Μελέτες & Φιλοσοφία

Truth is increasingly marginalized. Powerful news interests, social media and political orators all seem to point to the idea that the days of absolute Truth are past. Religions have always claimed to stand for a transcendent dimension to reality and to the idea of an absolute claim to Truth but, in the West, religion has been and is declining in influence.

Fundamentalism is on the rise and this, combined with relativism, contributes to the current malaise. Peter Vardy has a passionate commitment to helping people think about key issues deeply, yet writes in a lucid and clear style. In Beyond the Cave he explains why claims to absolute Truth have become severely eroded but he also charts a way forward.

Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full colour. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression.

The only limit is your imagination.

Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action. Among this quarrel- some sisterhood, you'll find ACT UP's Queer Nation Manifesto, Emma Goldman's 1896 Anarchy and the Sex Question, Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto and The Combahee River Collective Statement

'What Japan was she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation, but its root as well.'Inazo Nitobe's book, the most influential ever written on Bushido, or the samurai Way of the Warrior, argues that the philosophy of Bushido is the true key to understanding 'the soul of Japan'. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

'To create today means to create dangerously'This new collection contains some of Camus' most brilliant political writing as he reflects on moral responsibility and the role of the artist in the world. Letters to a German Friend, written and published underground during the Nazi occupation of France, was born out of Camus' experience in the Resistance and explores what it truly means to love your country. Reflections on the Guillotine, his impassioned polemic against the death penalty, became a touchstone for the movement to abolish capital punishment, while in his Nobel speeches Camus argues that the artist must engage with dangerous times. Together these powerful pieces express Camus' mistrust of rigid ideologies, and his commitment to human solidarity. 'Probably no European writer of his time left so deep a mark on the imagination' Conor Cruise O'Brien

Through a series of specific questions that cut to the core of conspiracism as a global social and cultural phenomenon this book deconstructs the logic and rhetoric of conspiracy theories and analyses the broader social and psychological factors that contribute to their persistence in modern society.

From the acclaimed author of How Will Capitalism End? comes an omnibus of long-form critical essays engaging with leading economists and thinkers. Critical Encounters draws on Wolfgang Streeck's inimitable writing for the London Review of Books and New Left Review, among other publications. It opens with treatments of two contrasting historical eras-factory capitalism and financialization -and three of the world's major economies: the United States, France and Germany.

Delving into the world of ideas, Streeck discusses the work of Quinn Slobodian, Mark Blyth, Jurgen Habermas and Perry Anderson. Finally, he zooms out to compare his home discipline of sociology to natural history, giving a remarkable and non-deterministic reading of Charles Darwin.

In the preface, Streeck reflects on the art (or craft) of book reviewing and the continuing merits of the book form. Critical Encounters also includes a series of 'Letters from Europe', penned as the coronavirus descended upon the Continent.

In these timeless and witty essays George Orwell explores the English love of reading about a good murder in the papers (and laments the passing of the heyday of the 'perfect' murder involving class, sex and poisoning), as well as unfolding his trenchant views on everything from boys' weeklies to naughty seaside postcards. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.