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A sympathetic and systematic reconstruction of Sartre's philosophy, explaining its relation to other major philosophical theories. Among the themes elucidated are the relation between reality and our representation of it; the parities between language and consciousness; the relationship between the world as it may be and as we structure it in our interventions as engaged beings; the conceptual interdependence of the self and others; and the connections between factual beliefs and systems of value.--Adapted from book jacket.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the dominant force in twentieth-century British and American poetry. With poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," he introduced an edgy, disenchanted, utterly contemporary version of French Symbolism to the English-speaking world. With his masterpiece "The Waste Land," he almost single-handedly ushered an entire poetic culture into the modern world. And with his enormously influential essays he set the canonical standards to which writers and critics of poetry have adhered throughout our era.

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Riga timber merchant and the first Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, he was a presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic for sixty years: historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time. But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, in Israel as the new state came into being. For this definitive biography - the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject - Michael Ignatieff, himself a leading public intellectual, interviewed Berlin extensively and was granted complete access to his papers, one of the largest archives in Anglo-American cultural history. Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique liberal temperament - serene, comic, secular, and unafraid - and he examines its influence on Berlin's vision of liberalism, which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral choice.

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today. In particular, the book describes the many projects, which Barthes explored and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena--from literature, fashion, wrestling, and advertising to notions of the self, of history, and of nature.