Columbia University Press imprint: 2220 books
Night Passages
Philosophy, Literature, and Film
Language: English
Release Date: September 10, 2013
In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night...
Practice Extended
Beyond Law and Literature
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Written by a renowned literary critic and legal historian, Practice Extended illuminates the intricacies of legal language and thought and the law's relationship to society, literature, and culture. Robert A. Ferguson details how judicial opinions are written, how legal thought and philosophy inform...
Up from Invisibility
Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America
Language: English
Release Date: December 26, 2001
A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media's stage. And yet even as the mass...
Tamil Love Poetry
The Five Hundred Short Poems of the Ainkurunuru
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2011
Dating from the early decades of the third century C.E., the Ainkurunuru is believed to be the world's earliest anthology of classical Tamil love poetry. Commissioned by a Cera-dynasty king and composed by five masterful poets, the anthology illustrates the five landscapes of reciprocal love: jealous...
The Implied Spider
Politics and Theology in Myth
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2010
Wendy Doniger's foundational study is both modern in its engagement with a diverse range of religions and refreshingly classic in its transhistorical, cross-cultural approach. By responsibly analyzing patterns and themes across context, Doniger reinvigorates the comparative reading of religion, tapping...
by Joseph Meisel
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2001
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2001
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, more people were making more speeches to greater numbers in a wider variety of venues than at any previous time. This book argues that a recognizably modern public life was created in Victorian Britain largely through the instrumentality of public speech....
by Hans-Georg Moeller
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2011
Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal theoretical framework....
In Search of the Lost Orient
An Interview
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 2017
Olivier Roy is one of the world's leading experts on political Islam. But he is not only a scholar—he is also a traveler. Roy's keen and iconoclastic insights emerge from a lifetime of study combined with intrepid exploration through Afghanistan and Central Asia. In this book-length interview, Roy...
by Michael Dummett
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2010
Philosophy is a discipline that makes no observations, conducts no experiments, and needs no input from experience. It is an armchair subject, requiring only thought. Yet that thought can advance knowledge in unexpected directions, not only through the discovery of new facts but also through the enhancement...
LoveKnowledge
The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida
Language: English
Release Date: December 4, 2012
Since its inception, philosophy has struggled to perfect individual understanding through discussion and dialogue based in personal, poetic, or dramatic investigation. The positions of such philosophers as Socrates, Spinoza, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida differ in almost every respect,...
Taking Back Philosophy
A Multicultural Manifesto
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2017
Are American colleges and universities failing their students by refusing to teach the philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and other non-Western cultures? This biting and provocative critique of American higher education says yes. Even though we live in an increasingly multicultural...
The Disclosure of Politics
Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization
Language: English
Release Date: August 13, 2013
Postmodern political critiques speak of the death of ideology, the end of history, and the postsecular return of religious attitudes, yet radical conservative theorists such as Mark Lilla argue religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Returning much-needed uncertainty to debates over the...
Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past
The Politics of Amnesty and Integration
Language: English
Release Date: August 27, 2002
Of all the aspects of recovery in postwar Germany perhaps none was as critical or as complicated as the matter of dealing with Nazi criminals, and, more broadly, with the Nazi past. While on the international stage German officials spoke with contrition of their nation's burden of guilt, at home questions...
by Gary Steiner
Language: English
Release Date: April 16, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: April 16, 2013
In Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism, Gary Steiner illuminates postmodernism's inability to produce viable ethical and political principles. Ethics requires notions of self, agency, and value that are not available to postmodernists. Thus, much of what is published under the rubric of postmodernist...