Kind of book
Philosophy
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Existentialism Is a Humanism
A public lecture Sartre gave in Paris in October 1945, published in 1946, when existentialism had become both a fashion and a target. He answers Communist critics, who…
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Dialectic of Enlightenment
A set of linked essays written by two Frankfurt School exiles in California during the Second World War, first circulated in 1944 as Philosophical Fragments and published in…
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The Rebel
A long essay published in 1951 that continues the argument of The Myth of Sisyphus. Where that book asked whether suicide can be justified in an absurd world,…
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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
A short essay, revised several times between 1935 and 1939, asking what happens to art when photography and film can copy and distribute it without limit. Benjamin argues…
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Phenomenology of Perception
Merleau-Ponty's main work, published in 1945. Its preface asks what phenomenology is and concludes that the reduction can never be completed, because we are always already in the…
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One-Dimensional Man
A work of social criticism, subtitled Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, written in the United States during the post-war boom. Marcuse argues that modern industrial…
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The Ethics of Ambiguity
A short book by Simone de Beauvoir, published in 1947, which answers the charge that existentialism cannot ground an ethics. Beauvoir starts from the ambiguity of the human…
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The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Habermas's first major book, a historical and sociological study written as his habilitation thesis. It traces the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain, France and…
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Creative Evolution
Bergson's best-known book, published in 1907, which offers a philosophical account of evolution. Chapter 1 argues that neither mechanism, which explains life by blind physical causes, nor finalism,…
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The Theory of Communicative Action
A two-volume treatise in social theory, Habermas's main work. Volume One, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, separates strategic action, aimed at success, from communicative action, aimed at…
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