Our ability to find meaning in things is one of the most important aspects of human life. But it is also one of the most mysterious. Where does meaning come from? What sorts of things have meaning? And how do we grasp the meaning others want to convey? Meaning: A Very Short Introduction is shaped by exploring possible answers to these questions.

Aziz Z. Huq shows how the rule of law can still be used as an important tool for framing and evaluating the goals and functions of a legal system. He traces the idea's historical origins from ancient Greece to the constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey to the economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. And he explores how that value is coming under pressure from terrorist threats, macroeconomic crisis, pandemics, autocratic populism, and climate change.

Authoritarianism is one of the buzzwords of our age. But what is it exactly? This Very Short Introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the world of authoritarian regimes, including military, single-party, and personalist regimes. It considers how understandings of authoritarianism have evolved over time, as well as the curious fact that many authoritarian regimes today hold elections. Drawing on examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, James Loxton examines the life cycle of authoritarian regimes.

Physics, the fundamental science of matter and energy, encompasses all levels of nature from the subatomic to the cosmic, and underlies much of the technology around us. Understanding the physics of our universe is an essential aspect of humanity's quest to understand our environment and our place within it. Doing physics enables us to explore the interaction between environment and human society, and can help us to work towards the future sustainability of the planet.

In this Very Short Introduction, Marya Schechtman uses insights from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and popular thought to consider some of the most compelling and puzzling questions about the self, including questions about what kind of object a self is if it is an object at all, what it means to be oneself and why it is important, what kinds of changes the self can and cannot survive, whether a self can be separated from its body, and what role engagement with the environment and with other selves plays in constituting and maintaining the self.

For more than a millennium, the Byzantine Empire presided over the juncture between East and West, as well as the transition from the classical to the modern world. Rather than recounting the standard chronology of emperors and battles, leading Byzantium scholar Jonathan Harris focuses on a succession of archetypal figures, families, places, and events.

This is a fascinating introduction to the history of Western astronomy, from prehistoric times to the origins of astrophysics in the mid-19th century. Historical records are first found in Babylon and Egypt, and after two millennia the arithmetical astronomy of the Babylonians merged with the Greek geometrical approach to culminate in the Almagest of Ptolemy. This legacy was transmitted to the Latin West via Islam and led to Copernicus's claim that the Earth is in motion.

Emotions are complex mental states that resist reduction. They are visceral reactions but also beliefs about the world. They are spontaneous outbursts but also culturally learned performances. And just as our emotions in any given moment display this complex structure, so their history is plural rather than singular. The history of emotions is where the history of ideas meets the history of the body, and where the history of subjectivity meets social and cultural history.

This book provides an introduction to the most important philosopher of the Islamic world, Ibn Sina, often known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna. After introducing the man and his works, with an overview of the historical context in which he lived, the book devotes chapters to the different areas of Ibn Sina's thought. Among the topics covered are his innovations in logic, his theory of the human soul and its powers, the relation between his medical writings and his philosophy, and his metaphysics of existence

This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power.

Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose—and, if at all possible, cure—the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical investigations.

Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world.

The New Deal shaped our nation's politics for decades, and was seen by many as tantamount to the "American Way" itself. Now, in this superb compact history, Eric Rauchway offers an informed account of the New Deal and the Great Depression, illuminating its successes and failures.

This very short introduction offers listeners a superb overview of the teachings of the Buddha, as well as a succinct guide to the integration of Buddhism into daily life.

John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident.