Very Short Introductions - Böcker

John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design...

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Hinduism is practised by nearly eighty per cent of India's population, and by some seventy million people outside India. In this Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott offers a succinct and authoritative overview of this major religion, and analyses t...

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Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction introduces the reader to the teachings of the Buddha and to the workings of Buddhism in daily life. Damien Keown looks at the distinctive features of Buddhism, examining who the Buddha was and what his teachings...

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What is knowledge? How does it differ from mere belief? Do you need to be able to justify a claim in order to count as knowing it? How can we know that the outer world is real and not a dream? Questions like these are ancient ones, and the branch ...

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Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The tradition of ancient philosophy is a long, rich and varied one. Julia Annas gives a succinct account of ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, emphasizing its freshness and variety of themes, and...

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Originating in the pioneering work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the four decades around the turn of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy established itself in various forms in the 1930s. After t...

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There are many stories we can tell about the past, and we are not, perhaps, as free as we might imagine in our choice of which stories to tell, or where those stories end. John Arnold's Very Short Introduction is a stimulating essay about how we s...

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How much faith should we place in what scientists tell us? Is it possible for scientific knowledge to be fully 'objective'? What, really, can be defined as science? In the second edition of this Very Short Introduction, Samir Okasha explores the m...

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The rise and fall of the Roman Republic occupies a special place in the history of Western civilization. From humble beginnings on the seven hills beside the Tiber, the city of Rome grew to dominate the ancient Mediterranean. Led by her senatorial...

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Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, a behaviour that is intrinsic to our daily lives. As humans, we decipher the meaning of newspaper articles, books, legal matters, religious texts, political speeches, emails, ...

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Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, the income differences were small, but they have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. Since then, the interplay between geography, globalization, technological change, and economi...

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Today there is no place on Earth that does not harbour invasive exotic species. Invasive plants and animals can be found on every continent, including Antarctica, and within all waterbodies, including all oceans. In our increasingly connected worl...

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Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Our self-image as moral, well-behaved creatures is dogged by scepticism, relativism, hypocrisy, and nihilism, and by the fear that in a Godless world science has unmasked us as creatures fated ...

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At a time when Christianity is flourishing in the Southern hemisphere but declining in much of the West, this Very Short Introduction offers an important overview of the world's largest religion. Exploring the cultural and institutional dimensions...

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Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The Second World War was the most destructive conflict in history. It left Europe in ruins, its economies severely damaged and millions of its people facing malnutrition, its political systems ...

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As part of the Christian Bible, the New Testament is at once widely influential and (especially among the young and the educated) increasingly unknown. Those who want to know the basics can find in this introduction the sort of information that lo...

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The idea of saints and sainthood are familiar to all, irrelevant of religious faith. In this Very Short Introduction, Simon Yarrow looks at the origins, ideas, and definitions of sainthood, sanctity, and saints in the early Church, tracing their d...

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We find risks everywhere--from genetically modified crops, medical malpractice, and stem-cell therapy to intimacy, online predators, identity theft, inflation, and robbery. They arise from our own acts and they are imposed on us. In this Very Shor...

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'The avant-garde' is perhaps the most important and influential concept in the history of modern culture. For over a hundred years it has governed critical and historical assessment of the quality and significance of an artist or a work of art, in...

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The contribution of the Ancient Greeks to modern western culture is incalculable. In the worlds of art, architecture, myth, literature, and philosophy, the world we live in would be unrecognizably different without the formative influence of Ancie...

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Distilling the ideas of the greatest military theoreticians of history, including Sun Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Carl von Clausewitz, this clear and engaging Very Short Introduction presents a fascinating account of the "art of the general." An...

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Law has played a central role in American history. From colonial times to the present, law has not just reflected the changing society in which legal decisions have been made-it has played a powerful role in shaping that society, though not always...

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Malise Ruthven tackles the polemic and stereotypes surrounding this complex phenomenon - one that eludes sim today, a conclusion impossible to ignore since the events in New York on September 11 2001. But what does 'fundamentalism' really mean? Si...

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Very Short Introductions : Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Neurodiversity is the idea that human brains function in a variety of ways. By understanding that people take in, process, and respond to information differently, we can appreciate how these p...

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India has a long, rich, and diverse tradition of philosophical thought, spanning some two and a half millennia and encompassing several major religious traditions. This Very Short Introduction emphasizes the diversity of Indian thought, and is str...

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The English language is spoken by more than a billion people throughout the world. But where did English come from? And how has it evolved into the language used today? In this Very Short Introduction Simon Horobin investigates how we have arrived...

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The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such fervent investigations of the natural world that the period has been called the 'Scientific Revolution.' New ideas and discoveries not only redefined what human beings believed, knew, and coul...

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Multiculturalism appears to be in terminal crisis. It has been blamed for undermining national identity, diluting social cohesion, creating ethnic ghettos and cultural fragmentation, providing fertile ground for Islamic radicalism, encouraging per...

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How have the Jews survived? For millennia, they have defied odds by overcoming the travails of exile, persecution, and recurring plans for their annihilation. Many have attempted to explain this singular success as a result of divine intervention....

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Corporate social responsibility has been defined as 'the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society'. Is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) just window dressing or is it a contradiction in terms? In this Very Short Introduction,...

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