Christopher Phillips

"This moving, insightful and ultimately hopeful and helpful blend of memoir and philosophical exploration begins in Christopher Phillips's native stomping grounds of the tiny volcanic island of Nisyros, Greece and unfurls through space and time as the author explores the connections between his immediate circumstances and the eternal wisdom of popular philosophers"--

Transform Grievous Hurt, Betrayal, and Setback Into Love, Joy, and Compassion

Soul of Goodness

Regional Rivalry in the New Middle East

Battle for Syria

Geoff Raby

Liu Heng Shing

A Life in a Sea of Red

Liu Heung Shing : a Life in a Sea of Red

Philosophy for a Passionate Heart

Socrates In Love

Sócrates Café / Socrates Café

"A bracing, rollicking read about the spark that ignites when people start asking meaningful questions."-"O" magazine

A Fresh Taste of Philosophy

Socrates Café

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

The decade between the world wars witnessed an astonishing flowering of photography in Europe-- marked particularly by the unprecedented work of such figures as Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and Alexander Rodchenko. Alongside the visual experiments ran a fascinating public discussion in which critics, artists, and the photographers themselves struggled to define the nature and possibilities of photography in the modern era. The seventy-one essays and documents collected in this book provide a concise, provocative introduction to the ideas and personalities that animated avant-garde photography during these years of artistic ferment and that continue to influence the medium today. By turns poetic, analytical, and fiercely ideological, these diverse writings give expression to a very wide range of original ideas. Moholy-Nagy calls on photographers to create a powerful abstract vision that will transform our ability to see. Albert Renger-Patzsch argues for a quite different goal, a photography of revelatory realism that lays bare the essence of the subject before the lens. The French writer Pierre Mac Orlan explores psychologically compelling notions: that photography realizes "all that is curiously inhuman" and "creates death for a second." Photography is widely characterized as a modern machine-age art that supersedes the traditional fine arts. In the Soviet Union an extraordinary interchange pits the avant-gardist Rodchenko against opponents who insist that social usefulness is photography's primary responsibility. While shedding important new light on the directions taken by photography during the twentieth century, these essays also illuminate such major movements as Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and the New Objectivity. Most of the selections were not previously available in English and have been translated especially for this volume. Each appears with an informative headnote by Christopher Phillips, who in an introductory essay provides a lucid overview of the period and the context in which the writings first appeared. With its wealth of new material, this collection is an essential resource for all those studying photography or seeking to understand the visual culture of this century. This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition The New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars, Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 23-December 31, 1989.

European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940

Photography in the Modern Era

A Modern-Day Journey of Discovery through World Philosophy

Six Questions of Socrates

Socrates Cafe

An unprecedented analysis of the crucial but underexplored roles the United States and other nations have played in shaping Syria's ongoing civil war "One of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published."--Patrick Cockburn, Independent Syria's brutal, long-lasting civil war is widely viewed as a domestic contest that began in 2011 and only later drew foreign nations into the fray. But in this book Christopher Phillips shows the crucial roles that were played by the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar in Syria's war right from the start. Phillips untangles the international influences on the tragic conflict and illuminates the West's strategy against ISIS, the decline of U.S. power in the region, and much more. Originally published in 2016, the book has been updated with two new chapters.

International Rivalry in the New Middle East

The Battle for Syria

Gu Zheng

The Chinese

Liu Zheng

Vanessa Rocco

Modernist Photography re-examines the classic period of twentieth-century photography using new critical approaches to consider five recurrent visual themes during the years 1915 to 1945. These themes cut across such stylistic movements as Pictorialism, Surrealism and the New Vision, and include the transformation of objects, experimental images of the body, visions of the city, the industrialization of the countryside and experimental directions in poster design and typography. This thematic approach fosters new perspectives on such key photographers as Bernice Abbott, Brassaï, Walker Evans, Raoul Hausmann, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Man Ray and emphasizes the interactions between European and American practitioners. The catalogue will include chapters on each of the five themes by ICP Curators Christopher Phillips and Vanessa Rocco. It is based on a selection of 70 works from the Daniel Cowin Collection. The collection of about 1,600 images dates from 1860 to 1960 and includes a range of processes and formats--postcards, stereographs, carte-de-vistes, tintypes, albumen prints and gelatin silver prints.

Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection

Modernist Photography

Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community. He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.

The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860

Freedom's Port

Louis P. Masur

Features more than 40 interviews conducted with the Boss from 1973 to 2012, cataloging his rise and development as a musician and political advocate and capturing his evolution from local rebel rocker to global idol. Original. 35,000 first printing.

The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen

Talk About a Dream

Maria Morris Hambourg

A broad historical study of the provocative innovations of European and American photography between the World Wars. Presents more than 160 images from the Ford Motor Company Collection of photographs.

Photography Between the World Wars : Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The New Vision

The author poses Socrates' "original" questions - as recorded by Plato - in the most diverse cultural circumstances. This unconventional method of discussion brings out surprising commonalities - he begins with "What is virtue?" in the remains of an ancient marketplace in Athens and moves on to a Navajo reservation in the Southwest, where it turns out that the Navajo conception of virtue, hozho, includes a sense of order and harmony with the natural world both similar to and distinct from the conception of the ancient Greeks. In Detroit, Phillips discusses "What is moderation?" with a group of twenty Muslim women, some veiled, some not, who explain to him the Koranic notion of a "just mean" or "balance between extremes. Along Phillips's journey, one learns both about Western philosophers from the ancient Greeks to Nietzsche and about the philosophical traditions of Native American tribes, Asian cultures, and the Islamic world. Phillips shows how "big questions" are inseparable from timely political issues, as when in Mexico his companions consider the question of "What is justice?" and discuss the endemic corruption of the Mexican police force and political system; just as the question of "What is piety?" has particularly intense meaning for a group of Catholics reeling from the priest sex-abuse scandals.

hena synchrono taxidi anakalypsēs me odēgo tē philosophia

Exi erōtēseis tou Sokratē

Philosophy for a Die-hard Romantic

Socrates in Love

“[Phillips takes] philosophy out of the ivory tower and into the street.”—Los Angeles Times Christopher Phillips goes to the heart of philosophy and Socratic discourse to discover what we’re all looking for: the kind of love that makes life worthwhile. That is, love not defined only as eros, or erotic love, but in all its classical varieties. Love of neighbor, love of country, love of God, love of life, and love of wisdom—each is clarified and invigorated in Phillips’s Socratic dialogues with people from all walks of life and from all over the world.

Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Passionate Heart

Socrate innamorato. La filosofia dell'amore

Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the fluid political cultures of the "Middle Border" states during the Civil War era. Far from forming a fixed and static boundary between the North and South, the border states experienced fierce internal conflicts over their political and social loyalties. White supremacy and widespread support for the existence of slavery pervaded the "free" states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which had much closer economic and cultural ties to the South, while those in Kentucky and Missouri held little identification with the South except over slavery. Debates raged at every level, from the individual to the state, in parlors, churches, schools, and public meeting places, among families, neighbors, and friends. Ultimately, the pervasive violence of the Civil War and the cultural politics that raged in its aftermath proved to be the strongest determining factor in shaping these states' regional identities, leaving an indelible imprint on the way in which Americans think of themselves and others in the nation. The Rivers Ran Backward reveals the complex history of the western border states as they struggled with questions of nationalism, racial politics, secession, neutrality, loyalty, and even place-as the Civil War tore the nation, and themselves, apart. In this major work, Phillips shows that the Civil War was more than a conflict pitting the North against the South, but one within the West that permanently reshaped American regions.

The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Making of American Regionalism

The Rivers Ran Backward

Christopher Phillips

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