Fontana Modern Masters – serie

Karl Popper has been hailed as the greatest philosopher of all time and as a thinker whose influence is ackowledged by a variety of scholars. This work demonstrates Popper's importance across the whole range of philosophy and provides an introduction to the main themes of philosophy itself.

An introduction to the work of the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. It analyzes Wittgenstein's two major works, the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" and the "Philosophical Investigation", and sets his conclusions against the background of changes in the nature of philosophy in the 20th century.

In this Modern Master on Jacques Lacan (1901-81), Malcolm Bowie presents a clear, coherent introduction to the work of one of the most influential and forbidding thinkers of our century. A practising psychoanalyst for almost 50 years, Lacan first achieved notoriety with his pioneering article on Freud in the 1930s. After the Second World War, he emerged as the most original and controversial figure in French psychoanalysis, and because a guiding light in the Parisian intellectual resurgence of the 1950s, Lacan initiated and subsequently steered the crusade to reinterpret Freud's work in the light of the new structuralist theories of linguistics, evolving an elaborate, dense, systematic analysis of the relations between language and desire, focusing on the human subject as he or she is defined by linguistic and social pressures. His lectures and articles were collected and published as Ecrits in 1966, a text whose influence has been immense and persists to this day.Knowledge of Lacan's revolutionary ideas, which underpin those of his successors across the disciplines, is useful to an understanding of the work of many modern thinkers - literary theoriest, linguists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists. Malcolm Bowie's accessible critical introduction provides the perfect starting point for any exploration of the work of this formidable thinker.

The biography of Donald Winnicott, a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who spent nearly all of his professional life at Paddington Green Children's Hospital, London. His work and writing about children has been increasingly regarded as an influential contribution to psychoanalysis.

Since his death in 1883, Marx has been revised, distorted and rediscovered. This work provides a survey of Marx's life and his contributions to the varied fields of history, economics and politics.

‘Every page is clear and interesting, taking one closer to understanding why Jung’s thought was so profound. Examples, models and case histories are provided.’EconomistCarl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) left behind him a vast collection of valuable and original contributions to psychology; but because at first sight some of his ideas appear obscure, Jung has never been widely appreciated. His emphasis upon the spiritual aspects of human nature provides an important contrast with Freud’s insistence upon the physical. This very clear exposition of Jung’s ‘analytical psychology’ will convince a wide audience that Jung’s ideas are not only comprehensible, but also have an especial relevance to the times we live in.

‘A lucid well-organized expose of the theory and the manner of its development.’Times Literary SupplementThis remarkable book is a biography of an unusual kind. It is at once the life of a mind at work, and the story of a long and intricate process of discovery. It takes the form of a stern and uncompromising analysis, and yet the author is so much in tune with his subject that the personality, and even the feelings, of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his contemporaries emerge from that analysis. Readers will also sense the effect of the frightening enlargement of the known area of human unhappiness that Freud’s work revealed.

Chomsky’s contribution to the study of language has, over the last four decades, been enormous, and has exerted a powerful influence throughout the other cognitive sciences. Language is, arguably, an even more distinctively human characteristic than intelligence, and the thousands of different human languages are, according to Chomsy, cut to the same general pattern. This pattern is determined, he claims, by innate structuring principles which only human beings possess. Chomsky’s search for the universal in language has revitalized the question of the relationship between language and mind, and has provided a powerful new tool, generative grammar, for students of language.