Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was a prolific philosopher and public intellectual who, throughout his illustrious career, taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and, until his death, Stanford University. When it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the...

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was a Dutch humanist, scholar, and social critic, and one of the most important figures of the Renaissance. The Praise of Folly is perhaps his best-known work. Originally written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, this satiric celebration of pleasure, youth, and intoxication irreverently pokes fun at the pieties of theologians...

"Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Winners of the 2005 Erasmus Prize, Praemium Erasmianum Foundation" Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Simon Schaffer is professor of history of science at the University of Cambridge. Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author...

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His many books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He is a general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into...

Walter A. Kaufmann (1921-1980) was professor of philosophy at Princeton University and a world-renowned scholar and translator of Nietzsche. This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche...

Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) was one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned for his contributions to economics, the social sciences, and the history of ideas. He is the author of many books, including the influential Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and The Strategy of Economic Development. In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate...

R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He taught at Princeton University from 1936 to 1963. He was the author of many books, including the two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton), the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in 1960, and the translator of The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre. Isser...

Anne Carson was born in Canada and now lives partly in Iceland. She is an acclaimed poet, essayist, translator, and classicist, and has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur, the PEN/Nabokov Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her books Autobiography of Red and Nox were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library Anne...

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the author of numerous works on the Middle East. Mark R. Cohen is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton. This landmark book probes Muslims' attitudes toward Jews and Judaism as a special case of their view of other...

"Winner of the 1998 Bancroft Prize in American History" "Winner of the 1997 Philip Taft Prize in Labor History" "Winner of the 1996 President's Book Award, Social Science History Association" "Winner of the 1997 Best Book in North American Urban History Award, Urban History Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1997" Thomas J. Sugrue is the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He...