Category: Philosophy

February 2, 2022

Joseph L. Graves and Alan Goodman in Conversation with Olivia Treynor on Racism, Not Race

Joseph L. Graves and Alan Goodman’s new book, Racism, Not Race, breaks down crucial myths about race in a highly readable format. Dissecting everything from junk science on athletic ability to the real reasons different populations are more vulnerable to...

December 6, 2021

Announcing the Columbia University Press Spring 2022 Catalog

Click on the down arrow above to download a PDF of our Spring 2022 catalog. Dear Readers, Close to two years have now passed since the pandemic imposed new limits on all of us. Many of Columbia’s authors have responded...

September 23, 2021

You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity

A Quiz and Book Excerpt

More and more, we present ourselves and encounter others through profiles. A profile shows us not as we are seen directly but how we display ourselves to a broader public. As we observe how others observe us, we calibrate our...

September 23, 2021

Of Understanding Experience and the Experience of Understanding

By Sonam Kachru

Time was when the words of Vasubandhu, the influential Buddhist philosopher from Peshawar (fl. late fourth–early fifth centuries C.E.), could be imagined to be part of the ecology of a place—as when the Sanskrit poet Bāṇabhaṭṭa intimated that Vasubandhu’s Treasury...

September 23, 2021

Book Excerpt! A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West (introduction)

By Luce Irigaray and translated by Stephen Seely, Stephen Pluháĉek, and Antonia Pont

We are delighted to publish A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West  by philosopher/psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. In her most accessible and personal work yet, she tells her own story of how she began to practice yoga and came...

September 13, 2021

Announcing Our 2021-2022 Philosophy Catalog

Letter from the Philosophy Editor: It is with great pleasure that I present the Columbia University Press philosophy catalog for 2022. These titles, which span subjects from critical theory to political philosophy to philosophy of religion, aesthetics, environmental and animal...

June 17, 2021

Which Way for the Biden/Blinken World Liberal Order?

By Leon Fink

In the spring 2017, Antony Blinken, then a resident fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, taught a seminar on America’s role in the world. Against a background of growing doubt among many Americans about the advantages of...

April 5, 2021

Q&A: Erin M. Kearns and Joseph K. Young on Tortured Logic

Experts in the intelligence community say that torture is ineffective. Yet much of the public appears unconvinced: surveys show that nearly half of Americans think that torture can be acceptable for counterterrorism purposes. In this Q&A, Erin M. Kearns and...

March 15, 2021

The Religious Left on the Rise Again? Let’s Wait and See

By L. Benjamin Rolsky

In January, Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as the forty-sixth president of the United States. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently observed, the inauguration was a “very American-Catholic spectacle” because it represented a moment in which the...

December 9, 2020

Video: Mark C. Taylor Reads from His New Book, Intervolution: Smart Bodies Smart Things

 “Intervolution is at once informative and thought-provoking—a fascinating exploration of the ever-narrowing gap between men and machines. Mark C. Taylor uses his own experience of chronic illness to probe some of the central questions of our time.” ~Elizabeth Kolbert,...

December 7, 2020

Three Questions That Make One

By Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh

“Drawing on philosophy, politics, poetry, psychoanalysis, and history, and extending from North Africa and the Mediterranean to Europe and North America, this powerful book poses the Arab and Jewish questions as inextricable, intimate, and hybrid forces that shape our desires...

December 5, 2020

Video: Michael Alexander on the Origins of Making Peace with the Universe

 “What happens when worlds fall apart? It’s a question that so many of us have asked ourselves in times of crisis. The marvel of Michael Scott Alexander’s book is that he has transformed his own search into a discovery...