Times of Crisis: What the Financial Crisis Revealed and How to Reinvent Our Lives and Future by Michel Serres

$8.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: very good

For Michel Serres, economic crises are earthquakes caused by societal tectonic plates. The current crisis erupted because of the widening discrepancy between major social changes and institutions that have remained the same since WWII. Serres, one of the first to bring nature into the political, writes, "To destroy, kill, exploit is worthless. In the long run, it means destroying ourselves." At a time when the world population has grown so much that it is exhausting natural resources and the environment, we need to rethink cultural, social, and political dynamics. Serres argues that geopolitics and economics will no longer be a two-player game, between West and East, for example, but a three-player one, in which is Earth will be the third partner. This book is one of hope as it calls for a new world and extols the importance of science for our future and political institutions. Here, Serres demonstrates an optimistic outlook in a clear and luminous language that offers new paths for reflection and, ultimately, a better life for Earth and its inhabitants. ...Show more

The Judgement of Paris by Kevin D. S. Murray (ed.)

$10.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: very good

French Philosophers in Conversation by Raoul Mortley

$12.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: very good

A collection of interviews with such French philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas. Each thinker represents one or more strand of the Parisien philosophical scene and feminism, literature, phenomenology and semiotics are subjects covered within this book.

The Myth of the Other - Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Bataille by Franco Rella; Nelson Moe (Translator, Foreword by)

$12.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Series: PostModernPositions Ser. | Reading Level: very good

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

$8.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: very good

'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign'. To this 'one very simple principle' the whole of Mill's essay "On Liberty" is dedicated. While many of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, from Adam Smith to Godwin and Thoreau, had celebrated liberty, it was Mill who or ganized the idea into a philosophy, and put it into the form in which it is generally known today. The editor of this essay, Gertrude Himmelfarb records responses to Mill's books and comments on his fear of 'the tyranny of the majority'. Dr. Himmelfarb concludes that the same inconsistencies which underlie "On Liberty" continue to complicate the moral and political stance of liberals today. ...Show more

Thumbelina - The Culture and Technology of Millennials by Michel Serres; Daniel W. Smith (Translator)

$10.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: near fine

The title of this timely and thought-provoking book, a French bestseller, refers to schoolgirls sending text messages to their friends on their smart phones. Michel Serres, one of France's most important living intellectuals, uses this image to get at something far broader: that humans are formed and sh aped by technologies, and that with the advent of computers, smart phones, and the Internet, a new human is being born. These new humans beings are our children--thumbelina (petite poucette) and tom thumb (petit poucet)--but technologies have been changing so fast that parents scarcely know their children. Serres documents this cultural revolution, arguing that there have been several similar revolutions in the past: from oral cultures to cultures focused on reading and writing; the advent of the printing press; and now the complex changes brought about by the new information technologies--changes that are taking place at an accelerated pace and that affect us all. ...Show more

Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman

$16.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: good

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisiti on to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it. Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. ...Show more

Thinker on Stage - Nietzsche's Materialism by Peter Sloterdijk

$14.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Series: Theory and History of Literature Volume 56 | Reading Level: very good

Thinker on Stage is Peter Sloterdijk's audacious, empathetic reading of Friedrich Nietzche's first published work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Intended originally as a postscript to a new edition of Nietzsche's book, Sloterdijk's text grew and became a book in its own right. Sloterd ijk characterizes Nietzsche as a centaur-a philologist/musician, a philosopher/poet; the possessor of multiple talents inseparable from one another-who, in consequence, led the life of an obscure outsider on the fringes of organized cultural life. To Sloterdijk, Nietzsche is not a hairsplitting philologist behind a lecturn but rather a thinker on stage, enacting a psychodrama on the origins of tragedy in universal human suffering. Reaching beyond philology, and risking his career, Nietzsche used this stage to present a glimpse of Greek antiquity quite unlike that cherished in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. Sloterdijk, in turn, uses his subtle reading of Nietzsche to make his own cultural evaluations. Above all, he finds in The Birth of Tragedy, and in Nietzsche's life, a refutation of the will to power, and a sign that Nietzsche-fragile, wounded, endangered, yet self-affirming-is our contemporary. Book jacket. ...Show more

After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism by Andreas Huyssen

$15.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Series: Language, Discourse, Society Ser. | Reading Level: good-very good

Today's challenge to the divide between mass culture and modernism goes by the name of the postmodern. Huyssen argues that postmodernism itself cannot be regarded as a radical break with the past, as its artistic and political strategies are indebted to that other trend within the culture of modernity - the historical avant garde. ...Show more

Philosophy & Architecture - Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts by Nicola Kearton (Editor)

$15.00 NZD

Category: Architecture | Reading Level: very good

Heidegger and the Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates by Thomas Cathcart; Daniel Klein

$10.00 NZD

Category: Humour | Reading Level: very good

Featuring Freud! Groucho Marx! Socrates! Lily Tomlin! Kierkegaard! Buddha! New Yorker cartoonists! Zombies! And of course, Heidegger! Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein first made a name for themselves with the outrageously funny New York Times bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. Now they tur n their attention to the Big D and share the timeless wisdom of the great philosophers, theologians, psychotherapists and wiseguys. From angels to zombies and everything in between, Cathcart and Klein offer a fearless and irreverent history of how we approach death, why we embrace life, and whether there really is a hereafter. As hilarious as it is enlightening, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates is a must-read for anyone and everyone who ever expects to die. ...Show more

Understanding the Political Philosophers from Ancient to Modern Times by Alan Haworth

$16.00 NZD

Category: Philosophy | Reading Level: very good