Best of
Theory

1966

Against Interpretation and Other Essays


Susan Sontag - 1966
    Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences


Michel Foucault - 1966
    The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that “man”—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge


Peter L. Berger - 1966
    In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdicipline that, since Max Scheler, has been known as the sociology of knowledge.

Negative Dialectics


Theodor W. Adorno - 1966
    Negative Dialectics is a critique of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, and a visionary elaboration of the author's own vision of dialectics.

Bergsonism


Gilles Deleuze - 1966
    In Bergsonism, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital.A perfect companion book to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Bergsonism is also of particular interest to students of Deleuze’s own work, influenced as it is by Bergson. Given his texts on Nietzsche, Kafka, and cinema, this book by Deleuze is essential to his English-reading audience. The paperback contains a new afterword prepared by the author especially for this English-language edition.

Enneads II


Plotinus - 1966
    His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master's death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Moslems, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience. In his acclaimed edition of Plotinus, Armstrong provides excellent introductions to each treatise. His invaluable notes explain obscure passages and give reference to parallels in Plotinus and others.

Some Lessons in Metaphysics


José Ortega y Gasset - 1966
    He wrote on varied subjects: love, bullfighting, hunting, education, and Don Quixote. His incessant search for knowledge led him into political theory and practice and metaphysics as well.This present book represents Ortega's incursions into a field of thought along which anyone curious enough to travel will find leads him into a succession of ideas that extend his vision and his understanding of himself. If generations of men have puzzled over man's role in the universe and have tried to put it into words, Ortega's phrase "I am myself and my circumstances" is so simply and appealingly true that it may come as a great surprise to find it hailed as an important philosophic contribution. In this day of alienation, when the young have difficulty finding out who they are, Ortega's venture into metaphysics is a lit lamp in the first chapter, of the student's role will shed light on the reason for present student disorders.

Rethinking Anthropology


Edmund Leach - 1966
    This book presents a collection of brilliant and provocative essays from Edmund Leach, one of the most original voices in the social anthropological tradition.

Psychopathology and Literature


Leslie Y. Rabkin - 1966
    This literary collection includes such works as Macbeth to demonstrate obsessive-compulsive reactions, The Judgement by Franz Kafka to demonstrate anxiety reactions, The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson to show dissociative reactions.