For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories – such as religion, science, and art – has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critique...

We all know scientists study a predictable set of organisms when performing research, whether they be mice, fruit flies, or less commonly known but widely used species of snail or worm. But when we think of the so-called humanistic social sciences, w...

When Hans Jonas died in 1993, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, when Jonas himself was an octogen...

"Migrants in the Profane" takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin's image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: "Nothing of theolog...

Through the lenses of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, this edited volume traces the development of the relation between the will and the law as self-given. Modern Philosophies of the Will explores a variety of topics including: the ontological turn i...

In "Mood and Trope", John Brenkman introduces two provocative propositions to affect theory: that human emotion is intimately connected to persuasion and figurative language; and that literature, especially poetry, lends precision to studying affect...

In this eye-opening, intellectually stimulating appreciation of a fascinating school of philosophy, Terry Eagleton makes a powerful argument that materialism is at the center of today's important scientific and cultural as well as philosophical debat...

An authority on the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965), Paul Mendes-Flohr offers the first major biography in English in thirty years of this seminal modern Jewish thinker. Organized around several key moments – such as his sudden...

A classic of medieval Jewish philosophy, Maimonides's "Guide of the Perplexed" is as influential as it is difficult and demanding. Not only does the work contain contrary – even contradictory – statements, but Maimonides deliberately wrote in a guard...

Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the sel...