The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries.
The first book in English to examine Leon Battista Alberti's major literary works in Latin and Italian, which are often overshadowed by his achievements in architectureLeon Battista Alberti (14041472) was one of the most prolific and original writers of the Italian Renaissancea fact often eclipsed by his more celebrated achievements as an art theorist and architect, and by Jacob Burckhardt's mythologizing of Alberti as a Renaissance or Universal Man.
This book explores how politeia (constitution) structures both political and extra-political relations throughout the entire range of Greek and Roman thought.
In recent decades, scholars have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt's notion that the free, untrammeled, and essentially modern Western individual emerged in Renaissance Italy.
Friedrich Nietzsche is often depicted in popular and scholarly discourse as a lonely philosopher dealing with abstract concerns unconnected to the intellectual debates of his time and place.
Blending social, intellectual, legal, medical, gender, and cultural history, Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia examines how eugenic theory and practice bolstered Virginia's various cultures of segregation--rich from poor, sick from well, able from disabled, male from female, and black from white and Native American.
Its like talking to a brick wall and Well have to agree to disagree are popular sayings referring to the frustrating experience of discussing issues with people who seem to be beyond the reach of argument.
Interest in the Man in Black has grown since his death in 2003, with increased record sales, cover videos by groups like Nine Inch Nails, and the 2006 biopic Walk the Line cementing his fame.
As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works.
Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy.
Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period-Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.
This book reexamines the historical thinking of Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of the few modern Chinese thinkers and cultural critics whose appreciation of the question of modernity was based on first-hand experience of the world space in which China had to function as a nation-state.
This Palgrave Pivot presents a historical reflection about the development of sociology in Colombia from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century, a period in which the process of professionalization in the discipline occurred due to the creation of university training programs, as well as the extension of research centers and groups nationwide.
One of the most radical philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze has become hugely influential in philosophy, cultural studies, literature, art, and architecture.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, in 1923, this book aims at shedding light on the archives of some of the key thinkers of Critical Theory of Society, also well known as "e;Frankfurt School"e;.
How Robespierre's career and legacy embody the dangerous contradictions of democracyMaximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) is arguably the most controversial and contradictory figure of the French Revolution, inspiring passionate debate like no other protagonist of those dramatic and violent events.
The controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual lifeScion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (19231987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin.
A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today's bitterly divided politicsIndividualism is a defining feature of American public life.
A bold reevaluation of Spinoza that reveals his powerful, inclusive vision of religion for the modern ageSpinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither.
From sex and music to religion and politics, a history of irrationality and the ways in which it has always been with us-and always will beIn this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump, Justin Smith argues that irrationality makes up the greater part of human life and history.
How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justiceThe relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes.