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The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century.

When animals and their symbolic representations--in the Royal Menagerie, in art, in medicine, in philosophy--helped transform the French state and culture.

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself.

Design objects, bachelor pads, and multimedia rotating beds as expressions of the relationships among architecture, gender, and sexuality.

A novel attempt to make sense of our preoccupation with copies of all kinds--from counterfeits to instant replay, from parrots to photocopies.

Gilles Deleuze examines the work of the late-nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher--Masoch.

Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was already an established neuropsychologist when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. This book, his magnum opus and widely regarded as a modern classic in psychology and biology, grew out of his dissatisfaction with traditional natural science techniques for analyzing living beings.

An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into what it means to feel alive.

Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today.

Beginning with a definition of the pre-rational meaning of "truth" in archaic Greece, Detienne traces the lineage of the concept. Its distinct difference from the logic of the western philosophers is discussed and a movement from a religious to a secular thought about truth is identified.

In this classic meditation on the problem of style in art history, Henri Focillon describes how art forms change over time.

Women's bodies and the study of anatomy in Italy between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries.

A consideration of blandness not as the absence of defining qualities but as the harmonious union of all potential values-an infinite opening into human experience.

Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence.

A study of the word pair "action and reaction" embracing philosophy, semantics, literature, and science.

An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand its discordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound.

In this analysis of one major philosopher by another, Gilles Deleuze identifies three pivotal concepts - duration, memory, and elan vital - that are found throughout Bergson's writings and shows the relevance of Bergson's work to contemporary philosophical debates.

The philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist: the pirate, the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe.

A fascinating account of the Na society, which functions without the institution of marriage.

Rituals of war and images of violence in Mesopotamia ca. 3000-500 BCE examined as "magical technologies of warfare."

A far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and disappearance of speech, in individuals and in linguistic communities.

A meditation on the human body as described by the classical Greeks and by the ancient Chinese.