Philosophy Books

This book discusses how civilized oppression (the oppression that involves neither violence nor the law) can be overcome by re-examining our participation in it. Moral community, solidarity and education are offered as vibrant strategies to overcome the...

Science and the End of Ethics examines some of the most important positive and negative implications that science has for ethics. On the basis of strong scientific reasons for abandoning traditional notions of right and wrong, it endorses a new ethical...

Williamson explains, defends, and applies Kant's theory of emotion. Looking primarily to the Anthropology and the Metaphysics of Morals, she situates Kant's theory of affect within his theory of feeling and focuses on the importance of moral feelings and...

The book examines how coevolved intraspecific aggression and appeasement gestures can give rise to complex social, cultural, and psychopathological phenomena. It argues that the individual's need regulate narcissistic supplies and maintain feelings of...

The topic of moral competence is generally neglected in the study of public management and policy, yet it is critical to any hope we might have for strengthening the quality of governance and professional practice. What does moral competence consist in?...

Ben-Yami shows how the technology of Descartes' time shapes his conception of life, soul and mind-body dualism; how Descartes' analytic geometry helps him develop his revolutionary conception of representation without resemblance; and how these ideas...

Based on an analysis of the changing practice of sovereignty in Brazil, India and South Africa, this book argues that soft sovereignty provides an adequate, yet unrecognized, basis for a moderate, embedded and plural cosmopolitanism situated between...

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject-predicate sentences, and that this...

This book examines Gilles Deleuze's ideas about creativity in the context of lifelong learning, offering an original take on this important contemporary topic using cinematic parallels. Discussing Deleuze's difficult notion of 'counter-actualization' as...

This book explores the various choices speakers or communicators make when expressing power relations in modern societies. The volume brings together several disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, communication studies and social psychology, to...

Wariboko offers a critical-philosophical perspective on the logics and dynamics of finance capital in the twenty-first century in order to craft a model of the care of the soul that will enable citizens to not only better negotiate their economic...

Re-examining English Romanticism through Hegel's philosophy, this book outlines and expands upon Hegel's theory of recognition. Deakin critiques four canonical writers of the English Romantic tradition, Coleridge, Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley and Mary...

Knowing that we are finite, how can we live to the fullest? Philosopher George Santayana suggested 'spirituality' enables us to enjoy what we have. This book clarifies and extends Santayana's account of spirituality, while suggesting how the detachment...

Through the works of key figures in ethics since modernity this book charts a shift from dominant fixated, objective moral systems and the dependence on moral authorities such as God, nature and state to universal, formal, fallible, individualistic...

Does theism dominant the language and practices of public life in the United States? This volume explores this question from a humanist perspective, and in so doing it provides insight into the relationship of religion to public policy, and offers ways...

This interdisciplinary project is situated at the boundary between literary studies and philosophy. Its chief focus is on American Romanticism and it examines work by a number of prominent writers and philosophers, from Whitman and Thoreau to Barthes and...

Conservatism and Pragmatism illustrates the intersections between classical British Conservative thought and classical American Pragmatist philosophy with regard to methodology in politics, ethics, and law.

Can neuroscience help explain the first-person perspective? The Science of Subjectivity delves into the nature of experience, arguing that unconscious subjectivity is a reality. Neisser identifies the biological roots of the first-person, showing how...

The book questions the concept of "the enemy," beginning with Carl Schmitt's famous notion that politics is the relationship of friend and enemy and that humanity is not a political concept. This book deconstructs this notion and views humanity at the...

As widely applied as Marxist theory is today, there remain a host of key western thinkers whose texts are rarely scrutinized through a Marxist lens. In this philosophical analysis of Marx's never-before translated German notes on Machiavelli,...

Crossing the boundaries between 'continental' and 'analytic' philosophical approaches, this book proposes a naturalistic revision of the mathematical ontology of Alain Badiou, establishing links with structuralist projects in the philosophy of science...

This book is about structural relations between phenomenological and neurophysiological aspects of consciousness and time. Focusing on auditory perception and making new and updated use of Leibniz and Husserl, it investigates the transition from...

This book offers an interpretation of certain Hegelian concepts, and their relevance to various themes in contemporary philosophy, which will allow for a non-metaphysical understanding of his thought, further strengthening his relevance to philosophy...

