Books published by The University of Chicago Press

This work challenges what Glbert Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory", the Cartesian "myth" of the separation of mind and matter.

"The Monkey and The Tiger" includes two detective stories, "The Morning of the Monkey" and "The Night of the Tiger." In the first, a gibbon drops an emerald in the open gallery of Dee's official residence, leading the judge to discover a strangely mutilated body in the woods--and how it got there. In the second, Dee is traveling to the imperial capital to assume a new position when he is separated from his escort by a flood. Marooned in a large country house surrounded by fierce bandits, Dee confronts an apparition that helps him solve a mystery.

Steinberg argues in this work that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition.

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved--from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling--Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations--all tempered by personal relationships--altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

Judge Dee, the master detective of seventh-century China, sets out to solve a puzzling double murder and discovers complex passions lurking beneath the placid surface of academic life. To connect crimes with betrayals and adulteries from decades past, the clever judge must visit a high-class brothel and the haunted shrine of the Black Fox.

What happens when the meaning of life based on a divine revelation no longer makes sense? Luc Ferry argues that modernity has not killed the search for meaning but has transformed the search into a more humanitarian language.

Ever since the renaissance, the female body has been a primary symbol of artistic beauty in the West. With the advent of the avant-garde and modernist art, beauty became suspect. This work explores how this happened, tracing the century's troubled relationship with beauty.

Against the backdrop of the violent partition of India and Pakistan, this volume sketches one last bittersweet romance, revealing the divided loyalties of the British as they flee, retreat from, or cling to India.

Willcock provides a line-by-line commentary that explains allusions and Homeric conventions that a student or general reader could not be expected to bring to an initial encounter with the Iliad.

This dictionary includes descriptions of hundreds oflanguages from A to Z and definitions of literary and grammatical concepts, as well as explanations of terms used in linguistics, language teaching, and speech pathology.

Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution the US stands as one of the greatest powers on earth and the undoubted leader of the western hemisphere. The author maintains that the Founding Fathers clearly understood the connection between public finance and power: a well-managed public debt was a key part of every modern state.

Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, this book attempts to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre.

"Stâephane Gerson's edited collection spotlights historians who have embraced the methodological, practical, and ethical challenges of writing about that most slippery and opaque of subjects, their own families-a practice that many historians have long felt has been discouraged professionally. In a remarkable number of ways, the diverse lineup of contributors here bring into the open the difficulties and complexities-personal, professional, and historiographic-that ensue from not distancing themselves from their subjects but stressing their closeness. Gerson suggests that historians overall might write better histories if they felt free to acknowledge that what speaks to them professionally might also be what moves them personally"--

"Stâephane Gerson's edited collection spotlights historians who have embraced the methodological, practical, and ethical challenges of writing about that most slippery and opaque of subjects, their own families-a practice that many historians have long felt has been discouraged professionally. In a remarkable number of ways, the diverse lineup of contributors here bring into the open the difficulties and complexities-personal, professional, and historiographic-that ensue from not distancing themselves from their subjects but stressing their closeness. Gerson suggests that historians overall might write better histories if they felt free to acknowledge that what speaks to them professionally might also be what moves them personally"--

A revelatory look at modern liberalism's historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.    Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, which widened its impact but narrowed its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of "professional class liberalism," and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals' egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional class liberals' power. The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism's place in contemporary American life.

A revelatory look at modern liberalism's historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.    Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, which widened its impact but narrowed its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of "professional class liberalism," and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals' egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional class liberals' power. The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism's place in contemporary American life.