Brief text commenting on the disciplines known as collectively as 'cultural studies' accompanies cartoon-type illustrations recounting the theories of the major figures in the field in Britain, Europe, North America, and other areas.

Brief text commenting on ethical dilemmas prevalent in today's world accompanies cartoon-type illustrations recounting philosophical arguments from ancient to postmodern philosophers.

A documentary cartoon-book introduces the life and thought of the man who revolutionized attitudes toward mental illness, religion, sex, and culture

Outlines the processes of government and politics in the United States from the Declaration of Independence to the presidential election of 2000

Product Description: Interest in ancient Eastern philosophy has grown in recent years, as dissatisfaction with materialism has turned many away from Western thoughts. This book describes the strands of Eastern thought from Confucius to Buddha, from Islam to Tao and explains how they differ from Western ideas...read more

Product Description: This text provides resources and graphic details on Aristotle for students and uninitiated lay readers. This book asks the question of how scientific is Aristotle?

Examines the theories of the prominent semiotologist and critic

Product Description: 'Introducing Barthes' elucidates Barthes' application of his ideas to literature and popular culture, and explains how he became a key figure in the structuralist movement of the 1960s.

This work traces the work of Jean Baudrillard, the postmodernist intellectual who has been hailed one of France's most powerful theorists. His style and assaults on sociology, feminism and Marxism have exposed him to accusations of promoting a dangerous new orthodoxy. The book presents his claims that reality has been replaced by a simulated world of images and events ranging from TV news to Disneyland. It provides accounts of his work on pornography, obesity and terrorism, and traces his development from critic of mass consumption to prophet of the apocalypse. It invites thoughts and discussion on whether Baudrillard is a cure for the vertigo of contemporary culture, or one of its symptoms.

This text traces the development of Albert Camus, from his impoverished background in Algeria, through his participation in the French Resistance movement during World War II, to his tragic death in a car crash in 1960. It explores the central theme of his work - the absurdity of existence in a universe without God or any ostensible purpose, and looks at his gradual estrangement from the Left-Bank intellectual milieu, thanks to his human "un-radical" views during the Algerian war for independence.

Product Description: The epoch-making theories of linguist Noam Chomsky maintain that the human brain has an innate language faculty, and that part of this biological endowment is a universal grammar, a theory of principles common to all languages. Thus, all human languages and the ways in which children learn them are remarkably similar...read more

Product Description: Christianity depends on the belief that the Jesus of hisory is identical with the Christ of faith, and that God in the person of Jesus intervened finally and decisively in human history. But is the historical Jesus the same as the Christian Saviour? And how did an obscure provincial relgiion based on the paradox of a crucified saviour conquer the Roman Empire and outlive it? "Introducing Christianity" confronts the enigmas...read more

Presents an introduction to consciousness with information on such topics as the relationship between mind and matter, neural mechanisms, and cerebral computations.

Jacques Derrida is one of the most influential figures in contemporary philosophy. Yet, Derrida has undermined the accepted rules of philosophy, rejected its methods and concepts, disrupted its boundaries and "contaminated" philosophy with other kinds of writings. Derrida's approach is an initially puzzling array of oblique, sliding and yet rigorous tactics for destabilising texts, meanings and identities. "Deconstructions" as these strategies have been called, has been reviled as a politically pernicious nihilism and celebrated as a liberatory politics of choice and difference. This work describes the key strategies of Derrida's writing, explains their controversial effects in philosophy, and shows how Derrida has put them to work in literature, art, architecture and politics. The book offers a starting point for an intellectual adventure that threatens to disturb some of the most comfortable habits of contemporary thought.

Product Description: Our knowledge comes primarily from experience. But is experience really what it seems? Is it reliable? Empiricist philosophers accept a 'commonsense' view of the phenomena we observe and yet conclude that all we can ever know are 'ideas'...read more

Product Description: Ethics has become the burning issue of current moral philosophical thought, raising the spectre of responsibility at a time when responsibility seems entirely replaced by uncertainty and relativism. What is the place of individual choice and consequence in a post-Holocaust world of continuing genocidal ethnic cleansing? Is 'identity' now a last-ditch cultural defence of ethic nationalisms and competing fundamentalisms? In a climate of instant information, free markets and possible ecological disaster, how do we define 'rights', self-interest and civic duties? What are the acceptable limits of scientific investigation and genetic engineering, the rights and wrongs of animal rights, euthanasia and civil disobedience? This book confronts these dilemmas, tracing the arguments of the great moral thinkers, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant, and brings us up to date with postmodern critics...read more

Pope Pius XII condemned Existentialism for its 'terrifying nihilism'. Anguish, despair, absurdity, nothingness...these still have a power to scandalise. Do we find in them the quintessence of Existentialism? Or has Existentialism's truth been eclipsed by its popular appeal? Richard Appignanesi begins with Camus and suicide: 'Must life have a meaning to be lived?' Is absurdity at the heart of Existentialism? Or is there a question as yet unexplored in Sartre - Existentialism, 'the least scandalous, most technically austere' of all teachings? The answer is found in Husserl's phenomenology, from which Heidegger, Sartre and others depart. We encounter Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, and always in the background a history of dark times - our legacy of Nazism and the Cold War - overcasting the search. This is a book of undergoing Existentialism. Can it have meaning in our age of postmodern crisis?