From Aristotle to Darwin, from ancient teleology to contemporary genealogies, this book offers an overview of the birth and then persistence of Aristotle's framework into modernity, until its radical overthrow by the evolutionary revolution.

This book is the first full-length study of Lenin's party building project and writings on elections, looking in detail at his leadership of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the four state Dumas from 1906 to the...

According to Michel Foucault, the 'history of the present' should constitute the starting point for any enquiry into the past. This collection considers the continued relevance of Foucault's work for thinking the history of our present and includes...

This collection of essays on the philosophy of love, by leading contributors to the discussion, places particular emphasis on the relation between love, its character and appropriateness and the objects towards which it is directed: romantic and erotic...

History doesn't have to mean only an effort to know the past. It can be instead, according to Kierkegaard, a willful and personal choice regarding the creation of the future. Kierkegaard offers us an amazing new approach to the problem of what is history...

Public space, both literally and figuratively, is foundationally important to political life. From Socratic lectures in the public forum, to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, public spaces have long played host to political discussion and protest...

This edited volume addresses the challenges and opportunities facing NATO post-2014, applying an original approach to strategy that will produce fresh insights into this hot topic within the international security community.

Through the use of a poststructuralist perspective, Antony O'Loughlin challenges the most basic tenets of International Relations Theory and deploys Rawlsian ideas of public reason in conjunction with Kratochwil's conceptions of practical reason in order...

Natural disasters in Asian countries have brought global attention to the work of local Buddhist communities and groups. Here, the contributors examine local Buddhist communities and international Buddhist organizations engaged in a variety of relief...

Through an analysis of the different dimensions of equality, this book provides a critical introduction to recent philosophical work on egalitarianism, discussing the central questions associated with each of the major debates about egalitarian justice.

This original study examines Jean-François Lyotard's philosophical concept of the differend and details its unexplored implications for literature. it provides a new framework with which to understand the discourse itself, from its Homeric beginnings to...

Taking Hugh of St. Victor's On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith as his source text, Dillard applies the methods of analytic philosophy to develop a systematic theology in the spirit of Christian Platonism, exploring questions that remain pressing...

The Moral Responsibilities of Companies is a philosophical analysis of the question of whether companies can be held morally responsible for the harms they create, and what implications such a view has on the moral position of employees and shareholders...

Markus Seidel provides a detailed critique of epistemic relativism in the sociology of scientific knowledge. In addition to scrutinizing the main arguments for epistemic relativism he provides an absolutist account that nevertheless aims at...

This book offers a unique and accessible way of conceptualizing the vocations of art, science, and politics in the capitalist world through an examination of some neglected features of the work of the scholar who first traced their origins and...

Bringing together active neuroscientists, neurophilosophers, and scholars this volume considers the prospects of a neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism and a pragmatically-informed neuroscience on issues ranging from the nature of mental life to the...

The book presents cinematic case studies in political realism versus political idealism, demonstrating methods of viewing popular cinema as political theory. The book appreciates political myth-making in popular genres as especially practical and...

A collection of essays discussing Herbert Hart's writings on responsibility. The essays focus upon Hart's work on causation in the law and on the justification of punishment. Specific topics discussed include senses of 'responsibility', voluntariness,...

This book is a timely revival of the social and political importance of meaningful work, which explores a philosophy of work based upon the value of meaningfulness and argues for the institution of a new politics of meaningfulness.

The Unsustainable Presidency develops a structural theory of the office by challenging and redefining the twin imperatives upon which the modern chief executive was constructed and by applying the theory to the three most recent presidents: Bill Clinton,...

The first book-length treatment of James Joyce's work through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, Slote argues that the range of styles Joyce deploys has an ethical dimension. This intersection raises questions of epistemology, aesthetics, and the...

This collection of original articles, a sequel of sorts to the 2009 Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension (Palgrave Macmillan), is the first sustained reflection, by scholars with expertise in the faith traditions, on how the...

Eddy M. Souffrant calls for a reassessment of the starting points of moral, social, and political philosophy that takes into account the actual living circumstances of persons living the 21st century.

Why has the US proven unable to enact a foreign policy of restraint in the post-Cold War era? For all but a brief period in the 1990s, US foreign policy is marked by an assertive appearance despite relative hegemony. This book examines the causes and...

Engaging recent developments within the bio-cultural study of religion, Shults unveils the evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms by which god-conceptions are engendered in minds and nurtured in societies. He discovers and attempts to liberate a...