Love – unconditional, selfless, unchanging, sincere, and totally accepting – is worshipped today as the West's only universal religion. To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos. In this pathbreaking and superbly written book, philosopher Si...

Who ought to govern? Why should I obey the law? How should conflict be controlled? What is the proper education for a citizen and a statesman? These questions probe some of the deepest and most enduring problems that every society confronts, regardle...

In this brilliant companion volume to her highly praised Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance, Aileen M. Kelly closely examines a humanist strand of Russian thought that has until now received little notice or understan...

Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them...

It is hard to imagine a book, essay or pamphlet outside of the Bible that has been more influential, and widely read, than Marx and Engels' "Communist Manifesto". Written in 1848, this small book has become one of the world's most influential politic...

There is one thing we can be sure of: we are all going to die. But once we accept that fact, the questions begin. In this thought-provoking book, philosophy professor Shelly Kagan examines the myriad questions that arise when we confront the meaning...

<p>In the first book to argue for the benefits of boredom, Peter Toohey dispels the myth that it's simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise like Jean-Paul Sartre's nausea. He shows how boredom is, in fact, one of our most common an...

Eugen Fink was Edmund Husserl's research assistant during the last decade of the renowned phenomenologist's life, a period in which Husserl's philosophical ideas were radically recast. In this landmark book, Ronald Bruzina shows that Fink was actuall...

Thorstein Veblen is best known for his authorship of "The Theory of the Leisure Class" and "The Theory of Business Enterprise", which made him a celebrated figure in the fields of economics and sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. In this...

What can a fingernail tell us about the mysteries of creation? In one sense, a nail is merely a hunk of mute matter, yet in another, it's an information superhighway quite literally at our fingertips. Every moment, streams of molecular signals direct...