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• First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Žižek

  Owen Hatherley finds Žižek actually making sense

• Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Keith Kahn-Harris enjoys Barbara Ehrenreich's antidote to positive thinking

• What happened to the women's movement?

  Elizabeth Wilson reviews two new books on how to revive feminism

• Living the life

  Should philosophers practise what they preach? And if so, who would deserve a contemporary nomination? asks Fred Inglis

• Beyond belief

  Some sophisticated arguments for God have been made in response to the New Atheists. Richard Norman puts the ‘New Believers’ to the test. Illustrations by Irene Fuga

• Better, juster, nobler

  A new collection of his essays on religion suggest that JS Mill is just the enlightened infidel we need today, says Jonathan Rée

• Atheism in Christianity by Ernst Bloch

  Owen Hatherley sings the praises of Ernst Bloch, the prophet of serious atheism

• Think again

  Postmodern theory can be pretentious and overblown. But a series of reissues now attempts to reclaim its importance. Nina Power assesses its impact

• Thinking animal

  Darwinism has profound implications for philosophy, but we need to remember the master’s caution, warns Simon Blackburn

• Life laid waste

  The exiled Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski died in Oxford in July, at the age of 81. Jonathan Rée examines the legacy of a disillusioned socialist humanist