World History Philosophy

Lost princesses, a queen who dethroned her own husband, the country that defeated Napoleon, and a dog who went to space—these are just a few of the fascinating aspects of Russian history.

The Second World War was one of the most traumatic events in human history. Across the world, existing conflicts became connected, entangling nations in a vast web of violence. It was fought on land, sea, and air, touching every inhabited continent. Over 55 million people died, some of them combatants, some civilians caught up in the violence, and some murdered by their own governments.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. These Christian intellectuals - Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others - sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.

Many contemporary political thinkers are gripped by the belief that their task is to develop an ideal theory of rights or justice for guiding and judging political actions. But in Philosophy and Real Politics, Raymond Geuss argues that philosophers should first try to understand why real political actors behave as they actually do. Far from being applied ethics, politics is a skill that allows people to survive and persue their goals.

The Book of Eels has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher...

The religious turn to their faith to find meaning. But what about the many people who lead secular lives and are also hungry for meaning? What guides, what approaches are available to them? Distinguished philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is indeed within reach.

In this brilliant book, Francis Wheen, the author of the most successful biography of Karl Marx, tells the story of Das Kapital and Marx's 20-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867 to muted praise. But after Marx's death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries.

"Civil Disobedience" is an essay by Henry David Thoreau. Published in 1849 under the title "Resistance to Civil Government", it expressed Thoreau’s belief that people should not allow governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty both to avoid doing injustice directly and to avoid allowing their acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Confucius is perhaps the most important philosopher in history. Today his teachings shape the daily lives of more than 1.6 billion people. Throughout East Asia, Confucius' influence can be seen in everything from business practices and family relationships to educational standards and government policies. Even as Western ideas from Christianity to Communism have bombarded the region, Confucius' doctrine has endured as the foundation of East Asian culture.

Il est arrivé le 15 mai 1779 à l'École royale militaire de Brienne. Il n'a pas encore dix ans et parle à peine le français... Il va rester cinq ans dans cette école, sans la quitter un seul jour, sans revoir sa famille. Vingt ans plus tard, cet enfant sera le général Napoléon, maître de cette France ou il n'a d'abord été qu'un étranger. Quel caractère, quelle volonté, quel courage, quelle énergie, quelle imagination, quelle démesure, quelle puissance de rêve, quel sens des situations, quel génie il a fallu à l'enfant arraché à son milieu pour devenir le héros d'une nation !

The thrilling story of the charismatic explorer who Simon Bolivar called "the true discoverer of South America" and the daring expedition that altered the course of science. From 1799 to 1804 German naturalist and adventurer Alexander von Humboldt conducted the first extensive scientific exploration of Latin America.

Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation to the critical application of social and economic theory, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who deny the possibility of achieving any kind of certain knowledge about the past.

Science is the basis of our assumptions about ourselves and our world, from ideas about our evolutionary past to our conceptions of the vast expanses of space and the smallest particles of matter. In this panoramic book, acclaimed historian of science Peter Dear uncovers the roots of such beliefs, revealing how they constitute a natural philosophy that has been developed and refined over the course of centuries—and how the world as we have come to know it was by no means inevitable.

This national best seller is an entertaining, informative, and sometimes shocking expose of the way history is taught to American students. Lies My Teacher Told Me won the American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.

These early philosophical writings underpinned the Chinese revolutions and their clarion calls to insurrection remain some of the most stirring of all time. Drawing on a dizzying array of references from contemporary culture and politics, Zizek's firecracker commentary reaches unsettling conclusions about the place of Mao's thought in the revolutionary canon.

Learn to release gifts and talents you never knew you had and how to use them to become hugely successful, happy, and even wealthy. Discover how it is your daily standards and authenticity that determine your success or failure with your goals.

Brazil has a rich and complicated history that few outside South America know about. It leads the world in some of the most profitable exports (gold, sugar, oil, and coffee), yet Brazil has one of the largest wealth disparities in the world, being known for crime and poverty.

Planet Earth has been a familiar concept for a mere fraction of recorded history. Until about the mid-1600s, most humans thought of Earth as immobile, likely either dim or simply invisible from the Moon or anywhere else in the heavens, and not (like the planets) participating in what Galileo called "the dance of the stars." A Universe of Earths retraces the exhilarating story of how all that changed, and how we came to perceive the Earth as a "wandering star."

The Antichrist is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1895. Although it was written in 1888, its controversial content caused its publication to be delayed. The German title can be translated into English as either The Anti-Christ or The Anti-Christian, depending on how the German word Christ is translated. Nietzsche claimed in the foreword to have written the book for a very limited readership. In order to understand the book, he asserted that the reader "...must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of hardness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion."