Harvard University Press: 1090 books

Revealing an Italian Renaissance beyond Michelangelo and the Medici, Sarah Gwyneth Ross recovers the experiences of everyday people who were inspired to pursue humanistic learning. Physicians were often the most avid professionals seeking to earn the respect of their betters, advance their families, and secure honorable remembrance after death.

Under the microscope of recent scholarship the universality of Greek tragedy has started to fade, as particularities of Athenian culture have come into focus. Miriam Leonard contests the idea of the death of tragedy and argues powerfully for the continued vitality and viability of Greek tragic theater in the central debates of contemporary culture.

How did the English Reformation, with its illiberal, intolerant beginnings, lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment—free will, liberty of conscience, religious toleration, constitutionalism, and all the rest? In his provocative rewriting of the history of liberalism, James Simpson uncovers its unexpected debt to Protestant evangelicalism.

Most books on AI focus on the future of work. But now that algorithms can learn and adapt, does the future of creativity also belong to well-programmed machines? To answer this question, Marcus du Sautoy takes us to the forefront of creative new technologies and offers a more positive and unexpected vision of our future cohabitation with machines.

Kant declared that philosophy began in 1781 with his Critique of Pure Reason. In 1806 Hegel announced that it had been completed. Förster assesses the steps that led from Kant’s “beginning” to Hegel’s “end” and concludes that both Kant and Hegel were indeed right. His study reveals Goethe’s significant contribution to post-Kantian thinking.

Originally published in 1965, Contraception received unanimous acclaim from all quarters as the first thorough, scholarly, objective analysis of Catholic doctrine on birth control. More than ever this subject is of acute concern to a world facing serious population problems, and the author has written...

Perhaps more than any other cause, the passage of texts from scroll to codex in late antiquity converted the Roman Empire from paganism to Christianity and enabled the worldwide spread of Christian faith. Guy Stroumsa describes how canonical scripture was established and how its interpretation replaced blood sacrifice in religious ritual.

A master of family therapy, Salvador Minuchin, traces for the first time the minute operations of day-to-day practice. Dr. Minuchin has achieved renown for his theoretical breakthroughs and his success at treatment. Now he explains in close detail those precise and difficult maneuvers that constitute...

A comprehensive survey of the evolutionary science of human sexual behavior, Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior invites us to imagine human sex from the vantage point of our primate cousins, in order to underscore the role of evolution in shaping all that happens, biologically and behaviorally, when romantic passions are aroused.

What is the best possible society? How would its rulers govern and its citizens behave? Such questions are sometimes dismissed as distractions from genuine political problems, but in an era when political idealism seems a relic of the past, says Jonny Thakkar, they are more urgent than ever. A daring...

Hilary Putnam’s writings have shaped fields from epistemology to ethics, metaphysics to the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of mathematics to the philosophy of mind. This volume reflects his latest thinking on how to articulate a theory of naturalism which acknowledges that normative phenomena form an ineluctable part of human experience.

Michel Chaouli invites novice and expert alike to set out on the path of thinking, with help from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, about the force of aesthetic experience, the essence of art, and the relationship of beauty and meaning. Each chapter unfolds the significance of a key concept for Kant’s thought and our own ideas.

Some commentators claim that Anselm's writings contain a second independent "modal ontological argument" for God's existence. A. D. Smith contends that although there is a second a priori argument in Anselm, it is not the modal argument. This "other argument" bears a striking resemblance to one that Duns Scotus would later employ.

In their search for truth, contemporary religious believers and modern scientific investigators hold many values in common. But in their approaches, they express two fundamentally different conceptions of how to understand and represent the world. Michael E. Hobart looks for the origin of this difference...