The Decline of the West - Volume 1 published in 1917, Volume 2 in 1922 - has exercised and challenged opinion ever since. It was a huge undertaking by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), formerly an unpublished historian and philosopher who set out to radically reconsider history - the rise and fall of world civilisations and their cultures. His primary view was to reject the established Eurocentric paradigm (ancient/classical, Medieval - and, following...

With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and analogies between the stars in the heavens and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning...

"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation"-- Provided by publisher

R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, philosopher, mathematician, and dogged individualist. Perhaps best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term "Spaceship Earth," his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought. Critical Path is Fuller's master work-the summing up of a lifetime's thought and...

"What good are the arts? Why should we care about the past? For millennia, humanity has sought to understand and transmit to future generations not just the "know-how" of life, but the "know-why"--the meaning and purpose of our existence, as expressed in art, architecture, religion, and philosophy. This crucial passing down of knowledge has required the radical integration of insights from the past and from other cultures. In Culture, acclaimed author,...

In this remarkable and enlivening study, Stefanos Geroulanos traces the development of our modern fascination with humanity's deep past, and lays out that fascination's deadly costs. An eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origins of humanity--and how, for three centuries, ideas of prehistory have been used to justify devastating violence against others.

"Science and the Modern World" by Alfred North Whitehead, originally published in 1925 redefines the concept of modern science. This book takes readers through the history of modern science and shows how cultural history has affected science over time in Romanticism, Quantum Theory, religion, and movements for social progress. Whitehead invites his audience to understand and read with celebration about the contemporary, historical, and cultural context...

The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact-political, demographic, ecological, and psychological-of disease on cultures. A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work. -The New Yorker From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, William H. McNeill's Plagues and...

"... History of the seven rivers representing the great natural arteries running through civilization, by virtue of the roles they have played in our shared and conflicted world history."--Provided by publisher.

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a groundbreaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the Freudian metapsychology, it thinks anew the relation between temporality and traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the character...