Harvard University Press imprint: 1080 books

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong...

Who gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American condescension toward China yielded to fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented conversation over U.S.-Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over who could claim the title of leading China expert.

For 2,500 years literature has been condemned in the name of authority, truth, morality and society. But in making explicit what a society expects from literature, anti-literary discourse paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The threat to literature’s continued existence, William Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.

Society's wealthiest members claim an ever-expanding share of income and property--a true counterrevolution, says Pierre Rosanvallon, the end of the age of growing equality launched by the American and French revolutions. Just as significant, driving this contemporary inequality has been a loss of faith in the ideal of equality itself.

A benchmark in the history of economics and of political ideas, Rothschild shows us the origins of laissez-faire economic thought and its relation to political conseratism in an unquiet world.

Slaughter in battle was once seen as a legitimate way to settle disputes. When pitched battles ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. Whitman explains why ritualized violence was more effective in ending carnage, and why humanitarian laws that view war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts.

Gareth Stedman Jones returns Karl Marx to his nineteenth-century world, before later inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. He shows how Marx adapted the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and others into ideas that would have—in ways inconceivable to Marx—an overwhelming impact in the twentieth century.

For Raymond Geuss, philosophers’ attempts to bypass normal ways of thinking—to point out that the question being asked is itself misguided—represents philosophy at its best. By provoking people to think differently, philosophers make clear that we are not fated to live within the stifling systems of thought we inherit. We can change the subject.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Tablet Book of the Year Marking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome’s...

Who and what was pagan depended on the outlook of the observer, as Christopher Jones shows in this fresh and penetrating analysis. Treating paganism as a historical construct rather than a fixed entity, Between Christian and Pagan uncovers the fluid ideas, rituals, and beliefs that Christians and pagans shared in Late Antiquity.

The earliest philosophers thought deeply about ethical questions, but Aristotle founded ethics as a well-defined discipline. Brad Inwood focuses on the reception of Aristotelian ethical thought in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds and explores the thinker's influence on the philosophers who followed in his footsteps from 300 BCE to 200 CE.

In these selected essays, Charles Parsons surveys the contributions of philosophers and mathematicians who shaped the philosophy of mathematics over the past century: Brouwer, Hilbert, Bernays, Weyl, Gödel, Russell, Quine, Putnam, Wang, and Tait.

The world’s most revered and eloquent interpreter of evolutionary ideas offers here a work of explanatory force unprecedented in our time—a landmark publication, both for its historical sweep and for its scientific vision. With characteristic attention to detail, Stephen Jay Gould first describes...

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Yet the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God, and had mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the largest, yet most undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?