reason; in fact, it is an...

Kant’s Critique of Judgement is the third and final part of his series of Critiques, which began with Critique of Pure Reason and continued with Critique of Practical Reason. Critique of Judgement was published in 1790 and is divided into two parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the...

The most famous and important book on politics ever written The Prince remains as lively and shocking today as when it was written almost five hundred years ago. Initially denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and a recommendation of tyranny, it has more recently been defended as the...

Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition. Unlike nearly all of Plato's philosophical contemporaries, Plato's entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. The works which are most often assigned to Plato's early years are all considered to be Socratic dialogues, written from 399 to 387.

In this classic work, award-winning philosopher Robert Nozick offers a “complex, sophisticated, and ingenious” (The Economist) defense of libertarianism First published in response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia has since become one of the...

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples - claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote - and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial.

At Independence, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, embarked upon a political and an economic project. His political project―to put India on the democratic path―was a resounding success.This success, though, was marred by an equally resounding failure of Nehru’s...

Over two millennia after its compilation, the Politics still offers much to consider with regards to political science. Aristotle's succinct and thoughtful analysis is based on his study of over 150 city constitutions and covers the gamut of political issues in order to establish which types of constitution are best, ideally as well as for particular circumstances, and how they may be maintained.

Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws.

This book consists of two parts: the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" and "The Law of Peoples", a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than 50 years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times.

These early philosophical writings underpinned the Chinese revolutions and their clarion calls to insurrection remain some of the most stirring of all time. Drawing on a dizzying array of references from contemporary culture and politics, Zizek's firecracker commentary reaches unsettling conclusions about the place of Mao's thought in the revolutionary canon.

**DREAM COUNT, the searing, exquisite new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is out now!** From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today – written as a letter to a friend. I have some suggestions for how to raise...