By drawing on the opposing ideas of Carl Jung and Karl Marx, James Driscoll’s develops fresh perspectives on urgent contemporary problems. Jung and Marx as thinkers, Driscoll contends, carry the projections of archetypal complexes that go back to the hostile Old Testament brothers Cain and Abel, whose enduring tensions shape our postmodern era.

The Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, André Gide, and André Malraux, and their relationships with communism and the broader anti-fascist movement.

French Intellectuals at a Crossroads examines a broad array of interrelated subjects: the effect of World War I on France’s intellectual community, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of international communism, calls for pacifism, the creation of an “Intellectuals’ International of the Mind,” the debate over the myth of the disengaged intellectual, the apolitical group of “intellectuels non-conformistes,” and, finally, the challenges of surrealism.

The Emergence of the French Public Intellectual provides a working definition of “public intellectuals” in order to clarify who they are and what they do. It then follows their varied itineraries from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the nineteenth century. Public intellectuals became a fixture in French society during the Dreyfus Affair but have a long history in France, as the contributions of Christine de Pizan, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo, among many others, illustrate.

A group of mostly Jewish German-speaking writers, the Prague Circle included some of the most significant figures in modern Western literature. Its core members, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and Egon Erwin Kisch, are renowned for their seminal dramas, lyric poetry, novels, short stories, and essays on aesthetics. The writers of the Prague Circle were bound together not by a common perspective or a particular ideology, but by shared experiences and interests.

The face circulates through most things of this world: anything that has presence, that presents itself, that has a front, a surface, an appearance, an aspect, a reputation, or honor – anything that confronts, opposes, or defies – has a face. And the face is a front: from the back it is just a head, a radically different entity. In this exciting new book, distinguished philosopher Marty Roth pursues considerations of the human face in art, literature, philosophy, and other manifestations of human culture.

Nietzsche and Joyce Carol Oates explores the American novelist’s The Wonderland Quartet through a reading of the German philosopher’s seminal works. In the four books of The Wonderland Quartet – A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), the National Book Award-winning Them (1969), and Wonderland (1971) – Oates aestheticizes cultural experiments after the Nietzschean proclamation of “God is dead” permeated American culture from about 1950.

In this new and persuasively argued study, philosopher Rod Cameron argues that definitive absolute Idealism changes the definition of logic, annuls ethics, and diminishes objective truth. Entitlement to “logic” is due to knowledge of the logos. The logos is religion and reasoning’s common origin. They are thus made compatible. Logic accesses ontology: a metaphysical realm of causation. Logic performs philosophy’s missing function: synthesis. The individual and the nation, Cameron argues, share the same essences.

It is often claimed that belief in God is based on faith, while non-belief is grounded in rationality. This claim is inaccurate. Moral philosopher Carlo Alvaro takes the reader through his philosophical journey—a journey taken with the absolute absence of faith. Through reasoning alone, and with an objective assessment of the classical theistic arguments, Deism takes the reader from disbelief to a particular version of deism. Deism discusses such arguments as the Kalam Cosmological, the asymmetry against the evil-god challenge, the anthropic principle, and the moral.

Once Upon a Time of Transition is a journey through four decades in the career of a Czech dissident and diplomat reflecting on transitions from the 20th to the 21st century. A meaningful contribution to on-going public debates, and to a better understanding of our current political situation, Ambassador Martin Palouš explores the uncertain territory between philosophy and politics. Directly or indirectly, his texts were inspired by three great Central European thinkers of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt, Jan Patočka and Eric Voegelin.