Bertrand Russell argues that humanity demands consideration solely as the instrument by which we acquire knowledge of the universe.

In "An Outline of Philosophy," Russell argues that philosophy is concerned with the universe as a whole. This work illuminated the ways in which we are capable of knowledge and discovering natural laws wtih a discussion of perception, memory, learning in infants and animals and linguistic ability. It moves on to a study of the physical world and then to a discussion of humanity as it sees itself. Finally Russell considers some of the great philosophers of the past and what philosophy has to say about humanity's place in the universe.

Philosophy, Russell argues, is concerned with the universe as a whole. He reveals how the world in which we seem to live differs from reality and makes clear how scientific advance has transformed our concept of the world.

Post-Continental Philosophy outlines the shift in Continental thought over the last 20 years through the work of four central figures: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and François Laruelle. Though they follow seemingly different methodologies and agendas, each insists on the need for a return to the category of immanence if philosophy is to have any future at all. Rejecting both the German phenomenological tradition of transcendence (of the Ego, Being, Consciousness, Alterity, or Flesh), as well as the French Structuralist valorisation of Language, they instead take the immanent categories of biology (Deleuze), mathematics (Badiou), affectivity (Henry), and axiomatic science (Laruelle) as focal points for a renewal of thought. Consequently, Continental philosophy is taken in a new direction that engages science and nature with a refreshingly critical and non-reductive approach to life, set-theory, embodiment, and knowledge. However, each of these new philosophies of immanence still regards what the other is doing as transcendent representation, raising the question of what this return to immanence really means. John Mullarkey's analysis provides a startling answer. By teasing out their internal differences, he discovers that the only thing that can be said of immanence without falling back into transcendent representation seems not to be a saying at all but a 'showing', a depiction through lines. Because each of these philosophies also places a special value on the diagram, the common ground of immanence is that occupied by the philosophical diagram rather than the word. The heavily illustrated final chapter of the book literally outlines how a mode of philosophical discourse might proceed when using diagrams to think immanence.

In "An Outline of Philosophy," Russell argues that philosophy is concerned with the universe as a whole. This work illuminated the ways in which we are capable of knowledge and discovering natural laws wtih a discussion of perception, memory, learning in infants and animals and linguistic ability. It moves on to a study of the physical world and then to a discussion of humanity as it sees itself. Finally Russell considers some of the great philosophers of the past and what philosophy has to say about humanity's place in the universe.

Appearing here in English for the first time, this is F. W. J. Schelling's vital document of the attempts of German Idealism and Romanticism to recover a deeper relationship between humanity and nature and to overcome the separation between mind and matter induced by the modern reductivist program. Written in 1799 and building upon his earlier work, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature provides the most inclusive exposition of Schelling's philosophy of the natural world. He presents a startlingly contemporary model of an expanding and contracting universe; a unified theory of electricity, gravity magnetism, and chemical forces; and, perhaps most importantly, a conception of nature as a living and organic whole.

This classic work, first published in 1912, has never been supplanted as an approachable introduction to the theory of philosophical enquiry. It gives Russell's views on such subjects as the distinction between appearance and reality, the existence and nature of matter, idealism, knowledge by acquaintance and by description, induction, truth and falsehood, the distinction between knowledge, error and probable opinion, and the limits and value of philosophical knowledge.