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The Philosophy of Umberto Eco stands out in the Library of Living Philosophers series as the volume on the most interdisciplinary scholar hitherto and probably the most widely translated. The Italian philosopher’s name and works are well known in the humanities, both his philosophical and literary works being translated into fifteen or more languages. Eco is a founder of modern semiotics and widely known for his work in the philosophy of language and aesthetics. He is also a leading figure in the emergence of postmodern literature, and is associated with cultural and mass communication studies. His writings cover topics such as advertising, television, and children’s literature as well as philosophical questions bearing on truth, reality, cognition, language, and literature. The critical essays in this volume cover the full range of this output.        This book has wide appeal not only because of its interdisciplinary nature but also because of Eco’s famous “high and low” approach, which is deeply scholarly in conception and very accessible in outcome. The short essay “Why Philosophy?” included in the volume is exemplary in this regard: it will appeal to scholars for its wit and to high school students for its intelligibility.

Hilary Putnam, who turned 88 in 2014, is one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. He currently holds the position of Cogan University Professor Emeritus of Harvard. He has been called “one of the 20th century’s true philosophic giants” (by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in Prospect magazine in 2013). He has been very influential in several different areas of philosophy: philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. This volume in the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers series contains 26 chapters original to this work, each written by a well-known philosopher, including the late Richard Rorty and the late Michael Dummett. The volume also includes Putnam’s reply to each of the 26 critical and descriptive essays, which cover the broad range of Putnam’s thought. They are organized thematically into the following parts: Philosophy and Mathematics, Logic and Language, Knowing and Being, Philosophy of Practice, and Elements of Pragmatism. Readers will also appreciate the extensive Intellectual Autobiography.

This collection focuses on the introduction of phenomenology to the United States by the community of scholars who taught and studied at the New School for Social Research from 1954 through 1973. During those years, Dorion Cairns, Alfred Schutz, and Aron Gurwitsch—all former students of Edmund Husserl—came together in the department of philosophy to establish the first locus of phenomenology scholarship in the country. This founding trio was soon joined by three other prominent scholars in the field: Werner Marx, Thomas M. Seebohm, and J. N. Mohanty. The Husserlian phenomenology that they brought to the New School has subsequently spread through the Anglophone world as the tradition of Continental philosophy. The first part of this volume includes original works by each of these six influential teachers of phenomenology, introduced either by one of their students or, in the case of Seebohm and Mohanty, by the thinkers themselves. The second part comprises contributions from twelve leading scholars of phenomenology who trained at the New School during this period. The result is a powerful document tracing the lineage and development of phenomenology in the North American context, written by members of the first two generations of scholars who shaped the field. Contributors: Michael Barber, Lester Embree, Jorge García-Gómez, Fred Kersten, Thomas M. T. Luckmann, William McKenna, J. N. Mohanty, Giuseppina C. Moneta, Thomas Nenon, George Psathas, Osborne P. Wiggins, Matthew M. Seebohm, and Richard M. Zaner.

Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body extends the scope of Paul Ricoeur’s reflections and analyses of the body as one’s own through explorations into the ethical, cultural, and affective dimensions of our corporeal existence. Starting with the fact that each of us has a place in the world by reason of our mode of incarnation as flesh, the contributors to this volume address a range of diverse themes in which the lived body figures. Edited by Roger W. H. Savage, this book investigates the construction of narrative identities and the social assignment of gender and race, the passions and an ethics of respect, affect theory, feeling, the carnal imagination, and the cultural and social milieu that comprises the conditions of our embodiment as subjects who have deeply held convictions and beliefs. By acknowledging that the lived body is irreducible to an object in the world, the essays in this volume have a common point: our assurance in acting and suffering is rooted in the mode of our incarnate existence as fragile yet capable human beings.

Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to «read» the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, Thing Knowledge demands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.

This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself. Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy. This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty. Contributors : Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels

In recent years, the field of cognitive psychology has begun to explore the rootedness of rational thinking in subrational inspiration, insight, or instinct—a kind of prediscursive hunch that leaps ahead and guides rational thought before the reasoning human being is even aware of it. In The Music of Reason , Michael Davis shows that this «musical» quality of thinking is something that leading philosophers have long been aware of and explored with great depth and subtlety. Focusing on the work of three thinkers traditionally viewed as among the most poetic of philosophers—Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato—Davis reveals the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's «prerational» foundations. Davis first examines Rousseau's Essay on the Origins of Languages: Where Something Is Said About Melody and Musical Imitation and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music to demonstrate that revealing the truth, or achieving individual enlightenment, requires poetic techniques such as irony, indirection, and ambiguity. How philosophers say things is as worthy of our attention as what they say. Turning to Plato's Lesser Hippias , Davis then reconsiders the relation between truth-telling and lying, finding the Platonic dialogue to be an artful synthesis of music and reason. The «ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry» that Plato placed near the core of this thinking suggests a tension between the rational (scientific) and the nonrational (poetic), or between the true and the beautiful—the one clear and definite, the other allusive and musical. Contemplating language in Rousseau, the Dionysian in Nietzsche, and playfulness in Plato, The Music of Reason explores how what we might initially perceive as irrational and so antithetical to reason is, in fact, constitutive of it.

In The Psychology of Inequality , Michael Locke McLendon looks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought for insight into the personal and social pathologies that plague commercial and democratic societies. He emphasizes the way Rousseau appropriated and modified the notion of self-love, or amour-propre , found in Augustine and various early modern thinkers. McLendon traces the concept in Rousseau's work and reveals it to be a form of selfish vanity that mimics aspects of Homeric honor culture and, in the modern world, shapes the outlook of the wealthy and powerful as well as the underlying assumptions of meritocratic ideals. According to McLendon, Rousseau's elucidation of amour-propre describes a desire for glory and preeminence that can be dangerously antisocial, as those who believe themselves superior derive pleasure from dominating and even harming those they consider beneath them. Drawing on Rousseau's insights, McLendon asserts that certain forms of inequality, especially those associated with classical aristocracy and modern-day meritocracy, can corrupt the mindsets and personalities of people in socially disruptive ways. The Psychology of Inequality shows how amour-propre can be transformed into the demand for praise, whether or not one displays praiseworthy qualities, and demonstrates the ways in which this pathology continues to play a leading role in the psychology and politics of modern liberal democracies.

Ist die Welt der Lohnarbeit eine seelenlose Maschine und sind Angestellte nur Rädchen im Getriebe des Systems? Anhand empirischer Fallstudien analysiert Lisa Herzog die Natur von Organisationen aus einer normativen Perspektive: ihren regelgebundenen Charakter, die Art, mit geteiltem Wissen umzugehen, Organisationskulturen und ihre Beziehung zur Moral. Sie untersucht, wie individuelles Handeln und Organisationsstrukturen ineinandergreifen müssten, um moralische Fallgruben zu vermeiden, und entwickelt die Idee eines »transformativen Handelns« – eine kritische, kreative Art, sich auf die eigene Rolle in einer Organisation einzulassen und dabei grundlegenden moralischen Normen verpflichtet zu bleiben. Weiter geht es um politische und institutionelle Veränderungen, die nötig wären, um Organisationen in eine gerechte Gesellschaft einzubetten. Ob wir uns dem »System« unterwerfen oder versuchen, es zurückzuerobern, ist eine Frage von größter politischer Wichtigkeit in unserer globalisierten Welt.

Mit Bernhard Brauns Opus Magnum liegt erstmals eine Darstellung der gesamten Geschichte der europäischen Kunstphilosophie und Ästhetik vor. Sie setzt ein mit den ersten bekannten Kunstwerken der Altsteinzeit und den begleitenden Weltbildern und reicht bis zu den kunstphilosophischen Denkschulen der Gegenwart. Ergänzt werden die historischen Betrachtungen durch ein systematisches Kapitel, das Fragen nach Kunst und Kunstwerk, nach der Rolle der Schönheit oder nach Kunstpraxis und Institution innerhalb der verschiedenen ästhetischen und kunstphilosophischen Positionen epochenübergreifend thematisiert. Die Darstellung der philosophischen Positionen würdigt eine große Bandbreite von Schulen und Methoden: von Rationalismus, Idealismus und Phänomenologie bis hin zu Empirismus, Transzendentalphilosophie und Analytischer Philosophie. Die Verbindung von Kultur-, Ideen- und Kunstgeschichte macht dieses Werk zu einer faszinierenden Erzählung über die kulturelle Identität Europas. Dies ist Band II der Gesamtausgabe (4 Bände).

A distinguished group of scholars explores compromise in contemporary affairs [/b][b] Do lawmakers have a greater ethical responsibility to compromise than ordinary citizens? How does one rectify what is at stake when lawmakers concede to compromise for the sake of reaching resolution? Is compromise necessarily equalizing and is it a reasonable mode of problem solving and dispute resolution? In this latest installment from the NOMOS series, distinguished scholars across the fields of political science, law, and philosophy tackle the complex set of questions that relate to the practice of compromise and its implications for social and political life in modern societies. The volume, edited by Jack Knight, brings together a range of perspectives – in both disciplinary and substantive terms – on representation, political morality, disagreement, negotiation, and various forms of compromise. The ten essays reflect a variety of considerations across interdisciplinary lines, and provide a new and thought-provoking discussion of the policy, practice, and philosophy of compromise, covering a number of specific topics including alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and conscientious objection. Examining these issues and more, Compromise offers new and thought provoking insights into the pressing issue of the importance of compromise in social and political affairs.

