Now available in English—one of the twentieth century’s most important works on the philosophy of technologyWith this first English translation of influential German philosopher Günther Anders’s 1956 masterpiece of critical theory, The Obsolescence of the Human, a new generation of readers can now engage with his prescient and haunting vision of a “world without us” dominated by technology.Looking at technological events such as the detonation of t...

A rollicking account of how Mark Twain mocked and mined DC's self-important, incompetent, and corrupt political scene to further his literary career.When young Samuel Clemens first visited the nation's capital in 1854, both were rough around the edges and of dubious potential. Returning as Mark Twain in 1867, he brought his sharp eye and acerbic pen to the task of covering the capital for nearly a half-dozen newspapers. He fit in perfectly among the other hard-drin...

"Reconstruct[s] Douglass's life in the nation's capital, both at home and in the halls of power, in ways that no other biographer has done" (Leigh Fought, author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass ).The remarkable journey of Frederick Douglass from fugitive slave to famed orator and author is well recorded. Yet little has been written about Douglass's final years in Washington, DC. Journalist John Muller...

Günther Anders’s prolific philosophy of technology is undergoing a major revival but has never been translated into English. Prometheanism mobilises Anders’s pragmatic thought and current trends in critical theory to rethink the constellations of power that are configuring themselves around our increasingly “smart” machines.The book offers a comprehensive introduction to Anders’s philosophy of technology with an annotated translation of his visionary essay ‘On Promethean Shame’, pa...

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on pos...

Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of exchange or a measure of value, it is the primary means by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age.But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? ...

This volume addresses itself to the ways in which the so-called 'new sciences of complexity' can deepen and broaden neurobiological and psychological theories of mind. Complexity theory has gained increasing attention over the past 20 years across diverse areas of inquiry, including mathematics, physics, economics, biology, and the social sciences. Complexity theory concerns itself with how nonlinear dynamical systems evolve and change over time and draws on research arising from chaos the...

Martin Heidegger - philosophy's 'hidden king', or leading exponent of a dangerously misguided secular mysticism. Heidegger has been acclaimed as the most powerfully original philosopher of the twentieth century. Profoundly influential on deconstruction, existentialism and phenomenology, he stands behind all major strands of post-structuralist and postmodern thought. Heidegger announced the end of philosophy and of humanism, and was a committed Nazi and vocal supporter of Hitler's National ...

Theodor Adorno was no stranger to controversy. In The Jargon of Authenticity he gives full expression to his hostility to the language employed by certain existentialist thinkers such as Martin Heidegger. With his customary alertness to the uses and abuses of language, he calls into question the jargon, or 'aura', as his colleague Walter Benjamin described it, which clouded existentialists' thought. He argued that its use undermined the very message for meaning and liberation that...

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) received his PhD in English literature from Cambridge University and taught in the United States and Canada. He is best known, however, as the founding father of media studies. McLuhan was Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Among his ground-breaking works on the psychic and social dimensions of communication technology are The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962); Understanding Media: the Extensio...

This volume presents two important lecture cycles delivered after WWII, exploring the poetry of Hölderlin and the nature of thought itself.Heidegger delivered his lecture series, Insight into That Which Is, at Bremen in 1949. It was his first speaking engagement after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Hölderlin's poetry and themes developed in his earlier works.

"[Lemm] consolidates her reputation as one of Nietzsche's most original, attentive, and lively readers." — The Journal of Nietzsche StudiesThis book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and provides the first systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's body of work. Vanessa Lemm argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche's thought. Instead, it stands ...