In the final stages of his career, Roland Barthes abandoned his long-standing suspicion of photographic representation to write Camera Lucida, at once an elegy to his dead mother and a treatise on photography. In Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, Jean-Michel Rabaté and nineteen contributors examine the import of Barthes's shifting positions on photography and visual representation and th…
A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were—and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmar…
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher and one of the most original European thinkers of the twentieth century. As a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, he had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. He was Hannah Arendt’s supervisor before her emigration to the United States in the 1930s and himself experienced the consequences…
Peter Winch's translation of Wittgenstein's remarks on culture and value presents all entries chronologically, with the German text alongside the English and a subject index for reference. "It was Wittgenstein's habit to record his thoughts in sequences of more or less closely related 'remarks' which he kept in notebooks throughout his life. The editor of this collection has gone through the…
In Post-Democracy (Polity, 2004) Colin Crouch argued that behind the façade of strong institutions, democracy in many advanced societies was being hollowed out, its big events becoming empty rituals as power passed increasingly to circles of wealthy business elites and an ever-more isolated political class. Crouch’s provocative argument has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, b…
"It is no surprise that William James's philosophy continues to draw creative and critical interpretations. Ellen Kappy Suckiel's is another such reading, but one that is neither narrowly analytic nor obtusely continental in its philosophical approach. It is fair-minded, well-documented, and sprinkled with important insights and connections to other current philosophical approaches to religion."