Μελέτες & Φιλοσοφία

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. An Idea Can Go Extinct is Bill McKibben's impassioned, groundbreaking account of how, by changing the earth's entire atmosphere, the weather and the most basic forces around us, 'we are ending nature.'Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration.

Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

**Shortlisted for the 2023 Royal Society Science Book Prize**Discover the world as you've never seen it before - through the eyes of animals. 'Immersive and mind-blowing' Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of TreesThe Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of this world.

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, welcoming us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. Showing us that in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes. The perfect Christmas gift for nature lovers.

Collection of Milton's most significant prose works features the famous tract "Areopagitica," a defense of freedom of speech, plus "Of Education," "Autobiographical Extracts," "The Doctrine and Disciple of Divorce," other essays.

Bronislaw Malinowski's pathbreaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific is at once a detailed account of exchange in the Melanesian islands and a manifesto of a modernist anthropology. Malinowski argued that the goal of which the ethnographer should never lose sight is 'to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.' Through vivid evocations of Kula life, including the building and launching of canoes, fishing expeditions and the role of myth and magic amongst the Kula people, Malinowski brilliantly describes an inter-island system of exchange - from gifts from father to son to swapping fish for yams - around which an entire community revolves. A classic of anthropology that did much to establish the primacy of painstaking fieldwork over the earlier anecdotal reports of travel writers, journalists and missionaries, it is a compelling insight into a world now largely lost from view. With a new foreword by Adam Kuper.

"Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range... [He] has packed into this short book an impressive amount of original reflection... A rich and illuminating book."-Thomas Nagel, New York Review of BooksIdealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models to make sense of the world, and life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities we encounter. Our beliefs, desires, and sense of justice are bound up with these ideals, and we proceed "as if" our representations were true, while knowing they are not. In this elegant and original meditation, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that this instinct to idealize is not dangerous or distracting so much as it is necessary. As If explores how strategic untruth plays a critical role in far-flung areas of inquiry: decision theory, psychology, natural science, and political philosophy. A polymath who writes with mainstream clarity, Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination not just in the arts but in science, morality, and everyday life. "Appiah is the rare public intellectual who is also a first-rate analytic philosopher, and the characteristic virtues associated with each of these identities are very much in evidence throughout the book."-Thomas Kelly, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Scholar, theologian and philosopher, Martin Buber is one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. He believed that the deepest reality of human life lies in the relationship between one being and another. Between Man and Man is the classic work where he puts this belief into practice, applying it to the concrete problems of contemporary society. Here he tackles subjects as varied as religious ethics, social philosophy, marriage, education, psychology and art. Including some of his most famous writings, such as the masterful What is Man?, this enlightening work challenges each reader to reassess their encounter with the world that surrounds them.

Truth is increasingly marginalized. Powerful news interests, social media and political orators all seem to point to the idea that the days of absolute Truth are past. Religions have always claimed to stand for a transcendent dimension to reality and to the idea of an absolute claim to Truth but, in the West, religion has been and is declining in influence.

Fundamentalism is on the rise and this, combined with relativism, contributes to the current malaise. Peter Vardy has a passionate commitment to helping people think about key issues deeply, yet writes in a lucid and clear style. In Beyond the Cave he explains why claims to absolute Truth have become severely eroded but he also charts a way forward.

Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full colour. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression.

The only limit is your imagination.