2010
Hinduism: A Graphic Guide
Hinduism is said to be the world's oldest religion. Yet the word 'Hindu' is of foreign 18th-century origin. Hinduism is defined as a polytheistic religion, but Mahatma Gandhi famously declared that one can be a Hindu without believing in any god.
Hinduism appears to accommodate endless contradictions. It is a religion at least as much of myth as of history - it has no historical founder, no single authoritative book, and few central doctrines.
Introducing Hinduism offers a guide to the key philosophical, literary, mythological and cultural traditions of this extraordinarily diverse faith. It untangles the complexities of...
Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide
Shakespeare’s absolute pre-eminence is simply unparalleled. His plays pack theatres and provide Hollywood with blockbuster scripts; his works inspire mountains of scholarship and criticism every year. He has given us many of the very words we speak, and even the thoughts we think.
Nick Groom and Piero explore how Shakespeare became so famous and influential, and why he is still widely considered the greatest writer ever. They investigate how the Bard has been worshipped at different times and in different places, used and abused to cultural and political ends, and the roots of the intense controversies which have...
Modernism: A Graphic Guide
Modernism is usually thought of as a shock wave of innovations hitting art, architecture, music, cinema and literature – the work of Picasso, Joyce, Schoenberg, movements like Futurism and Dada, the architecture of Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and the avant-garde theatre of Bertolt Brecht or Samuel Beckett.
But what really defines modernism? Why did it begin and how long did it last? Is Modernism over now?
This graphic tour through 20th-century culture interprets modernism as a set of responses to the phenomenon of modernity itself – the political and social upheavals presented by...
Darwin: A Graphic Guide
‘Miller and Van Loon have brought to life an important chapter of scientific history … a real achievement.’ New Scientist
Progress in genetics today would not have been possible without Darwin’s revolution, but the mysterious man who laid the rational basis for undermining belief in God’s creation was remarkably timid. He spent most of his life in seclusion, a semi-invalid, riddled with doubts, fearing the controversy his theories might unleash.
In this brilliantly lucid book – a classic originally published in 1982 – Jonathan Miller unravels Darwin’s life and his...
Time: A Graphic Guide
What is time? The 5th-century philosopher St Augustine famously said that he knew what time was, so long as no one asked him.
Introducing Time tackles this question and dares to go where Augustine would not. It traces the history of time from Augustine's suggestion that there is no time, to the flowing time of Newton, the conventional time of Poincaré, the static time of Einstein, and then back, full circle, to the idea that there is no time in quantum gravity.
Along the way, many puzzling questions are raised. For instance, is time a fourth dimension similar to space or does it 'flow' in some sense? And if it...
Feminism: A Graphic Guide
The term 'feminism' came into English usage around the 1890s, but women's conscious struggle to resist discrimination and sexist oppression goes much further back. This completely new and updated edition of Introducing Feminism surveys the major developments that have affected women's lives from the 17th century to the present day.
By highlighting the key social, political and literary ideas which have determined our thinking about the status of women across the globe, this book tells the story of remarkable individuals who actively challenged and changed traditions, social customs and laws.
Introducing Feminism is an...
Anthropology: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Anthropology is a fascinating account of an uncertain human science seeking to transcend its unsavoury history. It traces the evolution of anthropology from its genesis in Ancient Greece to its varied forms in contemporary times. Anthropology's key concepts and methods are explained, and we are presented with such big-name anthropologists as Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide
Covering the ground from Gramsci to Raymond Williams, postcolonial discourse to the politics of diaspora, feminism to queer theory, technoculture and the media to globalization, Introducing Cultural Studies serves as an insightful guide to the essential concepts of this fascinating area of study.
Evolution: A Graphic Guide
In 1859, Charles Darwin shocked the world with a radical theory – evolution by natural selection. One hundred and fifty years later, his theory still challenges some of our most precious beliefs.
From the death of the dinosaurs to the development of digital organisms, Introducing Evolution brings Darwin up-to-date with the latest scientific discoveries. This is the ideal guide to the most important idea ever to appear in the history of science.
Heidegger: A Graphic Guide
‘Jeff Collins has done an admirable job of explicating this profound thinker.’ John Banville, Irish Times
Martin Heidegger - philosophy’s ‘hidden king’, or leading exponent of a dangerously misguided secular mysticism?
Heidegger announced the end of philosophy and of humanism, and was a committed Nazi and vocal supporter of Hitler’s National Socialism. Was Heidegger offering a deeply conservative mythology or a crucial deconstruction of philosophy as we have known it?
Introducing Heidegger provides an accessible introduction to his notoriously abstruse thinking, mapping...
