Imprint Academic imprint: 246 books

The book explores the role of leisure in modern life. It was written in the belief that leisure sets us apart as a species, that what is “useless” by commercial standards is probably the best thing we have going for us, and that leisure is under attack, in high danger of being lost, and has been...

Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) lived through what he described as 'the two great catastrophes of the twentieth century: the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945', and yet the keynote of his astonishingly rich and varied life and work was an enduring optimism. Bronowski...

The book presents the conclusions of a psychologist seeking to make sense of contemporary particle physics as described in a number of popular science texts and media articles, written by physicists, seeking to explain the workings of the sub-atomic world. The accounts, it is argued, are a) mutually...

The popular and successful rhetorical textbooks produced by the 18th century Scottish philosophical tradition, such as George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), and Alexander Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric (1877) have...

This book provides an exposition and critical examination of Collingwood's philosophy of history, in which Collingwood's views are read in the light of his metaphilosophy. Collingwood's philosophy of history is also located in relation to recent and current philosophy. Although the author argues that...

Julian Jaynes' 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, continues to arouse an unsettling ambivalence. Richard Dawkins called it "either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between". The present book suggests that the bicameral...

Analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists have long argued that the mind is a computer-like syntactical engine, and that all human mental capacities can be described as digital computational processes. This book presents an alternative, naturalistic view of human thinking, arguing that computers...

The series, St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Life originates in the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, University of St Andrews and is under the general editorship of John Haldane. The series includes monographs, collections of essays and occasional anthologies of source...

The Liberty Option advances the idea that for compelling moral as well as practical reasons it is the free society - with the rule of law founded on the principles of private property rights, its complete respect for individual sovereignty and properly limited legal authorities - not one or another version...

This innovative research monograph on sovereignty argues that the historical examination of the concept and the conceptual analysis of sovereignty are interdependent. The book engages with and makes a significant contribution to the literatures on sovereignty from the history of political thought and...

The author writes:In this project I set out to provide an answer to two fundamental questions of political philosophy. How can human beings (living, as we do now, in a globalised world) live together, in conditions of co-operation over time, enjoying what Immanuel Kant famously called ‘perpetual peace’?...

The author writes:In this project I set out to provide an answer to two fundamental questions of political philosophy. How can human beings (living, as we do now, in a globalised world) live together, in conditions of co-operation over time, enjoying what Immanuel Kant famously called ‘perpetual...

Civil Society, Capitalism and the State presents a critical reconstruction of the social and political facets of Thomas Hill Green's liberal socialism. It explores the complex relationships Green sees between human nature, personal freedom, the common good, rights and the state. It explores Green's analysis...

This book deals with the role and place of the general will in modern and contemporary political thought. This project is carried out at the crossroads of the history of ideas and political philosophy. It extensively develops historical and philosophical themes, showing modifications to the idea of the...