Human Sciences All books
David Lepoutre
At the Heart of the Suburbs Codes, Rites and Languages
In the last 15 years, the social disease of suburban youth has been on the front pages of newspapers, feeding fear and encouraging a certain social and political discourse centered around the notions of crisis, disorder and desocialization. Coming from a direct experience, this book opposes the "problematic of the social vacuum" with a resolutely ethnological approach to relations between the adolescents of large urban settings. David Lepoutre is a professor of History and Geography in the second degree and gives courses in Ethnology at the Universities of Paris XIII and Lille II.
Étienne Klein
The Small Bang of Nanotechnologies
Nanotechnologies no longer concern just the manipulation of matter, one atom at a time: they now incorporate all the techniques that allow the manufacture of tiny objects with a precision equal to one billionth of a metre...
Jean-Denis Bredin, Thierry Lévy
Convince A Discussion of Eloquence
Two of France's most celebrated lawyers demonstrate the power of skillfuloration and how it can subordinate the actual facts. Anyone that is fascinated by speech, judicial history, and the art of debate, will truly enjoy gaining the knowledge, power and sense of conquest that this book imparts as they learn from the masters how to use eloquence advantageously. Entertaining, savage and brillant, this dialogue promises to help all with the art of elocution.
Michel Cassé, Edgar Morin
Children of the Sky Between Nothingness, Light and Matter
What is the universe, which we regard as "ours" not only because we live in it but because it produced us? This book is in the form of a dialogue on cosmology between the astrophysicist Michel Cassé and the philosopher Edgar Morin. It is a profound work which revels in the joy of knowledge and restores us to the universe that is in all of us, as it celebrates the "anthropo-cosmos". Michel Cassé is an astrophysicist at the Atomic Energy Commission. Edgar Morin is an internationally renowned writer and thinker.
Alain Ehrenberg
Tired of Yourself Depression and Society
Examining the changes that have occurred since the 19th century in both psychiatry and society at large, this book shows how the internal collapse that is depression is the ultimate symbol of our culture of powerlessness. The depressed person cannot rise above the demands imposed on him or that he imposes on himself. He has no recourse but fatigue, inhibition, and indecision. But what does it mean to learn to be oneself? Is our society merely creating huge numbers of hypochondriacs? Can we any longer draw a line between the small unhappinesses and frustrations of daily life, and pathological suffering? Alain Ehrenberg is a sociologist.
Roger-Pol Droit
101 Experiences of Daily Philosophy
This highly original book consists of 101 short texts, each describing an experiment or something to do. Although the practical exercises are easy to accomplish, they are often disconcerting and will make the reader aware of how strange an apparently banal action can seem. Their purpose is philosophical: the goal being to experience the unexpected through simple actions and events. Roger-Pol Droit intends to shake up the certainties that underlie our identity, speech, relations to time and space, and memory, and enable us to feel issues that are generally regarded as abstract. In his highly readable, incisive style he has succeeded in transforming ideas into feelings. Roger-Pol Droit is a philosopher and researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
Roger-Pol Droit
The Company of Philosophers
Roger-Pol Droit takes the reader on a voyage through time, spanning the centuries from Antiquity to the present, in a series of intellectual portraits of great and usual or remarkable thinkers, beginning with Socrates and Plato and ending with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. A major part of this volume is devoted to modern philosophers, from Kant to Heidegger. The author's goal is to stimulate new thought and to bring to life for the reader the vital ideas of past thinkers.