Lacan: A Graphic Guide
‘Excellent clarity’ New Scientist
‘A splendid job’ New Statesman
Written by a leading Lacanian analyst, Introducing Lacan guides the reader through his innovations, including his work on paranoia, his addition of structural linguistics to Freudianism and his ideas on the infant ‘mirror phase’. It also traces Lacan’s influence in postmodern critical thinking on art, literature, philosophy and feminism.
Media Studies: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Media Studies explores the complex relationship between the media, ideology, knowledge and power. It provides a scintillating tour of media history and presents a coherent view of the media industry, media theory and methods in media research. It explains how 'the audience' is constructed and how it in turn interprets the content and meaning of media representation. We also learn how to analyse film, deconstruct advertising and appreciate how TV and the press shape public opinion.
Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide
What is beauty, and what is truth? These are some of the questions which aesthetics tries to answer. In our everyday life, we talk about the ‘aesthetics’ of an artwork or a piece of design. But aesthetics goes beyond the simple experience of art. It is also a branch of philosophy concerned with the whole nature of experience itself, explored through our perceptions, feelings and emotions
Aristotle: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Aristotle guides the reader through an explosion of theories, from the establishment of systematic logic to the earliest rules of science. Aristotle's authority extended beyond his own lifetime to influence fundamentally Islamic philosophy and medieval scholasticism. For fifteen centuries he remained the paradigm of knowledge itself. But can Aristotelian realism still be used to underpin our conception of the world today?
Consciousness: A Graphic Guide
‘An excellent book’ Ted Honderich
Introducing Consciousness provides a comprehensive guide to the current state of consciousness studies. It starts with the history of the philosophical relation between mind and matter, and proceeds to scientific attempts to explain consciousness in terms of neural mechanisms, cerebral computation and quantum mechanics. Along the way, readers will be introduced to zombies and Chinese Rooms, ghosts in machines and Schrödinger’s cat.
Evolutionary Psychology: A Graphic Guide
How did the mind evolve? How does the human mind differ from the minds of our ancestors, and from the minds of our nearest relatives, the apes? What are the universal features of the human mind, and why are they designed the way they are? If our minds are built by selfish genes, why are we so cooperative? Can the differences between male and female psychology be explained in evolutionary terms? These questions are at the centre of a rapidly growing research programme called evolutionary psychology.
Semiotics: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Semiotics outlines the development of sign study from its classical precursors to contemporary post-structuralism. Through Paul Cobley’s incisive text and Litza Jansz’s brilliant illustrations, it identifies the key semioticians and their work and explains the simple concepts behind difficult terms. For anybody who wishes to know why signs are crucial to human existence and how we can begin to study systems of signification, this book is the place to start.
The Enlightenment: A Graphic Guide
Introducing The Enlightenment is the essential guide to the giants of the Enlightenment - Voltaire, Diderot, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Immanuel Kant, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was a crucial time in human history - a vast moral, scientific and political movement, the work of intellectuals across Europe and the New World, who began to free themselves from despotism, bigotry and superstition and tried to change the world.
Introducing The Enlightenment is a clear and accessible introduction to the leading thinkers of the age, the men and women who believed that...
Descartes: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Descartes explains why he is usually called the father of modern philosophy. It is a clear and accessible guide to all the puzzling questions that Descartes asked about human beings and their place in the world. It gives a lucid account of Descartes’ contributions to modern science, mathematics and the Philosophy of Mind, and also reveals why Descartes liked to do all of his serious thinking in bed.
Newton: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Newton explains the extraordinary ideas of a man who sifted through the accumulated knowledge of centuries, tossed out mistaken beliefs, and single-handedly made enormous advances in mathematics, mechanics and optics. By the age of 25, entirely self-taught, he had sketched out a system of the world. Einstein’s theories are unthinkable without Newton’s founding system. He was also a secret heretic, a mystic and an alchemist, the man of whom Edmond Halley said, ‘Nearer to the gods may no man approach!’
Plato: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Plato begins by explaining how philosophers like Socrates and Pythagoras influenced Plato’s thought. It provides a clear account of Plato’s puzzling theory of knowledge, and explains how this theory then directed his provocative views on politics, ethics and individual liberty. It offers detailed critical commentaries on all of the key doctrines of Platonism, especially the very odd theory of Forms, and concludes by revealing how Plato’s philosophy stimulated the work of important modern thinkers such as Karl Popper, Martha Nussbaum and Jacques Derrida.
Romanticism: A Graphic Guide
Romanticism is crucial to an understanding of modern Western culture. Philosophy, art, literature, music and politics were all transformed in the turbulent period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848. This was the age of the ‘Romantic revolution’, when modern attitudes to political and artistic freedom were born. When we think of Romanticism, flamboyant figures such as Byron or Shelley instantly spring to mind, but what about Napoleon or Hegel, Turner or Blake, Wagner or Marx, who also emerged from this great period of turmoil and change?