2010
Hinduism: A Graphic Guide
Hinduism is the world's oldest religion, yet the word 'Hindu' was never used before the 18th-century by Hindus to describe themselves. It is defined as polytheistic, but Gandhi declared that a Hindu needn’t believe in any god. It is a religion as much of myth as of history – it has no founder, no single authoritative book, even few central doctrines.
Introducing Hinduism offers a guide to the key philosophical, literary, mythological and cultural traditions of this extraordinarily diverse faith, giving equal consideration to texts and everyday practices. It untangles the complexities of Hinduism's gods and goddesses,...
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
Is biology destiny?
Why is the personal political?
Is pornography anti-feminist?
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.
Cathia Jenainati and Judy Groves highlight the key social, political and literary ideas which have shaped our thinking about the status of women across the globe, and tell the story of remarkable individuals who actively challenged and changed traditions, social customs and laws.
Surveying the major developments that have affected...
Anthropology: A Graphic Guide
Anthropology originated as the study of ‘primitive’ cultures – a now very loaded term. With the fall of Empire, anthropology became suspect and was torn by dissent from within. Did anthropology serve as a ‘handmaiden to colonialism’? Is it a ‘science’ created by racism to prove racism? Can it aid communication between cultures, or does it reinforce our differences?
Introducing Anthropology is a fascinating account of an uncertain human science seeking to transcend its unsavoury history.
Merryl Wyn Davis and Piero trace the...
Cultural Studies: A Graphic Guide
Cultural studies is a discipline that claims not to be a discipline – a radical critical approach for understanding racial, national, social and gender identities.
Introducing Cultural Studies provides an incisive tour through the minefield of this complex subject, charting its origins in Britain and its migration to the USA, Canada, France, Australia and South Asia, examining the ideas of its leading exponents and providing a flavour of its use around the world. Covering the ground from Gramsci to Raymond Williams, postcolonial discourse to the politics of diaspora, feminism to queer theory, technoculture and the media to...
Evolution: A Graphic Guide
Did life first evolve on other planets? What's the advantage of having sex? Why do your parents look after you? And what good to a bird is half a wing?
In 1859, Charles Darwin shocked the world with a radical theory – evolution by natural selection. More than one hundred and fifty years later, his theory still challenges some of our most precious beliefs.
Introducing Evolution provides a step-by-step guide to 'Darwin's dangerous idea' and takes a fresh look at the often misunderstood concepts of natural selection and the selfish gene. Drawing on the latest findings from genetics, ecology and animal behaviour...
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 out its...
Lacan: A Graphic Guide
‘Excellent clarity’ New Scientist
‘A splendid job’ New Statesman
Jacques Lacan is now regarded as one of the major psychoanalytical theorists, although fierce arguments still rage over the complexity of his ideas.
A leading Lacanian analyst and author, Darian Leader guides the reader through Lacan's early studies of paranoia to his subsequent analytical innovations – his addition of structural linguistics to Freudianism and his new ideas on the infant "mirror phase", the construction of identity and the dynamics of the psyche.
It also makes clear that, although Lacan...
Media Studies: A Graphic Guide
The media is ubiquitous. Every day we watch hours of TV, listen to the radio, surf the web, read newspapers and magazines, go to the cinema or watch DVDs. The media in these forms and more exercise enormous influence and power over all of us.
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....
Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide
What is beauty, and what is truth? And what does aesthetics have to do with either?
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the whole nature of experience itself, explored through our perceptions, feelings and emotions. The study of aesthetics, along with its widespread application in philosophical, artistic and literary circles, gained currency in the eighteenth century at the dawn of the Romantic period. What was recognised then – that to act upon our true feelings means taking a step into the unknown – is what aesthetics is centrally concerned with now.
Aesthetics today is not only a scholarly...
Aristotle: A Graphic Guide
Aristotle was known as the 'master of those who know'. A foundational thinker in every field of inquiry, he is unmatched even by his teacher Plato for his extraordinary range of mind.
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 fundamentally influence Islamic philosophy and medieval scholasticism. For fifteen centuries he remained the paradigm of knowledge itself. But what can Aristotle say about our world today?
Consciousness: A Graphic Guide
What have zombies, Chinese Rooms, ghosts in machines and Schrödinger’s cat got to do with consciousness?
Modern science may have split the atom and solved the mystery of life, but it has yet to explain the source of conscious feelings. It’s a hot subject across the academic world yet sceptics doubt whether consciousness can be tamed by conventional science, or even can be understood at all.
Introducing Consciousness provides a comprehensive guide to the current state of consciousness studies.
From the history of the philosophical relation between mind and matter, via scientific attempts to explain...
Evolutionary Psychology: A Graphic Guide
How did the mind evolve?
Why can’t children under three tell lies?
How is the mind a computer?
Pulling together insights and data from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and archeology, evolutionary psychologists are beginning to piece together the first truly scientific account of human nature.
How has the human mind evolved from that of our ancestors? 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? Evolutionary psychology offers a new way to answer these –...
Semiotics: A Graphic Guide
An animal’s cry, poetry, medical symptoms, media messages, language disorders, architecture, marketing, body language – all are signs, and their study is what semiotics is all about.
Introducing Semiotics outlines the development of sign study from its precursors in the ancient world, via classical scholars like St Augustine and William of Ockham to to Charles Sanders Peirce – whose writings laid the foundations of 21st century semiotics – and beyond to semioticians such as Jakobson, Sebeok and Umberto Eco.
Paul Cobley’s incisive text and Litza Jansz’s brilliant illustrations identify...
The Enlightenment: A Graphic Guide
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was a crucial epoch, a sea-change in human history.
It was also a vast moral, scientific and political movement, the work of intellectuals across Europe and the New World who linked up in networks of friendship, projects and debates, beginning to free themselves from the authority of the church and find their vocation to change the world.
Exploring the work of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau in particular, but also that of Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Immanuel Kant, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Introducing The Enlightenment is a vibrant and accessible introduction to the men...
Descartes: A Graphic Guide
René Descartes is famous as the philosopher who was prepared to doubt everything – even his own physical existence. Most people also know that he said ‘I think, therefore I am’, even if they are not always sure what he really meant by it.
Introducing Descartes explains what Descartes doubted, and why he is usually called the father of modern philosophy. It is a clear and accessible guide to all the puzzling questions he asked about human beings and their place in the world. Dave Robinson and Chris Garratt give a lucid account of Descartes’ contributions to modern science, mathematics and the...
Newton: A Graphic Guide
The rainbow, the moon, a spinning top, a comet, the ebb and flood of the oceans … a falling apple.
There is only one universe and it fell to Isaac Newton to discover its secrets.
Newton was arguably the greatest scientific genius of all time, and yet he remains a mysterious figure.
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, and...
Plato: A Graphic Guide
Plato is the most widely studied, and probably the greatest, philosopher of all time.
He asked his contemporary Athenians all the questions that we now call ‘philosophical’, and then recorded their ideas in the form of lively dramatic debates.
Plato also had his own views about the nature of knowledge and reality, politics, ethics, mathematics, economics, the size of the ideal city, and much else besides.
How did philosophers like Socrates and Pythagoras influence Plato? What is his puzzling theory of knowledge all about, and how did it direct his provocative views on politics, ethics and individual...
Romanticism: A Graphic Guide
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?
How was it that Romanticism could give birth to passionate individualism and chauvinistic nationalism at the same time? How does it prefigure the totalitarian...