Statistics-driven thinking is ubiquitous in modern society. In this study of the history of statistics, which begins with probability theory in the 17th century, Alain Desrosieres shows how the evolution of modern statistics has been inextricably bound up with the knowledge and power of governments.[...]

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.
Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich sourc[...]

Do numbers and the other objects of mathematics enjoy a timeless existence independent of human minds, or are they the products of cerebral invention? Do we discover them, as Plato supposed and many others have believed since, or do we construct them? Does mathematics constitute a universal language[...]

With the publication of French Philosophy of the Sixties, Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry in 1985 launched their famous critique against canonical figures such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, bringing under rigorous scrutiny the entire post-structuralist project that had dominated Western intellectual l[...]

Alain Passard is chef who astonished the food world in 2001 by removing red meat from his three-Michelin-starred Paris restaurant L'Arpege, and dedicating himself to cooking with vegetables, supplied exclusively from his own organic farm. Today L'Arpege is widely acknowledged as one of the world's g[...]

Placing Robbe-Grillet's filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhi[...]

'[Badiou's theory] enacts a return to full-blown philosophy that strikes as a thunder into the morass of postmodernist sophisms and platitudes...[Badiou] aims at the very heart of politically correct 'radical' intellectuals, undermining the foundations of their mode of life!' Slavoj Zizek, Professor[...]

Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction. It is not Badiou's wish to plead for an accused [...]

Touraine is one of the leading social thinkers in the world today and many of his books have been published in English. In this book Touraine presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the contemporary world. It is a broad theoretical work which seeks to make sense of everyday experien[...]

The political regime of global capitalism reduces the world to an endless network of numbers within numbers, but how many of us really understand what numbers are? In Number and Numbers Badiou offers an philosophically penetrating account of the attempts made over the last century to define the spec[...]