World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1991, English
Softcover, 306 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1991 softcover edition.
Nietzsche's friend, the philosopher Paul Rée, once said that Nietzsche was more important for his letters than for his books, and even more important for his conversations than for his letters. In Conversations with Nietzsche, Sander Gilman and David Parent present a fascinating selection of eighty-seven memoirs, anecdotes, and informal recollections by friends and acquaintances of Nietzsche. Translated from the definitive German collection, Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, these biographical pieces--some of which have never before appeared in English--cover the entire span of Nietzsche's life: his boyhood friendships, his arrival at the University of Bonn, his appointment to professor at Basel at age twenty-four, the impact of The Birth of Tragedy, his friendship with Wagner, his life in Italy, his confinement at the Jena Sanatorium, and his death. They present the philosopher in dialogue with friends and acquaintances, and provide new insights into him as a thinker and as a commentator on his times, recounting his views on some of the greats of history, including Burckhardt, Goethe, Kant, Dostoevsky, Napoleon, and numerous others. In his selections, Gilman has carefully balanced documents concerning Nietzsche's personal life with others on his intellectual development, resulting in an entertaining and informative book that will appeal to a wide audience of educated readers.
Very Good copy with one cover corner fold, otherwise a preserved tight copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 292 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Polity / US
$35.00 - In stock -
"One strength of this admirable introduction to modern German philosophy for English-speaking readers is the masterly manner in which Andrew Bowie manages to fairly structure an abundance of illuminating ideas."—JÜRGEN HABERMAS
"This is probably the most knowledgeable presentation in English of the history of the German contribution to so-called continental philosophy from Herder and Kant to Gadamer and Habermas. Andrew Bowie is an exceptional scholar of German Romanticism and Idealism as well as of the hermeneutic tradition and critical theory of the twentieth century."—MANFRED FRANK, EBERHARD-KARLS-UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN
"This book has remarkable breadth. Not only does it cover a larger period of German thought than other similar books, but it also has a genuine appreciation for so-called "second-rank" figures (e.g., Herder, Schlegel, Schelling) and for a range of issues concerning aesthetics and society that go far beyond the narrow focus on epistemology and metaphysics that one typically finds in philosophical overviews."—KARL AMERIKS, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
Introduction to German Philosophy is the only book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments of modern German philosophy from Kant to the present. Andrew Bowie offers an accessible introduction to the work, among others, of Kant, Herder, Fichte, the Romantics, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Frege, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Gadamer and Habermas. Modern German philosophy is proving to be more and more important to the study of all areas of the humanities. The book considers how that philosophy reacts to revolutionary changes in modern science, society and culture. The works of the philosophers are seen both as part of the wider traumatic history of Germany and as offering arguments which are central to debates in contemporary philosophy and theory in the humanities.
The book is clearly written, and makes complex arguments accessible without running the risk of oversimplification. It will be essential reading for students in philosophy, literature and the humanities in general and for anyone wanting to know more about the role of the German tradition within philosophy and literature as a whole.
ANDREW BOWIE is Chair of German and Founding Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London
Near Fine—Fine copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 259 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$45.00 - In stock -
First 2002 edition.
This is the only available systematic critical overview of German aesthetics from 1750 to the present. The book begins with the work of Baumgarten and covers all the major writers on German aesthetics that follow, including Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche up to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Adorno. The book offers a clear and non-technical exposition of ideas, placing these in a wider philosophical context where necessary.
Such is the importance of German aesthetics that the market for this book will extend far beyond the domain of philosophy to such fields as literary studies, fine art and music.
Kai Hammermeister teaches in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at The Ohio State University
As New copy.
1996, English
Softcover, 564 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$35.00 - In stock -
This collection provides the first English translation of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on the Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present.
In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, how- ever, that at the end of the Enlightenment German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that few subsequent criticisms have emerged that were not first considered before the end of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.
Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as several important essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.
"Schmidt is excellently equipped, both as a scholar-historian of the Enlightenment and as a political philosopher, to present these issues. [This] will be a classic source for students and scholars."—Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Brandeis University
James Schmidt is Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Boston University. He is author of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (1985).
Near Fine copy.
1999, English
Softcover, 708 pages, 23 x 15.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$55.00 - In stock -
This 1997 (first published in paperback in 1999) book was the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. The volume has been furnished with a substantial editorial apparatus including translator's introductions and explanatory notes to each text by Mary Gregor, and a general introduction to Kant's moral and political philosophy by Allen Wood. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms.
Edited by Mary J. Gregor
Introduction by Allen W. Wood
Good copy due to bumping to top right corner, otherwise VG—NF.
1994, English
Softcover, 308 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Continuum / London
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1994 edition.
Up to the end of the nineteenth century, Germany largely perceived itself as "the nation of poets and philosophers." But with the enormous popularity of Schubert and Wagner, this began to change. Suddenly, composers also began to play a greater role in theories of national identity, and music theory became and important element of German thought. The essays in this volume reflect this, and are by a range of writers: Adorno, Bloch, Thomas Mann, Wachenroder, Herder, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hegel, Bettina von Arnim, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Brecht, Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, Christian Gottlieb Ludwig, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, Arnold Schering, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Johann Georg Sulzer, and others.
