A group of mostly Jewish German-speaking writers, the Prague Circle included some of the most significant figures in modern Western literature. Its core members, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and Egon Erwin Kisch, are renowned for their seminal dramas, lyric poetry, novels, short stories, and essays on aesthetics. The writers of the Prague Circle were bound together not by a common perspective or a particular ideology, but by shared experiences and interests.

The face circulates through most things of this world: anything that has presence, that presents itself, that has a front, a surface, an appearance, an aspect, a reputation, or honor – anything that confronts, opposes, or defies – has a face. And the face is a front: from the back it is just a head, a radically different entity. In this exciting new book, distinguished philosopher Marty Roth pursues considerations of the human face in art, literature, philosophy, and other manifestations of human culture.

Nietzsche and Joyce Carol Oates explores the American novelist’s The Wonderland Quartet through a reading of the German philosopher’s seminal works. In the four books of The Wonderland Quartet – A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), the National Book Award-winning Them (1969), and Wonderland (1971) – Oates aestheticizes cultural experiments after the Nietzschean proclamation of “God is dead” permeated American culture from about 1950.

In this new and persuasively argued study, philosopher Rod Cameron argues that definitive absolute Idealism changes the definition of logic, annuls ethics, and diminishes objective truth. Entitlement to “logic” is due to knowledge of the logos. The logos is religion and reasoning’s common origin. They are thus made compatible. Logic accesses ontology: a metaphysical realm of causation. Logic performs philosophy’s missing function: synthesis. The individual and the nation, Cameron argues, share the same essences.

It is often claimed that belief in God is based on faith, while non-belief is grounded in rationality. This claim is inaccurate. Moral philosopher Carlo Alvaro takes the reader through his philosophical journey—a journey taken with the absolute absence of faith. Through reasoning alone, and with an objective assessment of the classical theistic arguments, Deism takes the reader from disbelief to a particular version of deism. Deism discusses such arguments as the Kalam Cosmological, the asymmetry against the evil-god challenge, the anthropic principle, and the moral.

Once Upon a Time of Transition is a journey through four decades in the career of a Czech dissident and diplomat reflecting on transitions from the 20th to the 21st century. A meaningful contribution to on-going public debates, and to a better understanding of our current political situation, Ambassador Martin Palouš explores the uncertain territory between philosophy and politics. Directly or indirectly, his texts were inspired by three great Central European thinkers of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt, Jan Patočka and Eric Voegelin.

This exciting third volume of David B. Honey’s comprehensive history of Chinese thought begins with China after nomadic invaders overran the northern regions of the historic kingdom. The differentiation between scholarly emphases—northern focus on the traditional pedagogical commentary, and southern classical school’s more innovative commentary—led to an emphasis on the interpretation of the overall message of a text, not a close reading of smaller sections. As Honey explains, serious attention to the phonological nature of Chinese characters also began during in this long era.

Volume II of David B. Honey’s comprehensive history of Chinese thought covers a vital 500-year stretch in China’s history, from national unification in 221 BCE to the first post-imperial fragmentation into rival northern and southern polities. This volume discusses the reconstitution of the classics after the textual devastation wrought by the policies of the First Emperor of Qin, who destroyed many of them, and their eventual canonization by the crown during the Western Han period.

The first volume of David B. Honey’s comprehensive history of Chinese thought offers a close study of Confucius, that tradition’s proto-classicist. This opening volume examines Confucius traditions that largely formed the views of later classicists, who regarded him as their profession’s patron saint. Honey’s survey begins by examining how these views informed the Chinese classicists’ own identities as textual critics and interpreters, all dedicated to self-cultivation for government service.

In the 1930s, the exciting urban environment of Montreal provided the perfect venue for a varied group of people who came together to form a kind of “salon” in the turmoil of the Great Depression. For ten years, these friends and acquaintances met each week at the home of the artist John Lyman. They saw themselves as “modern,” a part of the avant-garde that was then busily changing the world.