Beyond Reason relates Wagner’s works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the “secret” of large-scale form in Wagner’s music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

In Arendt's Judgment , Jonathan Peter Schwartz explores the nature of human judgment, the subject of the planned third volume of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind , which was left unwritten at the time of her death. Arguing that previous interpretations of Arendt failed to fully appreciate the central place of judgment in her thought, Schwartz contends that understanding Arendt's ideas requires not only interpreting her published work but also reconstructing her thinking from a broader range of sources, including her various essays, lecture course notes, unpublished material, and correspondence. When these sources are taken into account, it becomes clear that, for Arendt, political judgment was the answer to the question of how human freedom could be realized in the modern world. This new approach to understanding Arendt leads to what Schwartz argues are original insights Arendt can teach us about the nature of politics beyond sovereignty and the role of human agency in history. Above all, her novel understanding of the authentic nature and purpose of political philosophy is finally revealed. Schwartz claims that in her theory of political judgment Arendt presented a vision of political philosophy that is improved and deepened by the contributions of ordinary, active citizens. Along with challenging previous interpretations, Arendt's Judgment provides a roadmap to her published and unpublished work for scholars and students.

Phenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, now indispensable to many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to architectural theory and practice is well established. Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture is a vibrant collection of original essays by twelve eminent philosophers who mine Merleau-Ponty’s work to consider how we live and create as profoundly spatial beings. The resulting collection is essential to philosophers and creative artists as well as those concerned with the pressing ethical issues of our time. Each contributor presents a different facet of space, place, or architecture. These essays carve paths from Merleau-Ponty to other thinkers such as Irigaray, Deleuze, Ettinger, and Piaget. As the first collection devoted specifically to developing Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to our understanding of place and architecture, this book will speak to philosophers interested in the problem of space, architectural theorists, and a wide range of others in the arts and design community. Contributors: Nancy Barta-Smith, Edward S. Casey, Helen Fielding, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Randall Johnson, D. R. Koukal, Suzanne Cataldi Laba, Patricia M. Locke, Glen Mazis, Rachel McCann, David Morris, and Dorothea Olkowski.

The purpose of this book is to show the philosophical and anthropological foundation of the dispute about culture, especially in the perspective of the opposition between high and low culture. By analysing the most important achievements of Western philosophical reflection, from the Greeks and Romans through medieval scholasticism to Christian personalism, the author defends the concept of high culture and reveals its metaphysical significance for the human condition. The book also brings out the meaning of the concept of culture, shedding new light upon the long-disputed philosophical questions: who is the creator and subject of culture, what is culture in its essence, and what is its superior purpose?

"A history of Chinese philosophy in the so-called Axial Period (the period of classical Greek and Indian philosophy), during which time China evolved the characteristic ways of thought that sustained both its empire and its culture for over 2000 years. It is comprehensive, lucid, almost simple in its presentation, yet backed up with incomparable authority amid a well-honed discretion that unerringly picks out the core of any theme. Garlanded with tributes even before publication, it has redrawn the map of its subject and will be the one essential guide for any future exploration. For anyone interested in the affinities between ancient Chinese and modern Western philosophy, there is no better introduction"—Contemporary Review"The book is an expression of first-rate scholarship, filled with deep insights into classical Chinese thought. At the same time, it provides a comprehensive and well-balanced discussion that is accessible to the general reader. It is the rare kind of book that will be used as a standard text in introductory courses and be regularly consulted and cited by specialists working in the field."—Philosophical Review"For those who will read only one book on Chinese philosophy, A. C. Graham's Disputers of the Tao is it."—Journal of the History of Philosophy A. C. Graham (1919–1991) is considered by many to have been the leading world authority on Chinese thought, grammar, and textual criticism and the greatest translator of Chinese since Waley. He taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University (where he was Professor of Classical Chinese until 1988) Yale, Ann Arbor, Tsing Hua, Brown, and Honolulu. He was a Fellow of the British Academy. His numerous works include Two Chinese Philosophers (1958), Poems of the Late T'ang (1965), Chuang-tzu: the Seven Inner Chapters (1981), and Studies in Chinese Philosophical Literature (1986).

A rallying call for all those who have been disquieted or disgusted by the excesses of artistic modernism. This is a collection of ten provocative essays on the arts, by writers of varied orientations who share a skepticism about the exaggerated role of modernism and the successive avant-gardes in shaping what is accepted as valid contemporary art. The essays cover painting and other visual arts, literature, music, and general observations about all the arts. It is not an exercise in hand-wringing about the current state of the arts, but looks for different directions in which the arts may now fruitfully evolve. Despite the diverse philosophies of the contributors, these essays together constitute a formidable case against the unhealthy impact of avant-gardism on our lives and aesthetic culture. The essays include the following, among others: a study of anti-modernist painter Odd Nerdrum, who sees modernist art as totalitarian; a critique of the avant-gardist neglect of mimesis as a key to art; an evaluation of “the end of art”; a critique of modern art in light of “the aesthetic harm principle”; an examination of Popper's objections to progressivism in music; the presentation of a new paradigm for literature.

Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spanned right- and left-wing politics, secular and spiritual philosophy, and most every school of art or culture. The belief that humans are capable of making lasting improvements—intellectual, scientific, material, moral, and cultural—continues to be a commonplace of our age. However, events of the preceding century, including but not limited to two world wars, conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, the spread of communism across Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, violent nationalism in the Balkans, and genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, have called into question this faith in the continued advancement of humankind. In A Road to Nowhere , Matthew W. Slaboch argues that political theorists should entertain the possibility that long-term, continued progress may be more fiction than reality. He examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch—rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to engage political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists. Looking at the figures of Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Adams, Slaboch considers the ways in which they defined progress and their reasons for doubting that their cultures, or the world, were progressing. He compares Germany, Russia, and the United States to illustrate how these nineteenth-century critics of the idea of progress contributed to or helped forestall the emergence of forms of government that came to be associated with each country: fascism, communism, and democratic capitalism, respectively. Turning to Spengler, Solzhenitsyn, and Lasch, Slaboch explores the contemporary relevance of the critique of progress and the arguments for and against political engagement in the face of uncertain improvement, one-way inevitable decline, or unending cycles of advancement and decay. A Road to Nowhere concludes that these notable naysayers were not mere defeatists and presents their varied prescriptions for individual and social action.

The Perfection of Freedom seeks to respond to the impoverished conventional notion of freedom through a recovery of an understanding rich with possibilities yet all but forgotten in contemporary thought. This understanding, developed in different but complementary ways in the German thinkers Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, connects freedom, not exclusively with power and possibility, but rather most fundamentally with completion, wholeness, and actuality. What is unique here is specifically the interpretation of freedom in terms of form, whether it be aesthetic form (Schiller), organic form (Schelling), or social form (Hegel). Although this book presents serious criticisms of the three philosophers, it shows that they open up new avenues for reflection on the notion of freedom; avenues that promise to overcome many of the dichotomies that continue to haunt contemporary thought–for example, between freedom and order, freedom and nature, and self and other. The Perfection of Freedom offers not only a significantly new interpretation of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, it also proposes a modernity more organically rooted in the ancient and classical Christian worlds.

This book aims to reinvigorate the Marxist project and the role it might play in illuminating the way beyond capitalism. Though political economy and scientific investigation are needed for pure Marxism, Martin’s argument is that the extent to which these elements are needed cannot be determined within the conversations of political economy and other investigations into causal mechanisms. What has not been done, and what this book does, is to argue for the possibility of a rethought Marxism that takes ethics as its core, displacing political economy and «scientific» investigation.

The Socratic Turn addresses the question of whether we can acquire genuine knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. Reputedly, Socrates was the first philosopher to make the attempt. But Socrates was a materialistic natural scientist in his youth, and it was only much later in life—after he had rejected materialistic natural science—that he finally turned, around the age of forty, to the examination of ordinary moral and political opinions, or to moral-political philosophy so understood. Through a consideration of Plato's account of Socrates' intellectual development, and with a view to relevant works of the pre-Socratics, Xenophon, Aristotle, Hesiod, Homer, and Aristophanes, Dustin Sebell reproduces the course of thought that carried Socrates from materialistic natural science to moral-political philosophy. By doing so, he seeks to recover an all but forgotten approach to the question of justice, one still worthy of being called scientific.

This book employs Heidegger’s work of the 1920s and early 1930s to develop distinctively Heideggerian accounts of agency, freedom, and responsibility, making the case that Heidegger’s thought provides a compelling alternative to the mainstream philosophical accounts of these concepts. Hans Pedersen demonstrates that Heidegger’s thought can be fruitfully used to develop a plausible alternative understanding of agency that avoids the metaphysical commitments that give rise to the standard free-will debate. The first several chapters are devoted to working out an account of the ontological structure of human agency, specifically focusing on the Heideggerian understanding of the role of mental states, causal explanations, and deliberation in human agency, arguing that action need not be understood in terms of the causal efficacy of mental states. In the following chapters, building on the prior account of agency, Pedersen develops Heideggerian accounts of freedom and responsibility. Having shown that action need not be understood causally, the Heideggerian view thereby avoids the conflict between free will and determinism that gives rise to the problem of free will and the correlative problem of responsibility.

Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness presents a world-centric, ‘caring’ conceptualization of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness grounded in the thought of two radical, twentieth-century continental thinkers: Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida. It fundamentally re-evaluates what it means to care for the world in ‘dark times’ and develops a political theory of repairing, preserving and cultivating the relationships which constitute the human community. This interdisciplinary book reveals how cosmopolitanism and forgiveness each care for the powerful experience of human freedom: the power to begin new courses of political action with a plurality of people in the public realm. It not only casts new light on the political thought of both Arendt and Derrida but also contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of political spaces, the possibility for collective political action, and the importance of cultivating encounters with the unknown Other in today’s digitally interconnected world.

Ontologies of Sex: Philosophy in Sexual Politics considers the ontological presuppositions of feminist theories of sexual difference and brings them into conversation with phenomenological, ontological accounts of erotic experience. Erotic relation is a corporeal, intimate, and affective encounter with the other in which the subjects have the possibility of being revealed to themselves and to each other in who they are. In eroticism, law paradoxes, death, abjection, subjectivity, sovereignty, commitment, engagement, freedom are at stake. By inquiring into various types of analyzes of sexual oppression and different accounts of ethics of Eros, this book invites the reader to deepen their existential reflection on the significance of Eros for human life in general, and for political subjectivity in particular.

