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Polity is committed to publishing high-quality original work and key textbooks in the field of philosophy. Our list embraces continental philosophy and the analytical tradition, and we are actively expanding our publishing programme in both.
We publish some of the leading European philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Gianni Vattimo and Norberto Bobbio. We also publish many distinguished philosophers in the English-speaking world, including Brian Barry, Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Bernstein, Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, Carole Pateman, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Robert Goodin, Philip Pettit and Christopher Hookway.
Visit our highlights page for more information on our new and forthcoming general interest titles.
Lisa Bortolotti: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
“Without presupposing any prior knowledge of either philosophy or science, Lisa Bortolotti explains all the central issues clearly and adds some interesting twists of her own. This is an excellent first book for anybody who wants to understand the relation between scientific theorizing and reality.”
David Papineau, King's College, London
Noel Stewart: Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy
"Noel Stewart presents us with a long-awaited undergraduate text that combines normative ethics, practical (or applied) ethics, and metaethics. This excellently written book can be used for a sophisticated one-semester ethics course or for two separate courses, one combining normative and practical or combining normative and metaethics. The metaethics section is a clear, elegant, and accessible introduction to the topic. All in all, the text provides a lucid introduction to the themes and issues across the spectrum of ethics."
Sherrill Begres, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Beverley Clack & Brian R. Clack: The Philosophy of Religion 2e
“With an unusual lightness of touch, the Clacks offer a superbly clear tour of the major arguments that draws on an exceptional range of illustrations and insights, closing with a discussion of religion post-9/11 that will help all who are seriously concerned to develop a truly thoughtful approach to religion for our time.”
George Pattison, Christ Church, University of Oxford
O'Brien: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge
This introductory book guides the reader through the key issues and debates within contemporary epistemology. Engaging illustrative examples are used throughout, many taken from literature, cinema and TV.
Stone: An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy
Stone provides clear, succinct and readable accounts of key feminist thinkers including de Beauvoir, Butler, Gilligan, Irigaray, and MacKinnon. She also introduces other thinkers who have influenced feminist philosophy including Arendt, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan. Accessible in approach, this book is ideal for students and researchers interested in feminist philosophy, feminist theory, women's studies, and political theory. It will also appeal to the general reader.
Swift: Political Philosophy
A triumph of a book that illuminates the last two decades of politics and points the way to the next…How does philosophy affect politics? Through books like this.'
James Purnell MP
Maslin: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind
This text is an invaluable introduction which provides all the information, questions and features students will need to get them thinking laterally about the philosophy of mind – ideal for A Level students and first-year undergraduates.
Visit the accompanying website at www.polity.co.uk/maslin
Baert: Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism
In this ground-breaking new text, Patrick Baert analyses the central perspectives in the philosophy of social science, critically investigating the work of Durkheim, Weber, Popper, critical realism, critical theory, and Rorty's neo pragmatism.
West: An Introduction to Continental Philosophy
‘This book is an extremely impressive and masterly work. As an introduction for students, or indeed, for professional philosophers who need to improve their philosophical credentials this book is invaluable. I have no doubts about the significant contribution it will make to contemporary philosophical research and teaching.'
Australian National University Reporter
Miller: Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics
"An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics provides for the first time a critical survey of famous figures in 20th Century metaethics together with in-depth discussions of contemporary philosophers and will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers and professional philosophers with interests in contemporary metaethics."
Philosophical Inquiry
Individual chapters deal with: the open-question arguments and Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism; A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and the rejection of non-naturalism; Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism; Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivism; J. L. Mackie’s ‘error-theory’ of moral judgement; anti-realist and best opinion accounts of moral truth; the non-reductionist naturalism of the ‘Cornell realists’; Peter Railton’s naturalistic reductionism; the analytic functionalism of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit; the contemporary non-naturalism of John McDowell and David Wiggins; and the debate between internalists and externalists in moral psychology.
This series makes available to a wide audience the ideas of some of the most influential thinkers of our time. Cutting across the boundaries between academic disciplines and between different traditions of thought, the series addresses European as well as Anglo-American thinkers. The books are written in a clear and concise way, making them suitable for students and for the interested general reader.
New and published titles of particular interest to philosophy students and lecturers are listed below. Please check other subject pages for further titles in this series.
This series makes available to a wide audience the ideas of some of the most influential classic thinkers of our time. The books situate thinkers within their social and historical contexts, showing how their work emerged from a particular setting and addressed some of the concerns of their time. They are written in a clear and concise way, making them suitable for students and for the interested general reader.
Key Concepts is a series of concise and accessible textbooks exploring core concepts in the social sciences. The books focus on concepts that are central to each discipline and have a high degree of complexity surrounding them. For more information on individual titles please see the series webpage: www.polity.co.uk/keyconcepts.
This ground-breaking series sets a new agenda for debates in the social sciences and humanities. Each volume in the series sheds light on a particular issue or theme shaping social, political, economic, and cultural life in the new millennium. Written by internationally renowned scholars who are leaders in their field, books in this series provide original and accessible overviews of some of the most important topics of our age.
