My choice of books reflects a lifelong passion for literature and the natural world. I’ve always enjoyed travelling, to cities or more remote locations, learning as much as I can about the people that live there, and my first published article was about a hotel in Mali, photographed by my sister. Ten years later we published our first book, The Foraged Home. With Living Wild we wanted to look more deeply at how people lived, not just where, focussing not only on day-to-day life and their work, but their relationship with the surrounding landscape, asking big questions about our place in the world.
Six-year-old Calvin - along with his stuffed (?) tiger Hobbes - chafes against the ordinariness of his existence and ponders the meaning of life, often while strolling in the woods, or plummeting from a cliff edge in his little red wagon.
I first read Calvin & Hobbes when I was 12. Over the years, this brilliantly illustrated comic strip (which ran from 1985-1995) has only become richer and funnier and more poignant.
Calvin and Hobbesis unquestionably one of the most popular comic strips of all time. The imaginative world of a boy and his real-only-to-him tiger was first syndicated in 1985 and appeared in more than 2,400 newspapers when Bill Watterson retired on January 1, 1996. The entire body of Calvin and Hobbescartoons was originally published in hardcover as a truly noteworthy tribute to this singular cartoon in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Available for the first time in paperback, these four full-colour volumes in a sturdy slipcase include all the Calvin and Hobbescartoons that ever appeared in syndication. This is the…
John Sellars is a Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of multiple books on ancient philosophy, including Hellenistic Philosophy. He is also a founding member of Modern Stoicism and The Aurelius Foundation, both non-profit companies devoted to bringing Stoicism to a wider audience and showing how it can benefit people today.
Epicurus wrote a series of letters summarizing his philosophy and we also have a couple of sets of short aphorisms that report key ideas. All of these are translated in this volume, along with the ancient biography of Epicurus and a substantial introduction. For any one keen to learn more about Epicureanism, the first thing to reader are his letters, especially the Letter to Menoeceus and the Letter to Herodotus.
The teachings of Epicurus-about life and death, religion and science, physical sensation, happiness, morality, and friendship-attracted legions of adherents throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and deeply influenced later European thought. Though Epicurus faced hostile opposition for centuries after his death, he counts among his many admirers Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, and Isaac Newton. This volume includes all of his extant writings-his letters, doctrines, and Vatican sayings-alongside parallel passages from the greatest exponent of his philosophy, Lucretius, extracts from Diogenes Laertius' Life of Epicurus, a lucid introductory essay about Epicurean philosophy, and a foreword by Daniel Klein, author of…
I have had the privilege to teach the history of political theory from Plato to today for decades and to discuss texts such as the five I mentioned with very gifted students. No matter how often I return to such works, I always find something new in them and it is a pleasure to see how students learn to love reading for themselves what can be daunting works, once they overcome the fear of opening the great works and the initial challenge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose.
Hobbes’ attention to the meaning of words and his prose make this book well worth reading. If you find the beginning of Part I hard going, leaf through it and slow down as you come to last chapters of that first part of the book. Those and Part II are particularly engaging and make one think about the meaning of liberty, the nature of obedience, and the extent to which we are obliged to obey the state. Hobbes has interesting things to say about mercy and forgiveness, which might not be expected given the way he tends to be a caricatured. Another good book to read for oneself.
'The life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short'
Written during the chaos of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan asks how, in a world of violence and horror, can we stop ourselves from descending into anarchy? Hobbes' case for a 'common-wealth' under a powerful sovereign - or 'Leviathan' - to enforce security and the rule of law, shocked his contemporaries, and his book was publicly burnt for sedition the moment it was published. But his penetrating work of political philosophy opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world.
