Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. Most twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy has focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth.

It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in thefield that, unlike other refer...

'The god wanted everything to be good, marred by as little imperfection as possible.'Timaeus, one of Plato's acknowledged masterpieces, is an attempt to construct the universe and explain its contents by means of as few axioms as possible. The result is a brilliant, bizarre, and surreal cosmos - the product of the rational thinking of a creator god and his astral assistants, and of purely mechanistic causes based on the behaviour of the four elements. At times dazzlingly clear, at times intri...

Provides an insight into everything from holiday romance to hotel mini-bars, airports to sight-seeing. This book suggests how we might be happier on our journeys.

'One of the most important thinkers alive' The Times

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities.

In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments t...

Elucidates a problem integral to the history of Western philosophical thought - the relationship of the mind and body. This work develops a theory of the human mind and consciousness based on the advances in the field that came to be known as cognitive science.

Mary Midgley argues in this powerful book that, far from being the opposite of science, myth is a central part of it.

Although dour in appearance and formidable in reputation, Friedrich Nietzsche was an ardent practitioner of the art of poetry &; called in 12th-century Provencal "the gay science." This volume, which Nietzsche referred to as "the most personal of all my books," features the largest collection of his poetry that he ever chose to publish. It also offers an extensive and sophisticated treatment of the philosophical themes and views most central to his thinking, as well as the ideas that proved m...

A remarkable book, full of piercing spiritual and moral insight. Eloquent and inspiring, it asks profound questions about the nature of faith, doubt and morality that continue to resonate today. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Introduction by Janet Soskice.

One of the most important texts of modern times, Herbert Marcuse's analysis and image of a one-dimensional man in a one-dimensional society has shaped many young radicals' way of seeing and experiencing life. Published in 1964, it fast became an ideological bible for the emergent New Left. As Douglas Kellner notes in his introduction, Marcuse's greatest work was a 'damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, capitalist and communist.' Yet it also expressed the hopes of a radical phi...