Philosophy - History & Surveys - Renaissance

A groundbreaking edition of controversial theses proposed by the most famous philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), the most famous philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, had ambitions in line with his talents, especially in philosophical theology. His boldest venture urged...

The story of one of the most important--and incendiary--books in Western history When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published--"godless," "full of abominations," "a book forged in hell . . . by the devil...

A preeminent Renaissance philosopher on the founder of Neoplatonism Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was the leading Platonic philosopher of the Renaissance and is generally recognized as the greatest authority on ancient Platonism before modern times. Among his greatest accomplishments as a scholar was his 1492...

A sweeping history of The Age of Reason, revealing how--although it was a time of great progress--it was also an era of brutality and intolerance with a very human cost. During the 1600s--between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Enlightenment--Europe...

"Lively . . . excoriating, eloquent . . . We are all Faustians now." -- James Wood, The New Yorker A devilishly fascinating tour of the Faustian bargain through the ages, from brimstone to blues and beyond, now in paperback . . . From...

Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, Anthony...

Integralism is the application to the temporal, political order of the full implications of the revelation of man's supernatural end in Christ and of the divinely established means by which it is to be attained. These implications are identified by means of the philosophia...

The Ptolemaic system of the universe, with the earth at the center, had held sway since antiquity as authoritative in philosophy, science, and church teaching. Following his observations of the heavenly bodies, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) abandoned the geocentric system for a heliocentric model, with...

Blaise Pascal, the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, was a gifted mathematician and physicist, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon which his reputation now rests. The Penseés is a collection of philosohical fragments, notes and essays in which Pascal...

A collection of classic essays from one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance French philosopher Michel de Montaigne was single-handedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French...

Collector's Edition Laminated Hardback with Jacket Ancient wisdom meets divine revelation as a seeker of knowledge delves into the mysteries of the universe, the nature of the divine, and the essence of the human soul. Through dialogues with powerful cosmic forces, the reader is...

A survey of one of the giants of Renaissance thought, The Essays: A Selection collects some of Michel de Montaigne's most startling and original works, translated from the French and edited with an introduction and notes by M.A. Screech in Penguin Classics. To overcome...

The Prince is a political treatise by the Italian diplomat, historian and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. The Prince is sometimes claimed to be one of the first works of modern philosophy, especially modern political philosophy, in which the effective truth is taken to be...

In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio...

Explore the transformative power of Romanticism­--where emotion, imagination, and contradiction collide--through the eyes of its greatest thinkers and artists. The post-Enlightenment movement known as Romanticism is a messy period; so messy, in fact, that many scholars eschew any attempt to define it. In reaction...

A celebration of Montaigne, the most enjoyable and yet profound of all Renaissance writers. In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his château to brood on the deaths of...