Philosophy and Religion

Postmodernism For Beginners features the thoughts of Foucault on power and knowledge, Jameson on mapping the postmodern, Baudrillard on the media, Harvey on time-space compression, Derrida on deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari on rhizomes. The book also discusses postmodern artifacts such as Madonna, cyberpunk sci-fi, Buddhist ecology and teledildonics. If you are like most people, yo

“What is Structuralism? How is it possible? And once the structures of Structuralism have been discovered, how is Poststructuralism possible?”Thus begins Don Palmer's STRUCTURALISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM FOR BEGINNERS. If Nobel or Pulitzer ever made a prize for making the most difficult philosophers and ideas accessible to the greatest number of people, one of the leading candidates would certainly

Michel Foucault's work has profoundly affected the teaching of such diverse disciplines as literary criticism, criminology, and gender studies. Arguing that definitions of abnormal behavior are culturally constructed, Foucault explored the unfair division between those who meet and those who deviate from social norms.Foucault's deeply visual sense of scenes such as ritual public executions, lends

The ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger have been described as an intellectual time bomb, as some of the most revolutionary thought in Western history. Despite the enormous amount of secondary scholarships available on Heidegger, it is – due to the complexity of his thought and the density of his writing – difficult for the curious beginner to gain an insight into Heidegger's philosop

SARTRE FOR BEGINNERS is an accessible yet sophisticated introduction to the life and works of the famous French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre was a member of the French underground during WWII, a novelist, a playwright, and a major influence in French political and intellectual life.The book opens with a biographical section, introducing the significant events in the life of the man who co

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was one of the most original thinkers of the 19th Century – and one of the most enigmatic men who ever walked the Earth.Philosophically, Kierkegaard was the “bridge” that led from Hegel to Existentialism.Kierkegaard abhorred Hegel's abstract, Know-it-all idealism that tried to capture reality in a few words. Kierkegaard's attack on social and religious comp

EXISTENTIALISM FOR BEGINNERS is an entertaining romp through the history of a philosophical movement that has had a broad and enduring influence on Western culture. From the middle of the Nineteenth Century through the late Twentieth Century, existentialism informed our politics and art, and still exerts its influence today. Tracing the movement's beginnings with close-up views of seminal figures

Deconstruction is so labyrinthine (and rumored to be fatal) that it's become the monster that murdered philosophy. When Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, uses buzz-words such as “phallogocentrism” and “transcendental signified,” humanities students and aspiring philosophers may get weak in the knees.Following up on the success of DERRIDA FOR BEGINNERS, Jim  Powell's DERRIDA FOR BEGINN

Jacques Lacan is probably the most influential psychoanalyst since Freud (of the roughly 20,000 psychoanalysts in the world, about half are 'Lacanians') yet most people know nothing about him. The 10,000 analysts who use Lacan's ideas work mostly in France, Spain, Italy, and South America. To the rest of the world, including England and America, Lacan is a genius-in-waiting, due to be 'discovered'

Philosopher, psychoanalyst, politician, propagandist, prophet...although difficult to categorize, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and one of our most powerful writers on race and revolution. The book opens with a biography, following Fanon from his birthplace of Martinique through combat in World War II and education in France, to his heroic in

From Egyptian mythology to Jewish mysticism, Rome and Greece to the druids and the gnostics, Tim Wallace-Murphy exposes a fascinating lineage of hidden mysteries and secret societies, continuing through the Templars, Rosicrucians, and Freemasons to our modern visionaries. This hidden stream of spirituality and that of sacred knowledge are inseparably entwined to form the single most important cont

Buckminster Fuller reminds us, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” This book provides just that model, as well as concrete practices for living it. The model is derived from ancient wisdom traditions, modelled on the pulses, cycles and seasons of our beloved Earth Mother. It deeply grounds the reader

Is it possible that everything we think we know about God and what God wants, is wrong?Could humanity's ideas about all this be the greatest inaccuracies . . . ever? Would it matter if they were? The author of the multi-million-selling Conversations with God series places the question squarely before our world in another blockbuster book that could move our species closer to true spiritual revolut

In his most important book since Taking the Quantum Leap, Fred Alan Wolf will explain how our understanding of time, space and matter have changed in just the last few years and how with these new ideas we have a glimpse into the "mind of God." Making comparisons to Hindu Vedic and Judeo-Christian cosmology, Dr. Wolf explains how the universal command of the Deity "Let there be light" now takes on

The examination of parallel universes, wormholes and extra dimensional portals might sound like the beginning of a Ray Bradbury novel—but this isn't science fiction. In THE GRID, authors, Larry Flaxman and Marie D. Jones, present their theory of The Grid —the pattern by which all of reality is built upon and structured around. Using evidence from quantum theory as well as support from many religio

We know that we can't speak to our friends in a negative manner and expect them to stay our friends - so why do we speak to ourselves so negatively? It is no wonder that we are not our own best friends, when all of the self-talk that we hear in our minds is judgment about our bodies, our careers, our lifestyles our very being. Cynthia Kane has the solution. In TALK TO YOURSELF LIKE A BUDDHIST, she

CREATE YOUR OWN RELIGION is a call to arms -- an open invitation to question all the values, beliefs and worldviews that humanity has so far held as sacred in order to find the answers we need to the very practical problems facing us. Writer, philosopher and professor of comparative religion, Daniele Bolelli, leads the reader through three thousand years of mythology, misogyny, misinformation and

MORMONISM FOR BEGINNERS is a balanced, richly engaging introduction to the history, tenets, practices, traditions and, yes, debates and controversies of this uniquely American Protestant movement. Designed for the uninitiated or younger members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), this book presents the history of the movement from Joseph Smith to the 21st century along with t

Have you heard the terms 'structuralism' and 'deconstruction' and 'postmodernism' but aren't really sure what they mean? Have you taken a whole course on literary criticism, but are still feeling lost? Here's the book you need to sort it all out - and enjoy doing so!In LITERARY THEORY FOR BEGINNERS, Mary Klages takes you into her classroom, cuts through the jargon and explains the ABCs (and the DE

In the course of writing this book, answers to the following questions and many others were given in both narrative and visual form. Most of them were presented rather forcefully and not when I was expecting them. I understood that I was to share what I learned.· What is in store for the geology of North America?· How do we create matter every day?· What is the nature of nature?· How did people li