An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion . Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.

An impassionate and fearless study of Georges Bataille which goes beyond analysis and criticism to actually engage with him.

Offers a new understanding of representational cognition that synthesizes postwar philosophical approaches to the question of objective knowledge This study develops a novel account of representational cognition, explaining how cognitive systems progressively come to map the structure of their worlds. Daniel Sacilotto offers a constructive response to the critique of representation formulated throughout the post‐Kantian philosophical tradition. Rather than a skepticism or idealism whereby thinking can grasp appearances but never the real, representation, Sacilotto shows, is a constitutive dimension of cognitive systems’ creative capacity to know and intervene in the world of which they are part. Structure and Thought: Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition integrates various lines in contemporary philosophy, including those often seen as incommensurable or in irresolvable tension with one another. Sacilotto thus advances a productive synthesis of a materialist ambition to provide a creative and historical understanding of cognition with a structural realist account of representation. He shows how the different forms of sensory, discursive, and theoretical mediation that characterize human cognition are conducive to a realist epistemological framework that explains how the possibility of knowledge about a mind‐independent reality is conceivable.

The present edition, revised and enlarged by the author himself, presents the old genuine Buddha doctrine with the aim of developing a new type of man, free from prejudices and intent on working out his own future with his self as the light. It represents not only the flower of Indian religious feeling and philosophy but also the crowning summit of religious introspection in general. The book deals with Truth as the theme and basis of the doctrine of the Buddha. It explains (1) Truth, Critrine, World and subject of suffering, (2) Truth of the arising of suffering, (3) Truth of the annihilation of suffering, (4) Truth of the path leading to the annihilation of suffering. The author presents the highest knowledge, the supreme reality to which Buddha is awakened, in so cogent a form, free from mythological and mythical clothing that it becomes positively self-evident to the reader. The study is prefixed with an Introduction and Appendix--as important as the text itself. Introduction answers the queries 'Who was the Buddha?' 'What is a Buddha?' and depicts the method of handing down the 'Marvel'. The Appendix deals with the Doctrine, the Metaphysics of the Buddha, Right cognition etc. There are four indexes: (1) Index of quotations from the Pali texts, (2) General Index, (3) Index of proper names (4) Pali and Sanskrit Index. An exhaustive Bibliography supplies the gap in our knowledge of Buddhist literature.

On Buddhist metaphsical approach to suffering; a study, with some reference to George Grimm's works.