The best-selling, official, and definitive guide to the characters of the dynamic, ever-expanding Marvel Universe.

Compiled by a team of comic book experts in close collaboration with Marvel Comics, this fully updated and expanded edition features more than 1,200 iconic Super Heroes and villains, with hundreds of expanded entries detailing their adventures since the previous edition (2019).

Major new characters have also been added, and the latest Marvel Universe crossover events, such as Judgment Day, Empyre, and War of the Realms, are included as in-depth features. With every character illustrated with superb artwork from the original Marvel Comics, this is the one book every Marvel fan has to own.

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Descartes characterisation of the mind as a 'thinking thing marks the beginning of modern philosophy of mind. It is also the point of departure for Descartes own system in which the mind is the first object of knowledge for those who reason in an 'orderly way. This ground-breaking book shows that the Cartesian mind has been widely misunderstood: typically treated as simply the subject of phenomenal consciousness, ignoring its deeply intellectual character. James Hill argues that this interpretation has gone hand in hand with a misreading of Descartes method of doubt which treats it as all-inclusive and universal in scope. In fact, the sceptical arguments of the First Meditation aim to lead the mind away from the senses and towards the intellectual 'notions that the mind has within it, and which are never the subject of doubt. Hill also places Descartes concept of mind into the wider setting of his science of nature, showing how he wished to reveal a mental subject that would able to comprehend the new physics necessitated by Copernicus heliocentrism.

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of the most striking works of autobiography ever written. Like many creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel and innovative angles. His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does exactly that. Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about the divine right of kings and queens to rule. In France, the book was banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau's native Geneva, it was both banned and burned. But history soon pushed Rousseau's ideas into the mainstream of political theory, with the French and American revolutions paving the way for democratic government to gain ground across the Western world. Though it was precisely what got Rousseau's book banned at the time, the novel idea that all legitimate government rests on the will of the people is now recognised as the core principle of democratic freedom and represents, for many people, the highest of ideals.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer James Hill of the "New York Times" chooses fifty of his photographs and describes the stories and emotions behind those pictures and the artistic and emotional choices shaped during the intense kaleidoscope of those experiences. From the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the Royal Wedding in 2011, to taking the first portrait of the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, to the death of Pope John Paul II, Hill has witnessed some of recent history's most poignant moments, and describes the fine balance demanded of a photojournalist between professional detachment and personal engagement.

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of the most striking works of autobiography ever written. Like many creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel and innovative angles. His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does exactly that. Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about the divine right of kings and queens to rule. In France, the book was banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau’s native Geneva, it was both banned and burned. But history soon pushed Rousseau’s ideas into the mainstream of political theory, with the French and American revolutions paving the way for democratic government to gain ground across the Western world.

Though it was precisely what got Rousseau’s book banned at the time, the novel idea that all legitimate government rests on the will of the people is now recognised as the core principle of democratic freedom and represents, for many people, the highest of ideals.

George Berkeley’s doctrine of notions is often disparaged or dismissed. In a systematic interpretation and positive reconstruction of the doctrine, James Hill presents Berkeley’s understanding of the inner sphere and self-awareness, and reassesses the widely held view of Berkeley as an empiricist. Examining the development of Berkeley’s philosophy from the early notebooks to the late Siris, Hill sets out how knowledge by notion involves a radical rejection of the perceptual model of self-cognition and of the attempt to frame our knowledge of the inner by analogy with the outer. He points to Berkeley’s divergence from the assumption among rationalists and empiricists that we know our selves and our mental acts by idea, or by an immediate presentation before the mind. Weaving together Berkeley’s conception of the intellect, conceptual thought, mathematics, ethics and theology in the light of the doctrine of notions, Hill invites us to treat Berkeley’s philosophy of mind as distinct from the empiricist tradition. This cutting edge reflection on the doctrine of notions is essential reading for students and scholars specialising in Berkeley as well as early modern accounts of the self, perception and God.