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century initiated a great debate not just about inequality but also regarding the failures found in the economic models used by theoreticians and practitioners alike. Wealth of Persons offers a totally different perspective that challenges the very terms of the debate. The Great Recession reveals a great existential rift at the core of certain economic reflections, thereby showing the real crisis of the crisis of economics. In the human sciences we have created a kind of «Tower of Babel» where we cannot understand each other any longer. The «breakdowns» occur equally on the personal, social, political, and economic levels. There is a need for an «about-face» in method to restore harmony among dissociated disciplines. Wealth of Persons offers a key to such a restoration, applying insights and analysis taken from different economic scholars, schools of thought, philosophical traditions, various disciplines, and charismatic entrepreneurs. Wealth of Persons aims at recapturing an adequate understanding of the acting human person in the economic drama, one that measures up to the reality. The investigation is a passport allowing entry into the land of economic knowledge, properly unfolding the anthropological meaning of the free economy.

This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, «What is Enlightenment?» The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present.

In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.

Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

Moral universalism, or the idea that some system of ethics applies to all people regardless of race, color, nationality, religion, or culture, must have a plurality over which to range — a plurality of diverse persons, nations, jurisdictions, or localities over which morality asserts a universal authority. The contributors to Moral Universalism and Pluralism , the latest volume in the NOMOS series, investigate the idea that, far from denying the existence of such pluralities, moral universalism presupposes it. At the same time, the search for universally valid principles of morality is deeply challenged by diversity. The fact of pluralism presses us to explore how universalist principles interact with ethical, political, and social particularisms. These important essays refuse the answer that particularisms should simply be made to conform to universal principles, as if morality were a mold into which the diverse matter of human society and culture could be pressed. Rather, the authors bring philosophical, legal and political perspectives to bear on the core questions: Which forms of pluralism are conceptually compatible with moral universalism, and which ones can be accommodated in a politically stable way? Can pluralism generate innovations in understandings of moral duty? How is convergence on the validity of legal and moral authority possible in circumstances of pluralism? As the contributors to the book demonstrate in a wide variety of ways, these normative, conceptual, and political questions deeply intertwine. Contributors: Kenneth Baynes, William A. Galston, Barbara Herman, F. M. Kamm, Benedict Kingsbury, Frank I. Michelman, William E. Scheuerman, Gopal Sreenivasan, Daniel Weinstock, and Robin West.

In Prophetic Politics , Philip J. Harold offers an original interpretation of the political dimension of Emmanuel Levinas's thought. Harold argues that Levinas’s mature position in Otherwise Than Being breaks radically with the dialogical inclinations of his earlier Totality and Infinity and that transformation manifests itself most clearly in the peculiar nature of Levinas's relationship to politics. Levinas’s philosophy is concerned not with the ethical per se, in either its applied or its transcendent forms, but with the source of ethics. Once this source is revealed to be an anarchic interruption of our efforts to think the ethical, Levinas's political claims cannot be read as straightforward ideological positions or principles for political action. They are instead to be understood “prophetically,” a position that Harold finds comparable to the communitarian critique of liberalism offered by such writers as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. In developing this interpretation, which runs counter to formative influences from the phenomenological tradition, Harold traces Levinas's debt to phenomenological descriptions of such experiences as empathy and playfulness. Prophetic Politics will highlight the relevance of the phenomenological tradition to contemporary ethical and political thought—a long-standing goal of the series—while also making a significant and original contribution to Levinas scholarship.

The nature of consciousness and the relationship between the mind and brain have become the most hotly debated topics in philosophy. This book explains and argues for a new approach called enactivism. Enactivism maintains that consciousness and all subjective thoughts and feelings arise from an organism's attempts to use its environment in the service of purposeful action. The authors admit that their perspective presents many problems: How does one distinguish real action from reaction? Is it scientifically acceptable to say that the whole organism can use its parts, instead of being a mere summation of their separate mechanical reactions? What about the danger that this analysis will imply that physical systems fail to be «causally closed»? How the Mind Uses the Brain tries to answer these questions and represents a sharp break with tradition, arguing that consciousness and emotions are aspects of an organism's ongoing self-organizational activity, driving information-processing rather than merely responding to it.

In Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences , Robert Vinten takes a fresh look at the relationship between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the social sciences. The book locates Wittgenstein’s philosophy in relation to the social sciences. This involves getting clear about what Wittgenstein was doing in his philosophical work as well as about the nature of the social sciences. Vinten argues that the social sciences can be considered scientific despite the fact that social sciences have different methods and subject matter to the natural sciences. He then examines problems associated with relativism within the social sciences and considers whether Wittgenstein might be a relativist of some sort.  The book goes on to consider whether Wittgenstein’s philosophy lends support to any particular political ideology and asks an important question: whether Wittgenstein himself was a conservative, liberal, or socialist. This question is explored involving a critical engagement with Wittgenstein scholars, cultural theorists, and political philosophers such as J. C. Nyiri, Richard Rorty, Alex Callinicos, Perry Anderson, and Terry Eagleton. Finally, the book considers how Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks can help us in getting to grips with problems in the social sciences and political philosophy. A criticism of Patricia Churchland and Christopher Suhler’s neurobiological account of control suggests that Wittgenstein’s work can be useful in getting rid of problems concerning freedom of the will. A critical engagement with thinkers like John Rawls and Chantal Mouffe is used to examine the relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to discussions of justice. Wittgenstein’s work is clearly relevant to issues of injustice that are with us today.

Written by the most important scholars in contemporary Confucian studies, these approachable essays focus on the relevance of Confucius’s ideas to modern living, with special attention given to the Analects, his seminal text. Topics covered include tradition and creativity, grief and mourning, the doctrine of correcting names, Confucian kungfu, and moral cultivation.

Long considered «the noblest of the senses,» vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.

Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.

His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of «scopic regimes.» Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

Is it due to lack of critical agency that precarious persons opt, time and again, for political views that contribute to their marginalization? How should we understand that alleged loss of critical agency and how could it be countered? Influential perspectives in critical theory have answered these questions by highlighting how certain ideological mechanisms, incorporated thoughtlessly by the most vulnerable bodies, function to obscure their interests and the causes of the condition they find themselves in. Through an original interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s thought, but also going beyond it, The Politics of Bodies establishes a different horizon of reflection. Laura Quintana’s main hypothesis is that the lack of critical agency today has more to do with a loss of the desire for transformation, fostered by neoliberal consensual dynamics, than with techniques of deceit and manipulation. In developing her interpretation of Rancière’s thought, Quintana provides an analysis of certain aesthetic-political and socioeconomic conditions of the historical present, anchored mainly in Latin America. Thus, she addresses the corporeal transformations produced by emancipatory practices, the ways in which they affect configurations of power, and the manner in which they can be disseminated in and, in turn, alter the political landscape.

Is knowledge discovered, or just invented? Can we ever get outside ourselves to know how reality is in itself, independent of us? Philosophical realism raises the question whether in our knowing we connect with an independent reality–or only connect with our own mental constructs. Far from being a silly parlor game, the question impacts our lives concretely and deeply. Modern Western culture has been infected with antirealism and the doubt, skepticism, subjectivism, relativism, and atheism that attends it–not to mention distrust and arbitrary (mis)use of reality. Premier scientist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi stepped aside from research to offer an innovative account of knowing that takes its cue from how discovery actually happens. Polanyi defied the antirealism of the twentieth century, sounding a ringing note of hope in his repeated claim that in discovery, we know we have made contact with reality because «we have a sense of the possibility of indeterminate future manifestations.» And that sense marks contact with reality, because it is the way reality is: abundant, generous, and fraught with as-yet-unnameable possibilities. This book examines that distinctive claim, contrasting it to the wider philosophical discussions regarding realism and antirealism in the recent decades. It shows why Polanyi's outlook is superior, and why that matters, not just to scientific discoverers, but to us all.

The problem of human knowing has been foundational for the enterprise of philosophy since the time of Descartes. The great philosophers have offered different accounts of the power and limits of human knowing but no generally acceptable system has emerged. Contemporary writers have almost given up on this most intractable issue. In this book, Brian Cronin suggests using the method of introspective description to identify the characteristics of the act of human understanding and knowing. Introspection–far from being private and unverifiable–can be public, communal, and verifiable. If we can describe our dreams and our feelings, then, we can describe our acts of understanding. Using concrete examples, one can identify the activities involved–namely, questioning, researching, getting an idea, expressing a concept, reflecting on the evidence and inferring a conclusion. Each of these activities can be described clearly and in great detail. If we perform these activities well, we can understand and know both truth and value. The text invites readers to verify each and every statement in their own experience of understanding. This is a detailed and verifiable account of human knowing: an extremely valuable contribution to philosophy and a solution to the foundational problem of knowing.

Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—"interpreting music" in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaning—even the very concept of music—while breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. Kramer argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation, is ideally open to it, and that musical interpretation is the paradigm of interpretation in general. The book illustrates the many dimensions of interpreting music through a series of case studies drawn from the classical repertoire, but its methods and principles carry over to other repertoires just as they carry beyond music by working through music to wider philosophical and cultural questions.

