Philosophy

Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece of literary criticism, and a masterclass in the critical thinking skill of interpretation.

The power of Frank Dikotter's ground-breaking work on the disaster that followed China's attempted 'Great Leap Forward' lies not in the detail of his evidence (though that shows that Mao's fumbled attempt at rapid industrialization probably cost 45 million Chinese lives).

Discover global perspectives on happiness through this series of essays.

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What is a self?

Philosophy Bites Back is the second book to come out of the hugely successful podcast Philosophy Bites.

Sure to be a classic, Donald Richie's concise, profound insights into the mysteries of Japanese Aesthetics.

Few historical problems are more baffling in retrospect than the conundrum of how Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany and then command the German people - many of whom had only marginal interest in or affiliation to Nazism - and the Nazi state.

Many still consider Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1953 Philosophical Investigations to be one of the breakthrough works of twentieth-century philosophy.

Many people want to understand what revolutions are and - especially - how they come about, from the academics who study them to the states that wish to prevent (or, in some cases, provoke) them.

Ideas in Profile: Small Introductions to Big TopicsIn a world that is constantly changing, understanding the world has never been more important.

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Baruch Spinoza's Ethics is a dense masterpiece of sustained argumentative reasoning.

Francis Fukuyama's controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence.

Take 25 of the liveliest philosophers of our time.

Keith Thomas's classic study of all forms of popular belief has been influential for so long now that it is difficult to remember how revolutionary it seemed when it first appeared.

Social anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger's seminal Situated Learning helped change the fields of cognitive science and pedagogy by approaching learning from a novel angle.

Still a source of inspiration for soldiers on the battlefield and managers in the boardroom 2000 years after it was written, Sun-Tzu's The Art of War is the most influential book of strategy in the world, translated from the Chinese by John Minford in Penguin Classics.

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay on the history of the United States remains one of the most famous and influential works in the American canon.

The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Baruch Spinoza's Ethics is a dense masterpiece of sustained argumentative reasoning.

Benedict Anderson's 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of "e;nations"e; and "e;nationalism"e;.

A brilliant critique of the Right with very sharp insight on some of the shortcomings of the Left, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand how dishonest actors spread their propaganda.

Human beings are both supremely rational and deeply superstitious, capable of believing just about anything and of questioning just about everything.

Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great works of history, but also the departure point from which the modern discipline of international relations has been built.

Vision and Difference, published in 1988, is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour.

The 15 classic essays collected in Kokoro examine the inner spiritual life of Japan.

Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations is a classic of political science, built on the firm foundation of Morgenthau's watertight reasoning skills.

In this collection of essays and interviews philosophers, political scientists and economists reflect on the political role played by debt.

Gilbert Ryle's 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase "e;the ghost in the machine"e; - a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate.

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women is an incendiary attack on the place of women in 18th-century society.

Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short formWITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOREvery day, women around the world are confronted with a dilemma how to look.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman offers a general audience access to over six decades of insight and expertise from a Nobel Laureate in an accessible and interesting way.

Despite being written between 170 and 180, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations often resonates with modern readers because of its remarkable resemblance to a self-help book.

The history of anthropology is, to a large extent, the history of differing modes of interpretation.

Dieses Buch zeigt an praktischen Beispielen auf, wie einzelne Worte zur eigenen Lebensgestaltung genutzt werden können.

Debt is one of the great subjects of our day, and understanding the way that it not only fuels economic growth, but can also be used as a means of generating profit and exerting control, is central to grasping the way in which our society really works.

Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate.

In this book, Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde, Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of personhood as gender had been for centuries.

Understanding evidence is critical in a court of law - and it is just as important for critical thinking.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, New Yorker columnist, Surowiecki, explores the question of whether the many are better than an elite few - no matter their qualifications - at solving problems, promoting innovation and making wise decisions.

For many centuries, the history of the crusades, as written by Western historians, was based solidly on Western sources.

Essentials of philosophy expertly authored to succinctly cover historical details and key ideas that shaped the evolution of thought from ancient and classical to contemporary philosophy.

The ne plus ultra of Stoicism, Discourses outline clear-cut principles of right conduct and true thinking, offering secular thinkers a mode of reasoning that dismisses the strictures of absolutism and emotionalism in exchange for a more peaceful and productive life.