Fine—As New.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 292 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Penn State University / Pennsylvania
$70.00 - In stock -
First hardcover 1992 edition.
“Bernstein’s rich and provocative study examines the essentially modern attempt to distinguish a unique or autonomous realm of the aesthetic, and presents an ambitious argument designed to undermine that post-Kantian insistence on a categorical distinction among the beautiful, the true, and the good. In doing so, he offers a thoughtful account of why the fate of art has been so central to those thinkers in the European tradition worried about the implications of the European Enlightenment, and he presents a number of original, critical readings of individual thinkers. This is an important, very interesting book.”—Robert B. Pippen, University of Chicago
Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity.
Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers—Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno—and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics (its concepts of judgment, genius, and the sublime) to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies.
Near Fine copy in Near Fine dust jacket.
2011, English
Hardcpver (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras invented harmony. It is said that one day, he wandered by a forge and, hearing a wondrous sound come from within, ventured in to investigate. He found five men hammering with five hammers. To his astonishment, he discovered that four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, which, when combined, allowed him to reconstruct the laws of music. But there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he reason its discordant sound. He therefore discarded it.
What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? In The Fifth Hammer, Daniel Heller-Roazen lucidly shows how that fabled gesture offers a key for understanding ideas of harmony in the broadest sense of the term. Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has constituted a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the sensible world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal elements of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down in a set of ideal units. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound.
In eight chapters, linked together like the tones of a single scale, The Fifth Hammer explores the sounds and echoes of that percussion, as they have made themselves felt on the most varied of attempts to understand the natural world. In vastly different and yet complementary ways, ancient thought and early modern science and philosophy, before and after Galileo, encountered a troubling dimension of nature, which they sought to interpret and resolve.
Confronting disproportion, they revealed their fundamental aims and limits. From music to metaphysics, from aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz and Kant, The Fifth Hammer explores the ways in which orderings of the sensible world have continued to suggest a reality that neither notes nor letters can fully transcribe.
Heller-Roazen brings remarkable gifts and skills to his inquiry. Formidably learned and versed in many languages, he has also steeped himself in the original texts and in the manifold and difficult interpretative directions that have struggled with this archetypal narrative....I thoroughly admired Heller-Roazen's thoughtful and beautiful writing in The Fifth Hammer.
-Isis
This tightly reasoned book rewards close study, and will be of interest to astronomers, mathematicians, and students of musical history.
-The Sun News
1999, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$25.00 - In stock -
In this volume, Fenves expands the context of Jacques Derrida's work on voice and tonality by presenting English translations of two of Kant's important late essays, "On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy" and "Announcement of a Near Conclusion of a Treaty for Eternal Peace in Philosophy". The book also includes a revised translation, by John Leavey, of Derrida's "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy" which rewrites and reorients Kant's essays. Observing that Derrida continues the speculation Kant begins, Fenves proposes that these essays reveal tonality and the "end" of philosophy to be perennial compulsions.
Very Good copy of first 1999 paperback edition.
1966, English
Softcover, 252 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1966 softcover edition of Kant's Analytic by New Zealand born philosopher Jonathan Bennett.
"This book is a critical exposition and evaluation of the ideas contained in the first half of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". The author believes that we understand Kant only in proportion as we can say, clearly and in contemporary terms, what his problems were, which of them are still problems and what contribution Kant makes to their solution. Many commentaries and expositions of Kant's philosophy adopt a rigidly anti- or pro-Kantian approach, which make it difficult for the student to command a clear view of his theories. Mr Bennett tries to avoid partisan disputes and to present an unbiased assessment of !Cant based on modern analytical technique. Kant's Analytic, though intended primarily as an 'introduction' for students who have read little by or about Kant, also seeks to recon-struct, assess and criticise his work, and devotes much space to independent discussion of philosophical issues."
"And so Bennett does argue, continuously, fiercely, and fruitfully; and summons to join in the argument, at appropriate moments, those older contemporaries, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and those younger contemporaries, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayler, Quine, Quinton, Warnock, and others. This is splendid, and a necessary corrective to that extraordinary isolation in which Kant tends to be islanded, partly indeed, by his own unique qualities, but partly by oceans of the wrong kind of respect. Bennett, continuously engaging his great antagonist, shows the right kind."
Jonathan Bennett (b. 1930) is a New Zealand born philosopher of language and metaphysics, specialist of Kant's philosophy and a historian of early modern philosophy.
Good copy with general wear/marking/age.
1993, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15.2 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$45.00 - Out of stock
In the space of barely more than five years, with the publication of four pathbreaking books, Slavoj Zizek has earned the reputation of being one of the most arresting, insightful, and scandalous thinkers in recent memory. Perhaps more than any other single author, his writings have constituted the most compelling evidence available for recognizing Jacques Lacan as the preemient philosopher of our time.