The notebooks included in the three volume set 100 Conversations You Need to Have  contain A Philosophy Guide, A Stoic Philosophy Guide , and A Chinese Philosophy Guide. Each notebook offers an accessible and thought-provoking collection of life’s big questions and corresponding answers from some of history’s greatest philosophers. Readers are provided with the opportunity to answer each question, turn the page and receive a short piece of advice from thinkers on topics that include happiness, friendship, discipline, patience, the meaning of life and death, and other essential topics. The list of philosophers that are featured in each notebook is very multicultural. It includes both men and women and spans across time, including, among others, Aristotle, Seneca, Simone de Beauvoir, Lao Tzu, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Alfarabi, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pema Chodron. These notebooks duplicate the Socratic dialogue method and embody the idea of philosophy being a pathway to a more fulfilling life by creating 100 meaningful dialogues between the reader and a diverse array of interlocutors who will guide them on their journey to crafting a good life.

Although the French Hellenist and sinologist François Jullien has published more than thirty books, half of which have been translated into English, he remains much less known in the English-language world than many of his fellow “French philosophers”. This may be due to his work being perceived as within the limits of sinology. This book attempts to rectify this, highlighting Jullien’s work at the intersection of Chinese and Western thought and drawing out the “unthought” in both traditions of thinking. This "unthought" can be seen as what conditions our thought, and opens it up onto new ways of thinking and understanding. The notion of "unthought" is at the core of Jullien’s methodology, operating in what he calls the "divergence of the in-between". Written in an engaging style, Arne De Boever offers an accessible introduction to François Jullien’s work that emphatically challenges some of the core assumptions of Western reasoning.

Seit 800 Jahren zweifeln europäische Dichter an der Identität des Ichs: Schon Wolframs «Parzival» ist als «Mensch ohne Eigenschaften» auf der Suche nach dem Selbst und sein Ziel eine Illusion. Durch Zufälle und seine Beziehungen ständig verändert hat das Ich von da an niemals eine lineare Geschichte, sondern wird in Geschichten erzählt. Die Kirche hingegen fördert und überwacht seine Identität als Einheit von Leib und Seele. Erst nach 1900 zweifelt auch die Wissenschaft und entdeckt im christlichen und cartesischen Dualismus ein kreatives «Zwischen». Dichter schreiben dann Hypertexte, während Bürger wieder einmal von nostalgischen Utopien träumen, die heute Sicherheit, Leitkultur, Nation und Heimat heißen. Bleibt am Ende, mit den Worten Hilde Domins, "nur eine Rose als Stütze“? Ulrich Merkel erforscht in diesem Band interdisziplinär eine Geschichte des europäischen Ichs, im Vergleich mit den Geschichten der Literatur.

Zeitlebens hat Gustav Mahler mit der Thematik des Todes gerungen. Immer wieder behandelte er sie musikalisch auf neue Weise. Martin Dornis untersucht Mahlers Symphonien in seiner Studie als Vorübungen zu einer Kunst des Sterbens. Philosophie und Musik lehren das Sterben auf gegensätzliche, aber je ungenügende Weise, sprachlich einerseits, musikalisch andererseits. In Mahlers Musik wird hingegen künstlerisch greifbar, wie eine wirkliche Kunst des Sterbens klingen könnte. Sie wäre eine, die die Menschen lehren könnte, mit der Todesgewissheit umzugehen. Zugleich zeigt sie jedoch, dass Musik letztlich nicht in der Lage ist, dem Tod Einhalt zu gebieten. Stattdessen verweist sie auf den ewigen Augenblick des Augustinus: Sie zeigt, was erfüllte Zeit wäre und worin ein singend-sprechendes und sprechend-singendes Leben trotz des Todes und in dessen Angesicht bestünde.

Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)

This collection of brief essays and still briefer commentaries is a personal reflection on some topics that have been thematic in the development of my theoretical work. These essays are not meant to extend the theory into yet-uncharted territory, but rather to draw out some of its implications for clinical neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and everyday life. The point of view guiding these reflections can be found in prior works, but the discerning reader will not fail to see a departure from current models of mind and brain based on circuit board diagrams, modular and computational theories that conflict with a processual account in which the mind/brain is more like a living organism. This perspective, which is often at odds with common sense and folk psychology, has particular relevance to our concepts of the self, the inner life, subjective time, adaptive process, and the world represented in perception.

Rancière’s magnum opus on the aesthetic. Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

The origins of «Western Marxism». The early Marx called for the «realization of philosophy» through revolution. Revolution thus became a critical concept for Marxism, a view elaborated in the later praxis perspectives of Lukács and the Frankfurt School. These thinkers argue that fundamental philosophical problems are, in reality, social problems abstractly conceived. Originally published as Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, The Philosophy of Praxis traces the evolution of this argument in the writings of Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Marcuse. This reinterpretation of the philosophy of praxis shows its continuing relevance to contemporary discussions in Marxist political theory, continental philosophy and science and technology studies.

Distinguished ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman compiles Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings on music and nationalism, from his early volumes of Volkslieder through sacred song to the essays on aesthetics late in his life, shaping them as the book on music that Herder would have written had he gathered the many strands of his musical thought into a single publication. Framed by analytical chapters and extensive introductions to each translation, this book interprets Herder’s musings on music to think through several major questions: What meaning did religion and religious thought have for Herder? Why do the nation and nationalism acquire musical dimensions at the confluence of aesthetics and religious thought? How did his aesthetic and musical thought come to transform the way Herder understood music and nationalism and their presence in global history? Bohlman uses the mode of translation to explore Herder’s own interpretive practice as a translator of languages and cultures, providing today’s readers with an elegantly narrated and exceptionally curated collection of essays on music by two major intellectuals.