I have immersed myself in the study of seventeenth-century philosophy for almost forty years. Over that time, I have become particularly devoted to Spinoza. This is because, first, I think he got it all pretty much right; his views on religion, on human nature, and especially on what it is to lead a good life have always struck me as correct and relevant. You can be a Spinozist today, three and a half centuries after his death, and it would make perfect sense. Second, Spinoza is endlessly fascinating. I find that every time I read him⎯and I’ve been reading and re-reading him for a long time now⎯it gets more difficult. Just when you think you know him, there are always new questions that arise and new puzzles to solve.
It is impossible to read Spinoza and not think often of Thomas Hobbes. Spinoza read Hobbes’s works and was clearly influenced by the English philosopher both in his account of human nature and, especially, in his political thinking. This is, as far as I know, the first book devoted explicitly to the two thinkers together. Field’s focus is on the political, and she does a beautiful job of analyzing and distinguishing different conceptions of ‘power’ (both in the individual and in the group), as well as illuminating similarities and contrasts between these two of the most important early modern thinkers on politics and the state.
We live in an age of growing dissatisfaction with the standard operations of representative democracy. The solution, according to a long radical democratic tradition, is the unmediated power of the people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated as the quintessential expression of popular power, and this power promises to transcend ordinary institutional politics. But the outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing as the ordinary politics they sought to overcome, breeding skepticism about democratic politics in all its forms.
Potentia argues that the very meaning of popular power needs to be rethought. It offers a…
Like many adults, I love a good YA story. YA books take us back to our younger days when we were stronger, faster, and likely better-looking, but also to the confusing transitional time of being a teenager. Mostly, I love reading and writing YA novels because despite being about hard topics–friendship, disease, toppling the patriarchy–they are hopeful. In this confusing, stressful world, we need a little optimism. With that in mind, I offer you five of my favorite YA books that I think adults will love, too.
Did you love Calvin and Hobbes when you were a child? How about as an adult? If so, you will love Martine Leavitt’s Calvin. Calvin, in this novel, is a schizophrenic teen who is convinced that Hobbes is real. He thinks if he can walk across frozen Lake Erie – with the girl he loves, Suzie – and convince Bill Watterson to write one more Calvin cartoon, he will be healed.
This book is a brilliant exploration of mental health and relationships, rooted in characters you already know and love.
Just because you see something doesn't mean it's really there.
Seventeen-year-old Calvin has always known his fate is linked to the comic book character from Calvin & Hobbes.
He was born on the day the last strip was published. His grandpa put a stuffed tiger named Hobbes in his crib. And he even had a best friend named Susie.
Then Calvin’s mom washed Hobbes to death. Susie grew up beautiful and stopped talking to him. And Calvin pretty much forgot about the strip―until now.
Now he is seventeen years old and has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hobbes is back, as…
I’m a historian and classicist, teaching at the University of Exeter. I am equally interested
in classical Greece and Rome, especially their economy and society, and in the ways that classical ideas and examples have been influential in the modern world.
There are lots of excellent modern translations of Thucydides (I tend to recommend either theOxford World Classics edition by Martin Hammond or the CUP one by Jeremy Mynott), and Hobbes’ version, the first proper translation into English, is not the easiest place to start, not least because at times you effectively have to translate it out of seventeenth-century English. It is powerfully and elegantly written, and above all it offers the spectacle of one great thinker on matters of politics and war engaging with another – you can almost feel Hobbes developing his own ideas (some of which later appeared in works of original philosophy like Leviathan) as he works to make sense of Thucydides’ ideas. If you read nothing else, the introduction To the Readers and the sketch of Thucydides’ life and work are short and brilliantly insightful, capturing the particular nature of Thucydides’ text –…
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
I started drawing comics in the first grade and have never stopped. My syndicated comic strip, Cow & Boy, ran for eight years, and now I write and draw the middle-grade fantasy series Quest Kids. I am so fortunate to have cobbled together my love of comics into a career and to have been inspired by so many talented people along the way. Below is a collection of some of the best.
I had aspirations of making comics for Marvel or DC, but could never get a handle on drawing realistically. So I found inspiration in newspaper comics, one in particular.