In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle. Are we, Zizek asks, confined to a postmodern universe in which truth is reduced to the contingent effect of various discursive practices and where our subjectivity is dispersed through a multitude of ideological positions? No is his answer, and the way out is a return to philosophy. This revisit to German Idealism allows Zizek to recast the critique of ideology as a tool for disclosing the dynamic of our society, a crucial aspect of which is the debate over nationalism, particularly as it has developed in the Balkans-Zizek's home. He brings the debate over nationalism into the sphere of contemporary cultural politics, breaking the impasse centered on nationalisms simultaneously fascistic and anticolonial aspirations. Provocatively, Zizek argues that what drives nationalistic and ethnic antagonism is a collectively driven refusal of our own enjoyment.
Using examples from popular culture and high theory to illuminate each other-opera, film noir, capitalist universalism, religious and ethnic fundamentalism-this work testifies to the fact that, far more radically than the postmodern sophists, Kant and Hegel are our contemporaries.
Very Good copy.
2006, English
Softcover, 376 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First edition.
The Lyotard Reader and Guide is a one-stop companion to Lyotard's thought. It covers the full range of his works, from his three main books (Discours, figure; Libidinal Economy; and The Differend) and up to his influential essays in The Inhuman and Postmodern Fables.
The readings are organized into sections on philosophy, politics, art, and literature. Several have never before been translated into English. Detailed introductions to each section by two leading Lyotard scholars explain the philosopher's key ideas and provide crucial social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical context. As a sourcebook and guide, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive volume on Lyotard. It is indispensable to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the arts, and politics.
Keith Crome is lecturer in philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry.
James Williams is a leading Lyotard scholar. He is senior lecturer and head of philosophy at the University of Dundee and is the author of Understanding Poststructuralism and The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influence.
Very Good copy.
2017, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 17.3 x 22 cm
Published by
MUDAM / Luxembourg
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Carl Andre, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Barbara Bloemink, Jan Boelen, Louise Bourgeois, Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler Cheney, Alex Coles, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Hal Foster, Sigmund Freud, Dan Graham, Isabelle Graw, Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Dietmar Rübel, Graham Harman, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Dave Hickey, Matthew Higgs, Donald Judd, Immanuel Kant, Frederick J. Kiesler, Sven Lütticken, Alessandro Mendini, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jasper Morrison, Bruno Munari, Robert Nickas, Alice Rawsthorn, Jeff Rian, Richard Rinehart, Anthony Vidler
This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the present day, explores man’s rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time. Writers from different fields explore how things interact with materials, structures, and production processes while defining and registering the intangible qualities of the material world. Each author considers the different relationships between the context of a thing and its thingness, describing the ways in which things and ideas intersect.
Copublished with MUDAM Luxembourg
Design by Florence Richard
2012, English
Softcover, 587 pages, 10.8 x 17.5 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$52.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume V: The Copernican Imperative (Reissued Edition)
Damian Veal (Ed.)
Associate Editors: Robin Mackay, Ray Brassier
Philosophical Research and Development.
Ever since Nicolaus Copernicus unmoored the Earth from its anchorage at the centre of the Universe and set it hurtling around the Sun, science has progressively uncovered the lineaments of an objective reality to which human experience stands as only the most superficial and attenuated of abstractions.
Collapse V brings together some of the most intellectually-challenging contemporary work devoted to exploring the philosophical implications of this ever-widening gulf between the real and the intuitable from a variety of overlapping and complementary standpoints.
With articles by groundbreaking philosophers and scientists, in-depth interviews with prominent thinkers, and new work from contemporary artists, Collapse V addresses the issues of the 'deanthropomorphisation' of reality initiated by the Copernican Revolution, and the enduring chasm between the spontaneous image of reality bequeathed to us by evolution and that revealed by the sciences in the wake of Copernicus.
Contents
DAMIAN VEAL - Editorial Introduction
CARLO ROVELLI - Anaximander's Legacy
JULIAN BARBOUR - The View from Nowhen (Interview)
CONRAD SHAWCROSS AND ROBIN MACKAY - Shadows of Copernicanism
JAMES LADYMAN - Who's Afraid of Scientism? (Interview)
THOMAS METZINGER - Enlightenment 2.0 (Interview)
NIGEL COOKE - Thinker Dejecta
JACK COHEN AND IAN STEWART - Alien Science (Interview)
MILAN CIRKOVIC - Sailing the Archipelago
NICK BOSTROM - Where are They?
KEITH TYSON - Random Sampler from a Blocktime Animation
MARTIN SCHÖNFELD - The Phoenix of Nature
IMMANUEL KANT - On Creation in the Total Extent of its Infinity in Space and Time
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT - Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism
GABRIEL CATREN - A Throw of the Quantum Dice
ALBERTO GUALANDI - Errancies of the Human
PAUL HUMPHREYS - Thinking Outside the Brain