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You may not be interested in Russia. But Russia is interested in you. Russia's 2022 attack on Ukraine saw confrontation between Moscow and the West spill over into open conflict once again. But Russia has also been waging a clandestine war against the West for decades. Hostile acts abroad, from poisoning dissidents to shooting down airliners, interfering in elections, spying, hacking and murdering, have long seemed to be the Kremlin's daily business. But what is it all for? Why does Russia consistently behave like this? And what does it achieve? In this book, Keir Giles explains how and why Russia pushes for more power and influence wherever it can reach, far beyond Ukraine – and what it means not just for governments, but for ordinary people. Bringing together stories from the military, politics, diplomacy, espionage, cyber power, organised crime and more, Giles describes how Moscow conducts its campaigns across the globe, and how nobody is too unimportant to be caught up in them. By lifting the lid on the daily struggle going on behind the scenes to protect governments, businesses, societies and people from Russian hostile activity, Russia's War On Everybody shows how Moscow's hostile intentions for the rest of the world are far broader and more ambitious, and the ways it tries to achieve them far more pervasive and damaging, than we realise.

Although Habermas has written about the cultural role of literature and about literary works, he has not systematically articulated a literary-critical method as a component of either communicative reason or post-metaphysical thinking. Habermas and Literature brings Habermasian concepts and categories into contact with aesthetic and cultural theories in and around the Frankfurt School, and beyond. Its central claim is that Habermas' contribution to literary and cultural criticism is the concept of literary rationality and the notion that literature performs a key role in the formation of the modern social imaginary. Habermas and Literature maintains that literary works have "two faces" - discursive intervention in the public sphere and personal integration of imaginative disclosures - that depend upon two modalities of literary reception: critique and identification. It develops the resulting literary theory through detailed discussion of the theories advanced by Habermas, followed in each case by synthetic and reconstructive argumentation that brings the framework of communicative reason into dialogue with literary methods, aesthetic theories and psychoanalytic categories. It does so through close engagement with debates around aesthetic rationality, world disclosure, social imaginaries, post-secular society and the utopian demand for happiness articulated by artworks. In the process, the Habermasian position is critically reconstructed when necessary, with reference to psychoanalytic and literary theories, and tested, in relation to demanding fiction and popular works

"'Time' and 'world' are such familiar concepts that we rarely take their fragility into account. The rhythm of time and the feeling of the presence of a world provide us with a metaphysical landscape where we might be able to live - a place where reality makes enough sense to be existentially navigable. Several different worlds have emerged throughout history, each with its own range of what seemed possible and reasonable to do, to think and to imagine. Each of them has survived only as long as there have been voices singing out their metaphysical rhythm, and it has vanished together with the silencing of their world-song, leaving behind only ruins. At times, culture has to operate in a world that is about to exhaust its historical arc, speeding towards a horizon turned into a wall. What can a world say, when its only audience belongs to a time that will come after the end of the future? How can a world think about the cultural heritage of its own ruins? Throughout history, a tradition has been able to speak across time-segments. Its grotesque style of culture has carried forward a multi-dimensional cosmology, nestled within every speck of reality. A constant insurrection against the rule of mortality, which severs the solidarity between worlds, prophetic culture is a vessel sailing eternally over the boundaries between worlds. Perhaps, it might be possible also for us, today, to speak through its voice to those 'adolescents' who will inhabit a new world and a new time, somewhere beyond the approaching wall of the future"

"Shedding new light on the theme of "crisis" in Husserl's phenomenology, this book reflects on the experience of awakening to one's own naïveté. Beginning from everyday examples, Knies examines how this awakening makes us culpable for not having noticed what was noticeable. He goes on to apply this examination to fundamental issues in phenomenology, arguing that the appropriation of naïve life has a different structure from the reflection on pre-reflective life. Husserl's work on the "crisis" is presented as an attempt to integrate this appropriation into a systematic transcendental philosophy. Crisis and Husserlian Phenomenology brings Husserl into dialogue with other key thinkers in Continental philosophy such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. It is suitable for students and scholars alike, especially those interested in subjectivity, responsibility and the philosophy of history"--

"Stalinism at War tells the epic story of the Soviet Union in World War Two. Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens - Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men and women, loyal Stalinists and critics of his regime - to reveal how the Soviet Union and leadership of a ruthless dictator propelled Allied victory over Germany and Japan. In doing so, Edele weaves together material on the society and culture of the wartime years with high-level politics and unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with broader popular histories from below. The result is an engaging, intelligent and authoritative account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949"--

"In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of G.W.F. Hegel, Slavoj Žižek gives us a reading of a philosophical giant that changes our way of thinking about the post-human era we are entering. No ordinary study of Hegel, Hegel in a Wired Brain reveals our time as it appears through Hegel's eyes. Focusing in on the idea of the wired brain, this is a philosophical analysis of what happens when a direct link between our mental processes and a digital machine emerges. Here Žižek explores the phenomenon of a wired brain affect, and the notion of singularity subsequently arising when we can share our thoughts and experiences with others. He hones in on the key question of how it affects our experience and status as free human individuals, dealing with what happens with the human spirit, our subjectivity and the very essence of being-human when a machine can read, action and disperse our thoughts. With characteristic verve and energy, Žižek connects Hegel to the world we live in and shows why he is much more fun than anyone gives him credit for, and why the 21st century might just be Hegelian"--

"This book contextualizes David Hume's philosophy of physical science, exploring both Hume's background in the history of early modern natural philosophy and its subsequent impact on the scientific tradition. Drawing on topics including experimentalism, causation, laws of nature, metaphysics of forces, mathematics' relation to nature, and the concepts of space and time, it deepens our understanding of Hume's relation to natural philosophy. It does so in addition by situating Hume's thought within the context of other major philosophers, including Descartes, Locke, Boyle and Kant, and scientists including Newton and Leibniz"--

"Why do people take offence at things that are said? What is it exactly about the offending utterance which causes this negative reaction? How well motivated are these responses? Offensive Language addresses these questions by applying an array of concepts from linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics to a wide range of examples, from TV to Twitter and from Mel Gibson to Donald Trump. Establishing a sharp distinction between potential offence and actual offence, Jim O'Driscoll then examines a series of case studies where offence has been caused, assessing the nature and degree of both the offence and the documented response to it in. Through close linguistic analysis, this book explores the fine line between free speech and criminal activity, searching for a principle way to distinguish the merely embarrassing from the reprehensible and the censurable. In this way, a new approach to offensive language emerges, involving both how we study it and also how it might be handled in public life"--