Calvin & Hobbes is a work of art, and the perfect representation of childhood creativity. But Calvin’s imaginary tiger is only the tip of the iceberg here. Between his life-sized dioramas of snowmen acting out, to cardboard transmogrifiers, Calvin’s wicked imagination just spoke to me. And Bill Watterson helped jet-propel me down my own artistic path.
Celebrating an exhibit of ten years of Sunday comics featuring the beloved boy and his tiger, Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 is sure to bring back memories.
New York Times best-seller!
Everyone misses Calvin and Hobbes.
It reinvented the newspaper comic strip at a time when many had all but buried the funnies as a vehicle for fresh, creative work. Then Bill Watterson came along and reminded a new generation of what older readers and comic strip aficionados knew: A well-written and beautifully drawn strip is an intricate, powerful form of communication. And with Calvin and Hobbes, we had…
I’m a historian of modern China in the department of Chinese at the University of Oxford. I started off working on the twentieth century but have been drawn back into the Qing dynasty. It’s such an interesting and important period and one that British students often don’t know much about!
"Spence shows himself at once historian, detective, and artist. . . . He makes history howl." (The New Republic)
Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T'an-ch'eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at…
I was homeschooled, and when I was young (back in the last millennium), we didn’t have a TV, so my parents read to us kids hours every day. This really helped pass the time because we lived in the middle of a cornfield, and there was nothing else to do but . . . watch corn grow! Later in my teens, I started writing myself. This has continued until today. Writing is a good way to explore the world of ideas. All of the books on this list have influenced my writing.
I can (and have) read Calvin and Hobbes all day. Perfect on many levels. This is a good book in the series. But they are all good.
The strip is all about exploring with friends. I like how the strip avoids revealing what is real and what is imaginary. The story, art, and dialog work together and show just enough to constantly excite my imagination.
Also, each time a storyline recurs, it always tops the last time it was there. The interaction of the characters is second to none. The art is unexpected in its detail and emotion. Watterson took his work seriously.
Calvin and Hobbes are at it again, and this time, our irrepressible friends are taking a walk on the wild side.
Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat chronicles another segment of the multifarious adventures of this wild child and his faithful, but skeptical, friend. If the best cartoons compel readers to identify themselves within the funny frames, then all who enjoy Calvin and Hobbes are creative, imaginative, and ... bad, bad, bad!
Calvin, the irascible little boy with the stuffed tiger who comes to life are a pair bound for trouble. Boring school lessons become occasions for death-defying alien air battles, speeding…
I'm a philosopher and psychotherapist, with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton. From the beginning of my work in philosophy, I have been interested in the nature of agency: what is it to be an agent, and how is agency even possible in the first place? These questions naturally drew me to the metaphysics of free will, as well as related topics in the logic and semantics of agentive modality (that is, the kind of possibility and necessity that is characteristic of agents). Much of my recent work has been on more clinical issues, especially on understanding addiction. I continue to be fascinated by fundamental topics in metaphysics, and especially the question of free will.
This 17th-century debate remains both engaging and unresolved – testimony to the endurance of the free will problem.
Bramhall upholds a traditional view of free will, while Hobbes defends a more modern “materialist” view that is an ancestor to the views defended by List and Ismael above.
While many contemporary discussions of free will often focus on implications for moral responsibility, this debate is notable for the far broader range of considerations that the authors invoke, suggesting that the question of free will touches just about every aspect of our agency.
Do human beings ever act freely, and if so what does freedom mean? Is everything that happens antecedently caused, and if so how is freedom possible? Is it right, even for God, to punish people for things that they cannot help doing? This volume presents the famous seventeenth-century controversy in which Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall debate these questions and others. The complete texts of their initial contributions to the debate are included, together with selections from their subsequent replies to one another and from other works of Hobbes, in a collection that offers an illuminating commentary on issues still…
