Orion: 2711 books

From Schrodinger's cat to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, this book untangles the weirdness of the quantum world. Quantum mechanics underpins modern science and provides us with a blueprint for reality itself. And yet it has been said that if you're not shocked by it, you don't understand...

A.C. Grayling answers the most important question - How do we live a good life? One of the most fundamental questions in our life is to find out what we value - what principles we want to live by and which codes we will use to guide our behaviour. Most of us want to live a good life. But what,...

Popular Great Philosopher's Series Richard Webster expert on Freud A critical reassessment of one of the most controversial philosophers of the last century. Few figures have had so decisive and fundamental an influence on the course of modern cultural history as Sigmund Freud. Yet few...

Plato c428 - c348BC Without the work of Plato, western thought is, quite literally, unthinkable. No single influence has been greater, in every age and in every philosophic field. Even those thinkers who have rejected Plato's views have found themselves working to an agenda he set. Yet...

Part of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series. Democritus c. 460-c. 370BC The Renaissance's 'Laughing Philosopher'; our own age's 'Prophet of Quark': throughout the modern philosophical tradition, Democritus has been a man little known beyond his labels. Yet if the image of the cheerful...

Socrates 469 - 399BC 'If you put me to death,' Socrates warned his Athenian judges, 'you will not easily find anyone to take my place.' So indeed it would prove, a single cup of hemlock robbing the western philosophical tradition of the man with best claims to be its founding father. Yet...

Karl Popper 1902-1994 The political history of the twentieth century has been full of savage 'certainties'. A similar idea of history warranted the callous savageries of both Marxism and Fascism. They shared a faith in what Karl Popper called 'Historicism': the belief that the future could...

Heidegger 1889-1976 'We ourselves the entities to be analysed.' With those words, Martin Heidegger launched his assault on the 'sham clarity' of traditional Western thought. We are neither immortal souls nor disembodied intellects, he argues, but finite historical existences. And we are bound...

Part of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series. G.W.F. Hegel 1770-1831 Without Hegel, modern thought is unthinkable. From Marx to Merleau-Pontyh, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, those whose ideas have made the modern age have all worked in his shadow. For Hegel's preoccupations have turned...

The country of Lescar was carved out of the collapse of the Old Tormalin Empire. Every generation has seen the land laid waste by rival dukes fighting for the High King's empty crown. Tathrin's parents sent him to the distant city of Vanam to escape the recurrent skirmishes. He meets Aremil, another...

A short book combining extracts from the work of one of the world's greatest thinkers with commentary by on of Britain's most distinguished writers on philosophy.

With the celebrated words 'I think therefore I am', Descartes' compelling argument swept aside ancient and medieval traditions. He deduced that human beings consist of minds and bodies; that these are totally distinct 'substances'; that God exists and that He ensures we can trust the evidence of our...

Part of the GREAT PHILOSOPHERS series. Terry Eagleton explains that freedom, for Marx, entailed release from commercial labour, "a kind of creative superabundance over what is materially essential". Eagleton outlines the relationship between production, labour and ownership which...

An epic true story of treachery, revenge and courage The Indian Mutiny is a real page-turner, an epic story with surprising modern parallels. Fomer army officer-turned-TV scriptwriter, Julian Spilsbury is the ideal author to take us back to the desperate summer of 1857 when thousands of Indian...