- Rob Tempio
Senior Publisher & Executive Editor - Ben Tate
Senior Editor, Europe
The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars characterized the aim of philosophy as the effort “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Animated by a similar purpose, the philosophy list publishes widely across the field topically and historically, in order to provide the broadest possible understanding of the world and how to live wisely within it.
With strengths in the history of philosophy and moral and political philosophy, we publish books that reach into adjacent fields and we seek to engage general readers in search of the wisdom philosophy has to offer.
New & Noteworthy
Series
Ideas
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Ryan Patrick Hanley on Adam Smith
Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life.
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Justin Smith on Irrationality
It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal.”
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Jason Brennan: When the state is unjust, citizens may use justifiable violence
If you see police choking someone to death – such as Eric Garner, the 43-year-old black horticulturalist wrestled down on the streets of New York City in 2014 – you might choose to pepper-spray them and flee. You might even save an innocent life. But what ethical considerations justify such dangerous heroics?
