War lays bare death and our relation to it. And in the wars—or more precisely the memories of war—of the twentieth century, images of the deaths of countless faceless or nameless others eclipse the singularity of each victim’s death as well as the end of the world as such that each death signifies.Marc Crépon’s The Thought of Death and the Memory of War is a call to resist such images in which death is no longer actual death since it happens to anonymous others, and to see...

How do we interpret the recent changes in world politics and what is the future likely to hold? The contributors to this volume share an assumption that history repeats itself. The book places the events of the past few years in broad historical context, examining how the political, military and economic arrangements of the past are reflected in current events. By tracing historical patterns in Western Europe, Russia, East Asia, Latin America and the United States, the contributors aim to ...

Winner, 2002 French Translation Prize for NonfictionMurderous Consent details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it’s classically understood. Marc Crépon insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, ...

The EU seeks to define a role for itself in power politics while remaining firm in its rejection of power politics. In order to make power compatible with the European project, EU debate has appended a number of progressive adjectives to the word "power," adjectives like "civilian" and "normative," among others. This book asks what is power, such that it can be modified, tamed, and modulated by adjectives, yet remain "powerful"?Loriaux passes EU debate on power through the mill of ...

Philosophy is to question everything. More than a lifestyle, larger than any single idea, broader than a conviction, philosophy is the love of exploration, of knowledge, of uncertainty, and of that cornerstone of free thinking: doubt. Kevin Perry's "Philosophy" takes the reader on a grand tour of life's biggest questions, examining all that the world's greatest philosophers have said about life and death, love and loss, language, art and God, to name a few.Philosophy is a great com...

Existentialism was one of the leading philosophical movements of the twentieth century. Focusing on its seven leading figures, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Camus, this Very Short Introduction provides a clear account of the key themes of the movement which emphasized individuality, free will, and personal responsibility in the modern world. Drawing in the movement's varied relationships with the arts, humanism, and politics, this book c...

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition.In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock t...

These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky—as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his tho...

Encyclopedia of PhilosophyTABLE OF CONTENTS: I. Introduction II. Branches of Philosophy III. Schools of Thoughts IV. Political Philosophy V. Ancient Philosophy VI. Medieval Philosophy VII. Modern Philosophy List of Philosophers Glossary I. IntroductionIntroduction: Western philosophy Philosophical doctrines Ethics and political philosophy in the West Applied philosophy Eastern philosophy African philosophyEastern and Western Philosophy: Eastern WesternHistory of Western Philosophy: Ancient...

Many people regard Hegel's work as obscure and extremely difficult, yet his importance and influence are universally acknowledged. Professor Singer eliminates any excuse for remaining ignorant of the outlines of Hegel's philosophy by providing a broad discussion of his ideas and an account of his major works. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect w...

The Great Philosophers traces the biggest and most influential thoughts in philosophy's long stride through history, beginning with the Ancient Greeks and Early Romans, the first philosophical thinkers in the West, to whom much is owed.How their concerns became the concerns of those who followed is clearly laid out, as is the way their answers shaped what we now recognize as philosophy. The medieval philosophers are also represented, combining their religi...

From the distinguished polymath George Steiner comes a profound and illuminating vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living language.With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustrat...