Adopting the role of tour guide, award-winning writer Kevin Hart leads the reader through the pitfalls, conundrums and complexities that characterize postmodernism, while providing an overview of the many different approaches (philosophical, cultural, literary...) to the subject. All the major thinkers are introduced - from Derrida to Blanchot, Irigaray to Foucault, and more besides - while the book is unique among introductory guides in its consideration of the role of religion in a postmodern world. View More...
In the compelling book Doubt, a brilliant young writer and historian of ideas shows how the dialectic between faith and doubt, belief and radical questioning, religion on the one hand and philosophy and science on the other has been the driving force in intellectual and religious history. Jennifer Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions. This is an account of the world's great intellectual virtuosos, who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, and their attempts to reconcile the seeming randomness of the unive... View More...
The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don't know, now with a new section called "On Robustness and Fragility." A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the r... View More...