Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork provides a unique foundational introduction to the depths and glories of literature and its study. It is a book about why literature matters, and why it always will. Readers will explore the roots of literature and art in the interplay between life and language, actions and events, and culture and texts. This is not a book about theories; it is a book about our complex engagement with language and literature, from which theories, interpre...

Locating poetry in a philosophy of the everyday, Brett Bourbon continues a tradition of attention to logic in everyday utterances through Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Cavell, arguing that poems are events of form, not just collections of words, which shape everyone's lives.Poems taught in class are formalizations of the everyday poems we live amidst, albeit unknowingly. Bourbon resurrects these poems to construct an anthropology of form that centers everyday poems as events or ...

Jane Austen and the Ethics of Description demonstrates that Elizabeth Bennet and her creator are misunderstood, and often unrecognized, geniuses of moral philosophy, but not simply because of their virtue or wit or natural skills in game theory. The engine driving the moral judgement and growth of Austen’s protagonists consists of a particular and not well-understood ability to reason by description, a skill which we moderns must recover and remaster in order to negotiate the comp...

Drawing from philosophy, information theory, and network science, Organized Skepticism in the Age of Misinformation: Surviving the Kingdom of Gossip offers a novel conceptual framework that views information as a form of gossip.This book challenges the idea that truthfulness is a necessary, or even a relevant condition, of information. Instead, this book develops a conceptual framework in which information is understood as gossip, which fits within a more general account o...

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Kierkegaard in just one hour.Although Kierkegaard was not a philosopher in the academic sense, he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn’t write about the world, he wrote about life – how we live and how we choose to live, particularly focussing on the individual and the notion of his (or her) existence. Kierkegaard was one of the founders of existentialism, regarding the ‘existing being’ as a...

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.Despite the wi...

We live an information-soaked existence - information pours into our lives through television, radio, books, and of course, the Internet. Some say we suffer from 'infoglut'. But what is information? The concept of 'information' is a profound one, rooted in mathematics, central to whole branches of science, yet with implications on every aspect of our everyday lives: DNA provides the information to create us; we learn through the information fed to us; we relate to each other through inform...

What is Literary Theory? What is the relationship between literature and culture? In fact, what is Literature, and does it matter? These are the sorts of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler in a book which steers a clear path through a subject often perceived to be impenetrable. It offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience, and outlines the ideas behind a number ofdifferent...

In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe. Can it really be...

'The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking' Heidegger'We should never allow our fears of the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny'Martin Heidegger was one of the most controversial philosophers of the 20th century, and still causes widespread division. Born in Germany, he was concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings, and best known for his contributi...

A fresh reflection on what makes life meaningfulMost people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we righ...

The renowned social psychologist and New York Times –bestselling author's classic study of Freud's most important—and controversial—ideas: "Simple, thoughtful, and incisive" ( Library Journal )."Brilliant new insights into both the strengths and shortcomings of psychoanalysis, while reaffirming its radical potential." — Publishers Weekly...