Cornell University Press imprint: 972 books
The Fleeting Promise of Art
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Revisited
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2013
A discussion of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is bound to look significantly different today than it would have looked when the book was first published in 1970, or when it first appeared in English translation in the 1980s. In The Fleeting Promise of Art, Peter Uwe Hohendahl reexamines Aesthetic...
The Consumption of Justice
Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ideas and practices of justice in Europe underwent significant change as procedures were transformed and criminal and civil caseloads grew apace. Drawing on the rich judicial records of Marseille from the years 1264 to 1423, especially records of civil...
The Criminalization of Abortion in the West
Its Origins in Medieval Law
Language: English
Release Date: May 22, 2012
Anyone who wants to understand how abortion has been treated historically in the western legal tradition must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories. On one hand, there is the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong warranting...
Brotherly Love
Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France
Language: English
Release Date: August 21, 2014
Friendship, an acquired relationship primarily based on choice rather than birth, lay at the heart of Enlightenment preoccupations with sociability and the formation of the private sphere. In Brotherly Love, Kenneth Loiselle argues that Freemasonry is an ideal arena in which to explore the changing...
Aversion and Erasure
The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2017
In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit...
by Timothy J. Reiss
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2018
Timothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class...
by Peter van Van Inwagen
Language: English
Release Date: December 4, 1990
Language: English
Release Date: December 4, 1990
According to Peter van Inwagen, visible inanimate objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. In defending this controversial thesis, he offers fresh insights on such topics as personal identity, commonsense belief, existence over time, the phenomenon of vagueness, and the relation between metaphysics and ordinary language.
The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus
Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2011
"Perhaps Hermeticism has fascinated so many people precisely because it has made it possible to produce many analogies and relationships to various traditions: to Platonism in its many varieties, to Stoicism, to Gnostic ideas, and even to certain Aristotelian doctrines. The Gnostic, the esoteric,...
Telling Stories
The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History
Language: English
Release Date: August 22, 2012
In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives-autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs-are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples...
Germany's War and the Holocaust
Disputed Histories
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2013
"While attempts to come to terms with past catastrophe... can help prevent its recurrence, they may also provide arguments for... actions against the real or imagined perpetrators of previous disasters. The confrontation with... catastrophe can help us understand the roots and nature of this century's...
The Devil
A New Biography
Language: English
Release Date: September 11, 2014
"Although the Devil still 'lives' in modern popular culture, for the past 250 years he has become marginal to the dominant concerns of Western intellectual thought. That life could not be thought or imagined without him, that he was a part of the everyday, continually present in nature and history,...
The Political Unconscious
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
Language: English
Release Date: April 11, 2014
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement...
History and Its Limits
Human, Animal, Violence
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2011
Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme...
by Robert B. Westbrook
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2015
Over a career spanning American history from the 1880s to the 1950s, John Dewey sought not only to forge a persuasive argument for his conviction that "democracy is freedom" but also to realize his democratic ideals through political activism. Widely considered modern America's most important philosopher,...