philosophy
Ethics: A Graphic Guide
Are humans really selfish and greedy, or generous and kind? Does anyone have the right to tell you what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mean? Is morality about obeying a set of rules or thinking about the consequences?
Ethics affects everyone. Moral dilemmas can be big or small, from whether to keep pets pr recycle assiduously to how to use your vote, or whether it’s right to assist someone who wants to die. We all have our own ideas about what is right and what is wrong, but is this something we can know rather than merely believe?
Introducing Ethics traces the arguments of great moral philosophers...
Foucault: A Graphic Guide
The work of Michel Foucault – philosopher, historian, political activist, gay icon – was described at his death as 'the most important event of thought in our century'.
The author of classics such as The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish developed concepts of power, authorship, transgression and sex which have transformed how we think about the links between individuals and society. He overturned our assumptions about the experience and perception of madness, sexuality and criminality, and the often brutal social practices of confinement, confession and discipline.
Chris Horrocks and Zoran...
Jung: A Graphic Guide
Carl Gustav Jung was the enigmatic and controversial disciple of Sigmund Freud, who supplemented Freud’s work with crucial questions about religion and the soul. Jung, with his new-age following, is often perceived today as a quasi-religious sage, but Introducing Jung explores how this overlooks the fact that he was a scientist and a scholar.
Introducing Jung brilliantly explains why Jung broke away from Freud and describes his own near-psychotic breakdown in mid-life, from which he emerged with radical new insights into the nature of the unconscious mind. The book demonstrates how Jung explored the psychology of religion,...
Logic: A Graphic Guide
The next sentence is false.
The last sentence is true.
Where’s the logic in that?
Logic is the backbone of Western civilization, holding together our systems of philosophy, science and law. And logic is all around us in our everyday lives, from the languages we speak to the most fundamental workings of our mobile phones. It can even tell us about how a soap opera is constructed.
Introducing Logic is a cleverly illustrated graphic guide to this fascinating area, which cuts across philosophy, science and much more. From ‘fuzzy’ logic to the liar paradox, the book features ideas...
Nietzsche: A Graphic Guide
Is God dead?
Is morality just a ‘useful mistake’?
Can science explain anything?
Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his sanity hugging an old horse being whipped by its owner in 1899, is without question one of the most important, influential and yet supremely enigmatic, controversial thinkers of the past 150 years. His work is notoriously difficult, often contradictory and opaque. He was appropriated by the Nazis and yet clearly anticipated existentialism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and postmodernism. He was master of the philosophical soundbite, the aphorism, and his proclamations, from ‘God is...
Philosophy: A Graphic Guide
Philosophers have always enjoyed asking awkward and provocative questions. Some of these include: What is the nature of reality? What are human beings really like? What is special about the human mind and consciousness? Are we free to choose who we are and what we do? Can we prove that God exists? Can we be certain about anything at all? What is truth? Does language provide us with a true picture of the world? How should we behave towards each other? Do computers think?
Written by Dave Robinson and illustrated by Judy Groves, Introducing Philosophy is a comprehensive and enjoyable graphic guide to philosophical thinking.
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Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide
Ludwig Wittgenstein has somehow captured the popular imagination as the modern Socrates, the master of enigmatic logic, the fascinating and attractive icon of modernism. But what did Wittgenstein really say?
In Introducing Wittgenstein we meet a strange man, the rigorous logician who prized poetry above philosophy, who inherited an immense fortune and gave it all away, who sought death in the trenches of World War One, a great teacher who advised his students to give up philosophy, a tormented soul who thrived on jokes and crime fiction and a solitary who inspired lifelong friendships. We are also given a clear and accessible...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...