A major systematic study of the connection between Marx and Lacan’s work This book discusses the importance of Marx’s critique of political economy in Lacan’s attempt to rethink the political and philosophical legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis. By situating Marx in the broader context of Lacan’s teaching, it highlights the ongoing importance of the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm a dialectical and materialist thinking in philosophy and beyond. Lacan presents an unorthodox image of Marx, linking his critique of capitalism with the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the Freudian “labour theory of the unconscious” and emancipatory politics, showing that psychoanalysis, structuralism and the critique of political economy participate in the same movement of thought, which revolutionized the human sciences and whose relevance remains intact even today.

Autonomy is fundamental to liberalism. But autonomous individuals often choose to do things that harm themselves or undermine their equality. In particular, women often choose to participate in practices of sexual inequality—cosmetic surgery, gendered patterns of work and childcare, makeup, restrictive clothing, or the sexual subordination required by membership in certain religious groups. In this book, Clare Chambers argues that this predicament poses a fundamental challenge to many existing liberal and multicultural theories that dominate contemporary political philosophy. Chambers argues that a theory of justice cannot ignore the influence of culture and the role it plays in shaping choices. If cultures shape choices, it is problematic to use those choices as the measure of the justice of the culture. Drawing upon feminist critiques of gender inequality and poststructuralist theories of social construction, she argues that we should accept some of the multicultural claims about the importance of culture in shaping our actions and identities, but that we should reach the opposite normative conclusion to that of multiculturalists and many liberals. Rather than using the idea of social construction to justify cultural respect or protection, we should use it to ground a critical stance toward cultural norms. The book presents radical proposals for state action to promote sexual and cultural justice.

Drawing freely and expertly from Continental and analytic traditions, Richard Bernstein examines a number of debates and controversies exemplified in the works of Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt. He argues that a «new conversation» is emerging about human rationality—a new understanding that emphasizes its practical character and has important ramifications both for thought and action.

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fifth and final volume in the series focuses on the identity, nature, and future of visual studies, discussing critical questions about its history, objects, and methods. The contributors question the canon of literature of visual studies and the place of visual studies with relation to theories of vision, visuality, epistemology, politics, and art history, giving voice to a variety of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Rather than dismissing visual studies, as its provocative title might suggest, this volume aims to engage a critical discussion of the state of visual studies today, how it might move forward, and what it might leave behind to evolve in productive ways. The contributors are Emmanuel Alloa, Nell Andrew, Linda Báez Rubí, Martin A. Berger, Hans Dam Christensen, Isabelle Decobecq, Bernhard J. Dotzler, Johanna Drucker, James Elkins, Michele Emmer, Yolaine Escande, Gustav Frank, Theodore Gracyk, Asbjørn Grønstad, Stephan Günzel, Charles W. Haxthausen, Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, Tom Holert, Kıvanç Kılınç, Charlotte Klonk, Tirza True Latimer, Mark Linder, Sunil Manghani, Anna Notaro, Julia Orell, Mark Reinhardt, Vanessa R. Schwartz, Bernd Stiegler, Øyvind Vågnes, Sjoukje van der Meulen, Terri Weissman, Lisa Zaher, and Marta Zarzycka.

An account of perception is essential for an interpretation of memory, thought, and the mental state. The theory expounded in this book, developed from clinical studies of brain-damaged individuals, is a dynamic process account that departs from static computational models of the mind, with implications for our understanding of all aspects of mental function, including the mind/brain problem. The various topics are discussed in lengthy essays that cover such phenomena as imagery, reality and illusion, time and the present moment, subjectivity, will and agency, and psychoanalysis and group psychology.

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fourth volume in the series, Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic , focuses on questions revolving around the concepts of the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and the political. The book is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or nonaesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. The central question of this book is whether artists and academicians are free of this choice in practice, in pedagogy, and in theory. The contributors are Stéphanie Benzaquen, J. M. Bernstein, Karen Busk-Jepsen, Luis Camnitzer, Diarmuid Costello, Joana Cunha Leal, Angela Dimitrakaki, Alexander Dumbadze, T. Brandon Evans, Geng Youzhuang, Boris Groys, Beáta Hock, Gordon Hughes, Michael Kelly, Grant Kester, Meredith Kooi, Cary Levine, Sunil Manghani, William Mazzarella, Justin McKeown, Andrew McNamara, Eve Meltzer, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Maria Filomena Molder, Carrie Noland, Gary Peters, Aaron Richmond, Lauren Ross, Toni Ross, Eva Schürmann, Gregory Sholette, Noah Simblist, Jon Simons, Robert Storr, Martin Sundberg, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Rebecca Zorach.