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Philosophy & Critical Theory Books in this online selection represent only a sliver of what we offer in the store. If you've got a particular book in mind and want to check on its availability, call us at 415-362-8193.

<<< 1 2 3 4 >>>     sort list by title | author A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes Witold Gombrowicz Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books In this inspired book, the eminent Polish author Witold Gombrowicz reflects on seven great philosophers. He discusses Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger in six "one-hour" essays... Sophie's World A Novel About the History of Philosophy Jostein Gaarder A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old... The Writer of Modern Life Essays on Charles Baudelaire Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of... Imperial San Francisco Urban Power, Earthly Ruin Gray Brechin First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families--the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others--who gained power through mining, ranching, water and... The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault Two of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers debate a perennial question.In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world's leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel... A Field Guide to Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost is about the stories we use to navigate our way through the world and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves or losing ourselves. Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on... Berlin Childhood around 1900 Walter Benjamin Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin's lifetime, one of his "large-scale defeats." Now translated into English for the first time in book form... Training in Christianity Soren Kierkegaard This indispensable guide to the search for kinship with God was written by the great nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), whose writings set the stage for existentialism and continue to exert a lasting influence on... Ethics An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Wo Es War) Alain Badiou Alain Badiou explodes the facile assumptions behind the recent ethical turn by governments of the West. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and ultimately fail to provide a framework... Pataphysics The Poetics of an Imaginary Science Christian Bok 'Pataphysics, the pseudoscience imagined by Alfred Jarry, has so far, because of its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity, attracted very little scholarly or critical inquiry, and yet it has inspired a century of experimentation. Wanderlust A History of Walking Rebecca Solnit Drawing together many histories-of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores-Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern... Close to the Machine Technophilia and Its Discontents Ellen Ullman If there is such a thing as a typical computer programmer, Ellen Ullman is not it. She's female, a former communist, bisexual, old enough to be a twentysomething's mom, and not a nerd. She runs her own computer-consulting business in San Francisco... Discipline & Punish The Birth of the Prison Michel Foucault At the end of 2006, the United States had approximately 7.2 million people who were either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. Our society's propensity for punishment and justice has manifested into the modern prison system, arguably... <<< 1 2 3 4 >>>