Aesthetics

Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue invites us to remember and to awaken the Beautiful....

On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Crawford presents an articulated call for self-reliance....

A whole new way of looking at the world - and your life - inspired by centuries-old Japanese wisdom....

One of Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a remarkable source of inspiration....

Our world is full of people and products that are not what they seem. We no longer know whether we are talking to a person or a machine. But we can fight back—and this award-winning book shows us how....

Terry Waite invites you to meet some of the exceptional people he has got to know on his travels, and explore with him the widely different forms of solitary existence they inhabit....

In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics....

Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought....

An updated version of the seminal 1994 classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Nearly every book with "wabi" or "wabi sabi" in the title is based on the concepts first elucidated in this book....

From the author of the multimillion-copy-selling classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an original collection of Robert Pirsig’s writings on the central theme of his thought—“quality”—featuring never-before-seen selections from his unpublished works....

A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humor and comedy within Western culture - by one of its greatest exponents....

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. This Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture....

One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kind of walls, chairs, buildings, and streets we’re surrounded by....

How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow, describes the path to peace amid all of life's ups and downs....

Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas....

In this moving account, Peter Korn explores the nature and rewards of creative practice....

The Aesthetic Brain takes the listener on a wide-ranging journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art....

There is a cause, or a reason, behind everything that happens. This is the fundamental view behind the classical proposition the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, in 1813, Schopenhauer chose as his subject for further examination in his doctoral dissertation....

In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions....

This is a declaration of war. In the name of our creator, we declare a revolutionary war against both the gods and those titans who were gods before them! In the name of our liberator, we declare a revolutionary war against fatalism and every other form of tyranny....

Ecce homo, "behold the man", are the words Friedrich Nietzsche chose as the title for his literary self-portrait....