Philosophy

"A fascinating short book" on the perils of 21st-century capitalism and its near-complete takeover of our everyday lives (New York Times Magazine)

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.

Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

For over 2000 years, philosophy has been our best guide to the experience of being human, and the true nature of reality.

From Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, Confucius, Cicero and Heraclitus in ancient times to 17th century rationalists Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, from 20th-century greats Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Baudrillard and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary thinkers Michael Sandel, Peter Singer and Slavoj Zizek, 50 Philosophy Classics explores key writings that have shaped the discipline and had an impact on the real world.

This is the thinking person's guide to a uniquely powerful tool for opening our minds and helping us view the world. It synthesises the 50 greatest books ever written, distilling hundreds of ideas from across the centuries with insightful commentary, key quotes and biographical information on the authors.

The revised edition will:
- include 7 new contemporary or timely classics such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit, Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox and Mary Midgely's Myths We Live By.
- include a reader code to access a free pack of downloadable bonus material
- have a revised introduction to reflect on the current relevance of philosophy today with topical themes to have emerged in the 9 years since the last edition was written.
- have some of the less relevant titles removed

"50 Philosophy Classics is an impressively wide-ranging compendium of nutshell clarity. It strikes just the right balance between contextual analysis, and breezy illustrative anecdote."
Dr Phil Oliver, Department of Philosophy, Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Nicholas Rescher presents the first comprehensive chronology of philosophical anecdotes, spanning from antiquity to the current era. He introduces us to the major thinkers, texts, and historical periods of Western philosophy, recounting many of the stories philosophers have used over time to engage with issues of philosophical concern: questions of meaning, truth, knowledge, value, action, and ethics. Rescher's anecdotes touch on a wide range of themes--from logic to epistemology, ethics to metaphysics--and offer much insight into the breadth and depth of philosophical inquiry. This book illustrates the various ways philosophers throughout history have viewed the issues in their field, and how anecdotes can work to inform and encourage philosophical thought.

A contemporary philosophical masterwork from "one of the world's best-known public intellectuals " (New York Review of Books)

Philosophical materialism in all its forms - from scientific naturalism to Deleuzian New Materialism - has failed to meet the key theoretical and political challenges of the modern world. This is the burden of philosopher Slavoj Zizek's argument in this pathbreaking and eclectic new work. Recent history has seen developments such as quantum physics and Freudian psychoanalysis, not to speak of the failure of twentieth-century communism, shake our understanding of existence.

In the process, the dominant tradition in Western philosophy lost its moorings. To bring materialism up to date, Zizek - himself a committed materialist and communist - proposes a radical revision of our intellectual heritage. He argues that dialectical materialism is the only true philosophical inheritor of what Hegel designated the "speculative" approach in thought.

Absolute Recoil is a startling reformulation of the basis and possibilities of contemporary philosophy. While focusing on how to overcome the transcendental approach without regressing to naïve, pre-Kantian realism, Zizek offers a series of excursions into today's political, artistic, and ideological landscape, from Arnold Schoenberg's music to the films of Ernst Lubitsch.

A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conceptual history of the changing meanings and metaphors of "action" and "reaction"

What is meant by reactionary politics? What do biologists mean when they speak of the interaction between life and its surroundings? Why was the term "abreaction" invented and later abandoned by the first generation of psychoanalysts? These are but a few of the questions the internationally renowned scholar Jean Starobinski answers in his latest work on the conceptual history of the words "action" and "reaction."

Not just a history of ideas, Action and Reaction is also a semantic and philological history, a literary history, a history of medicine, and a history of the biological sciences. Concentrating especially on the moment when scientific language and ordinary language diverge, the author offers a genealogy of the human and natural sciences through their usage of the metaphors action and reaction.

Newton's theorem "to every action an equal action is always opposed," stands as a point of departure for Starobinski's exploration of the lexical and metaphorical traces this proposition left in its wake. With stunning clarity, the author analyzes the scientific, literary, and political effects of the terms action / reaction in describing and explaining the material universe, the living body, the events of history, and psychological behavior.

Ultimately, the book explores the power and danger of metaphorical language and questions the convergence and collapse of scientific and moral explanations of the universe.

A new interview with the philosopher of speed, addressing the ways in which technology is utilized in synchronizing mass emotions.

We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism, lightning pandemics, "professional" suicides.... Fear has become the world we live in.

The administration of fear also means that states are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear. Globalization has progressively eaten away at the traditional prerogatives of states (most notably of the welfare state), and states have to convince citizens that they can ensure their physical safety.

In this new and lengthy interview, Paul Virilio shows us how the "propaganda of progress," the illuminism of new technologies, provide unexpected vectors for fear in the way that they manufacture frenzy and stupor. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence that capitalism has accelerated into turbo-capitalism, and is accelerating still. With every natural disaster, health scare, and malicious rumor now comes the inevitable "information bomb"--live feeds take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of terror, the ultimate expression of speed. With the nuclear dissuasion of the Cold War behind us, we are faced with a new form of civil dissuasion: a state of fear that allows for the suspension of controversial social situations.

Aesthetic Noise: The Philosophy of Intentional Listening considers the complex nature of noise within the framework of philosophical filtering, examining how, if noise is engaged with aesthetically, it can produce profound experiences and understandings.

Since first published in 2002, After Capitalism has offered students and political activists alike a coherent vision of a viable and desirable alternative to capitalism. David Schweickart calls this system Economic Democracy, a successor-system to capitalism which preserves the efficiency strengths of a market economy while extending democracy to the workplace and to the structures of investment finance. In the second edition, Schweickart recognizes that increased globalization of companies has created greater than ever interdependent economies and the debate about the desirability of entrepreneurship is escalating. The new edition includes a new preface, completely updated data, reorganized chapters, and new sections on the economic instability of capitalism, the current economic crisis, and China. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, Schweickart shows how and why this model is efficient, dynamic, and applicable in the world today.