Irish - All Irish Books

As we find ourselves at the cusp of an economic downturn, there has been a clear reinvigoration of Keynesian economics as governments are attempting to stimulate the market through public...

Meditation, Karma, Zen, Tantric and Nirvana are some of the many Buddhist ideas Westerners hear of frequently, even if their meaning has been lost in translation. This vast and complex...

Sigmund Freud was born 150 years ago, in May 1856, and went on to revolutionise the way we think about ourselves. Along with Darwin, Marx and Einstein, he is considered...

Stephen Hawking is a world-famous physicist, but few people outside his field know what he has done. To the public he is a figure of tragic dimensions - a brilliant...

Meditation, Karma, Zen, Tantric, Nirvana - these are some of the many Buddhist ideas that have entered our Western popular idiom, usually inappropriately and half-baked. What is the truth of...

Illustrator Jules Scheele teams up with Dr Laura Locker in this comic-book introduction to the political history of the Land of Opportunity.How did a political outsider like Trump win the...

This is a superlative graphic guide described as 'warm, witty and wise' by Jonathan Ree to an enigmatic master of twentieth-century philosophy.

'Clever and witty.' Susie Orbach, GuardianCarl Gustav Jung was the enigmatic and controversial father of analytical psychology.This updated edition of Introducing Jung brilliantly explains the theories that underpin Jung's work,...

Did Fascism end with the Allied victory over the Axis powers in 1945, or has it been lying dormant and is now re-awakening as we move into the 21st century?...

What really happens at the most fundamental levels of nature?Introducing Particle Physics explores the very frontiers of our knowledge, even showing how particle physicists are now using theory and experiment...

Father of existentialism or the Eeyore of philosophy?Known as the first modern theologian, SorenKierkegaard was a prolific writer of the Danish 'golden age'. A philosopher,poet and social critic, his key...

What is mathematics, and why is it such a mystery to so many people?Mathematics is the greatest creation of human intelligence. It affects us all. We depend on it in...

Genetics is the newest of all sciences - nothing useful was known about inheritance until just over a century ago. Now genetics is exploding, and before long we will have...

Can it be that the human brain possesses an in-built faculty for language? Noam Chomsky, one of the most brilliant linguists of the 20th century, believes that it does- that...

INTRODUCING guide to the father of existentialism and one of 20th century philosophy's most famous characters. Jean-Paul Sartre was once described as being, next to Charles de Gaulle, the most...

The ideas of psychoanalysis have permeated Western culture. It is the dominant paradigm through which we understand our emotional lives, and Freud still finds himself an iconic figure. Yet despite...

Jacques Lacan is now regarded as a major psychoanalytical theorist alongside Freud and Jung, although recognition has been delayed by fierce arguments over his ideas. Written by a leading Lacanian...

How did the mind evolve? How does the human mind differ from the minds of our ancestors, and from the minds of our nearest relatives, the apes? What are the...

"Introducing Plato" begins by explaining how philosophers like Socrates and Pythagoras influenced Plato's thought. It provides a clear account of Plato's puzzling theory of knowledge, and explains how this theory...

'An excellent book' - Ted Honderich, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London (UCL) Introducing Consciousness provides a comprehensive guide to the current state of...

"Introducing Aristotle" guides the reader through an explosion of theories, from the establishment of systematic logic to the earliest rules of science. Aristotle's authority extended beyond his own lifetime to...

Anthropology originated as the study of 'primitive' cultures. But the notion of 'primitive' exposes presumptions of 'civilized' superiority and the right of the West to speak for 'less evolved' others....

The term 'feminism' came into English usage around the 1890s, but women's conscious struggle to resist discrimination and sexist oppression goes much further back. This completely new and updated edition...

Modernism is usually thought of as a shock wave of innovations hitting art, architecture, music, cinema and literature - the work of Picasso, Joyce, Schoenberg, movements like Futurism and Dada,...

'An ideal introduction [to Stephen Hawking]' - Independent'Astonishingly comprehensive - clearer than Hawking himself' - FocusStephen Hawking was a world-famous physicist with a cameo in The Simpsons on his CV,...

Fractals are the geometry of the natural world. They're about the broken, wrinkled, wiggly world- the uneven shapes of nature, unlike the idealised forms of Euclidean geometry. We see fractals...

A superlative, fascinating graphic account of Albert Einstein's strange world and how his legacy has been built upon since.It is now more than a century since Einstein's theories of Special...

From the medicine we take, the treatments we receive, the aptitude and psychometric tests given by employers, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear to even the beer we...

If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, does it cause a tornado in Texas?Chaos theory attempts to answer such baffling questions. The discovery of randomness in apparently predictable physical...

Why must we believe that God is dead? Can we accept that traditional morality is just a 'useful mistake'? Did the principle of 'the will to power' lead to the...

What is the place of individual choice and consequence in a post-Holocaust world of continuing genocidal ethnic cleansing? Is "identity" now a last-ditch cultural defence of ethnic nationalisms and competing...

Quantum theory confronts us with bizarre paradoxes which contradict the logic of classical physics.At the subatomic level, one particle seems to know what the others are doing, and according to...

How do emotions affect your basic decision making? Why do certain smells prompt long-forgotten memories, and what makes us suddenly self-conscious?How does the biological organ, the brain, give rise to...

Sociology is interested in the ways people shape the society they live in, and the ways society shapes them. Simply, it is the study of what modern society is and...

Richard Appignanesi goes on a personal quest of Existentialism in its original state. He begins with Camus' question of suicide: 'Must life have a meaning to be lived?' Is absurdity...

Covering thinkers from Aristotle to Saussure and Chomsky, "Introducing Linguistics" reveals the rules and beauty that underlie language, our most human skill.

Was Marx himself a 'Marxist'? Was his visionary promise of socialism betrayed by Marxist dictatorship? Is Marxism inevitably totalitarian? What did Marx really say? "Introducing Marxism" provides a fundamental account...

A comic-book introduction to economics from David Orrell, the author of Economyths: 11 Ways Economics Gets it Wrong. With illustrations from Borin Van Loon. Part of the internationally-recognised Introducing Graphic...

Progress in genetics today would not be possible without Darwin's revolution, but the mysterious man who laid the rational basis for undermining belief in God's creation was remarkable timid. He...

What might a 'theory of everything' look like? Is science an ideology? Who were Adorno, Horkheimer or the Frankfurt School? The decades since the 1960s have seen an explosion in...

Freud revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. His psychoanalytic terms such as Id, Ego, libido, neurosis and Oedipus Complex have become a part of our everyday vocabulary.But do we...

The works of French philosopher Alain Badiou range from novels, poems, 'romanoperas' and popular political treatises to elaborate philosophical arguments engaging with mathematical theory.Badiou suggests that 'philosophy is always a...

Wagner's operatic works rank with the supreme achievements of western culture. But acceptance of Wagner's musical genius is tempered by feelings of misgiving and many believe the composer's underlying ideas...

Our knowledge comes primarily from experience - what our senses tell us. But is experience really what it seems?The experimental breakthroughs in 17th-century science of Kepler, Galileo and Newton informed...

In 1859, Charles Darwin shocked the world with a radical theory - evolution by natural selection. One hundred and fifty years later, his theory still challenges some of our most...

Why do Hindus revere the cow?Must Hindus be vegetarian? Hinduism is the world's oldest religion, yet the word 'Hindu' was never used before the 18th century by Hindus to describe...

Islam is one of the world's great monotheistic religions. Islamic culture, spanning 1,500 years, has produced some of the finest achievements of humanity. Yet the religion followed by a fifth...