september 2010
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...