This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experi...

In Reading Sartre’s Second Ethics, Elizabeth A. Bowman and Robert V. Stone provide a comprehensive, reconstructive, and critical interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. The key Sartrean texts are two posthumously published lectures, one delivered at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964, the other scheduled to be delivered at Cornell University in 1965 but cancelled by Sartre in protest of U.S. foreign policy. Though different in content, method, and intend...

Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as a teacher, mentor, and scholar without peer. The author of seven books and more than two hundred book chapters, articles, and reviews, he is a world-renowned expert on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and a leader in the international community of philosophers. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers stude...

Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene brings together scholars from the Sartre studies community to think through the planetary ecological crisis. Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria, the collection explores ways in which Sartre’s existential thought can be read socio-ecologically, illuminating the tightly imbricated earthly and worldly crises of our post-Holocene epoch. Contributors variously discuss phenomenology, ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Earthl...

How to Hold a Cockroach is about discovering and freeing ourselves from the beliefs that cause us to suffer. With a message both surprising and simple, it is a love letter to humankind, a book for those who are free and don't know it.An Inspirational Tale with 42 Beautiful IllustrationsIn this story for all ages, a struggling boy begins a life-changing journey when a disgusting guest disturbs his dinner. Continuing to encounter sources of suffering, the boy must ...

An illustrated tale for all ages on how to free ourselves from our inherited beliefsA suffering boy begins a life-changing journey when a menacing cockroach disturbs his dinner and scares him. But why is he so afraid of the cockroach? What does he actually know about it? Maybe cockroaches aren’t all that different from me… he thinks to himself.As he continues to encounter apparent sources of suffering throughout his day, his curiosity and realizati...

A house is more than just a place to lay your head at night.Sometimes, the walls remember.Gathering ten modern masters of the strange and unsettling, Unquiet Guests sets fire to the blueprints and reimagines the haunted house from the foundations up.From dreamlike visions of an abandoned future mansion to a sentient building grown tired of its owners, these rooms echo with whispers of the disenfranchised and the lost.

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Slavoj Žižek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in our world.Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his unique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; in daring terms, he re...

Critical Theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose-and, if at all possible, cure-the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical...

Ideology is one of the most controversial terms in the political vocabulary, exciting both revulsion and inspiration. This book examines the reasons for those views, and explains why ideologies deserve respect as a major form of political thinking. It investigates the centrality of ideology both as a political phenomenon and as an organizing framework of political thought and action. It explores the changing understandings of ideology as a concept, and the arguments of the main ideologies....

Billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilisation. So why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressing world poverty and environmental crisis? In this take-no-prisoners analysis, Slavoj Zizek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century. What he finds is the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the right hook o...

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does-or should-religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception...