Columbia Press: 2357 books
China's Philological Turn
Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: April 3, 2018
In eighteenth-century China, a remarkable intellectual transformation took place, centered on the ascendance of philology. Its practitioners were preoccupied with the reliability of sources as evidence for restoring ancient texts and meanings and with the centrality of facts and truth to their scholarship...
Fixing the Sky
The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control
Language: English
Release Date: September 2, 2010
As alarm over global warming spreads, a radical idea is gaining momentum. Forget cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, some scientists argue. Instead, bounce sunlight back into space by pumping reflective nanoparticles into the atmosphere. Launch mirrors into orbit around the Earth. Make clouds thicker...
The Freedom Schools
Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2016
Created in 1964 as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Schools were launched by educators and activists to provide an alternative education for African American students that would facilitate student activism and participatory democracy. The schools, as Jon N. Hale demonstrates,...
To Carl Schmitt
Letters and Reflections
Language: English
Release Date: May 7, 2013
A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor—and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt...
by Abed Azzam
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2015
Abed Azzam offers a fresh interpretation of Nietzsche's engagement with the work of Paul the Apostle, reorienting the relationship between the two thinkers while embedding modern philosophy within early Christian theology. Paying careful attention to Nietzsche's dialectics, Azzam situates the philosopher's...
The Cult of the Fox
Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China
Language: English
Release Date: December 7, 2005
For more than five centuries the shamanistic fox cult has attracted large portions of the Chinese population and appealed to a wide range of social classes. Deemed illicit by imperial rulers and clerics and officially banned by republican and communist leaders, the fox cult has managed to survive...
Sacred Economies
Buddhist Monasticism and Territoriality in Medieval China
Language: English
Release Date: March 25, 2010
Buddhist monasteries in medieval China employed a variety of practices to ensure their ascendancy and survival. Most successful was the exchange of material goods for salvation, as in the donation of land, which allowed monks to spread their teachings throughout China. By investigating a variety of...
by Mencius
Language: English
Release Date: September 18, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: September 18, 2009
Known throughout East Asia as Mengzi, or "Master Meng," Mencius (391-308 B.C.E.) was a Chinese philosopher of the late Zhou dynasty, an instrumental figure in the spread of the Confucian tradition, and a brilliant illuminator of its ideas. Mencius was active during the Warring States Period...
The Great Civilized Conversation
Education for a World Community
Language: English
Release Date: June 25, 2013
Having spent decades teaching and researching the humanities, Wm. Theodore de Bary is well positioned to speak on its merits and reform. Believing a classical liberal education is more necessary than ever, he outlines in these essays a plan to update existing core curricula by incorporating classics...
by Arthur C. Danto
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2005
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2005
Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto's classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offered...
Nietzsche and Levinas
"After the Death of a Certain God"
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2008
The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the...
The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow
Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2018
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century in spite of his well-known transgressions—his complicity with National Socialism and his inability to show remorse or compassion for its victims. In The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow,...
Of Reality
The Purposes of Philosophy
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2016
We think it is wise to accept reality, rather than fight for something that does not exist or might never be. But in Of Reality, Gianni Vattimo condemns this complacency, with its implicit support of the status quo. Instead he urges us to never stop questioning, contrasting, or overcoming reality,...
The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy
A Study of Ernst Tugendhat
Language: English
Release Date: May 14, 2008
Contemporary philosopher—analytic as well as continental-tend to feel uneasy about Ernst Tugendhat, who, though he positions himself in the analytic field, poses questions in the Heideggerian style. Tugendhat was one of Martin Heidegger's last pupils and his least obedient, pursuing a new and controversial...