In this brief account of Wittgenstein I aim to do two things. The first is to make clear, for a non-specialist readership, the main outline of Wittgen ...
Tragedy is a precious word. We use it to confer dignity and value on violence, catastrophe, agony, and bereavement. ‘Tragedy’ claims that this death i ...
This book aims to give a sympathetic but critical account of Schopenhauer's philosophy. He constructed a system which embraces metaphysics, epistemolo ...
Russell lived long and did much. He is one of the relatively small number of philosophers whose names are popularly known, and who in their life and w ...
Together with Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Kant among his contemporaries, Rousseau has exerted the most profound influence on modern European intelle ...
Carl Andre’s rectangular pile of bricks, Equivalent VIII (1966), annoyed lots of people when shown at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1976. It is a typic ...
The Theaetetus is one of Plato's most appealing dialogues, but also one of his most puzzling. In it, Socrates says that he is a midwife like his mothe ...
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-19 00) was a German philosopher, almost wholly neglected during his sane life, which came to an abrupt end early in 1889. 'N ...
In Victorian Britain, every schoolboy knew that Sir Isaac Newton was an unrivalled mathematical and scientific genius, and most would have been able t ...
His given Xhosa name Rolihlahla signifi ed he could be a troublemaker. His clan honorifi c Madiba associated him with his aristocratic Thembu lineage. ...
When Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture Monument (Plate I) was installed on the empty fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square on 4 June 2001, the respons ...
There are many books on Marx, but a good brief introduction to his thought is still hard to find. Marx wrote at such enormous length, on so many diffe ...
Hailed by the early 20th-century French poet Guillaume Apollinaire as ‘the freest spirit who ever lived’, but demonized throughout the last two hundre ...
Many introductions to literary theory describe a series of ‘schools’ of criticism. Theory is treated as a series of competing ‘approaches’, each with ...
No man could have loved fame more than Abraham Lincoln. ‘‘Oh, how hard [it is] to die and not be able to leave the world any better for one’s little l ...
The bare facts of Franz Kafka’s life seem ordinary, even banal. He was born on 3 July 1883 in Prague, where his parents, Hermann and Julie Kafka, kept ...
He was (with the possible exception of Wittgenstein) the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He was (with the possible exception of Hegel) ...
Who is Jürgen Habermas? Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important and widely read social theorists in the post-Second World War era. His theoretica ...
Do not ask who I am . . . I give Foucault the first word: ‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same . . . Let us leave it to our burea ...
Question: How many Surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: A fish. Everybody knows something about Dada and Surrealism. Dada, born in ...
When Roland Barthes died in 1980, he was a formidable figure on the cultural and critical scene: a powerful presence, a commentator on everything unde ...
It has been a pleasure and a privilege to write this book for the (until now at least) excellent Very Short Introductions series. In keeping with the ...
Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 bc. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers: a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging ...
Buildings can be the most expensive things that civilizations produce. They can absorb any amount of effort and money if they are to compete with the ...
Much of the interest in reading texts from an earlier age lies in working out how familiar and yet how foreign their preoccupations and ways of thinki ...
