Topics in philosophy Books

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology,...

McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time, first published in 1908, set the agenda for 20th-century philosophy of time. Yet there is very little agreement on what it actually says-nobody agrees with the conclusion, but still everybody finds...

In 1758, Rousseau announced that he had adopted "vitam impendere vero" (dedicate life to truth) as a personal pledge. Despite the dramatic nature of this declaration, no scholar has yet approached Rousseau's work through the lens of truth or truthseeking...

Mary Midgley is one of the most important moral philosophers working today. Over the last thirty years, her writings have informed debates concerning animals, the environment and evolutionary theory. The invited essays in this volume offer critical...

In this book, Toby Svoboda develops and defends a Kantian environmental virtue ethic, challenging the widely-held view that Kant's moral philosophy has little to offer environmental ethics. On the contrary, Svoboda contends that on Kantian...

Virtues and reasons are two of the most fruitful and important concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Many writers have commented upon the close connection between virtues and reasons, but no one has done full justice to the complexity of this...

John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding begins with a clear statement of an epistemological goal: to explain the limits of human knowledge, opinion, and ignorance. The actual text of the Essay, in stark contrast, takes a long and seemingly...

This book reconceives virtue epistemology in light of the conviction that we are essentially social creatures. Virtue is normally thought of as something that allows individuals to accomplish things on their own. Although contemporary ethics is...

First published in 1986. The social sciences in the twentieth century have tended to fragment into different disciplines and schools of thought. Often these schools of thought are complete but closed systems of thought, permitting no exchange of ideas...

Normativity and Naturalism in the Social Sciences engages with a central debate within the philosophy of social science: whether social scientific explanation necessitates an appeal to norms, and if so, whether appeals to normativity can be rendered...

 Bringing together specialists and scholars in different areas of law, critical theory and philosophy, this rethinking of law and socio-legal studies through Rancière provides an original and important engagement with a range of contemporary legal...

First published in 1977. Ethics is the most practical branch of philosophy: its immediate concern is with people's actions. Yet most philosophers do little to relate ethics intelligibly to the human situation. In this inquiry into the nature of ethics,...

This book is the first devoted to Hume's conception of testimony. Hume is usually taken to be a reductionist with respect to testimony, with trust in others dependent on the evidence possessed by individuals concerning the reliability of texts or...

Mental action deserves a place among foundational topics in action theory and philosophy of mind. Recent accounts of human agency tend to overlook the role of conscious mental action in our daily lives, while contemporary accounts of the conscious mind...

A broadly liberal politics requires political compassion, not simply in the sense of compassion for the victims of injustice but also for opponents confronted through political protest and (more broadly) dissent. There are times when, out of a sense of...

The Text as Thou establishes Martin Buber's central concept of "I-Thou" as the heart of a dialogical theory of textual interpretation and a narrative method for explicating Jewish philosophy and theology. Part One takes up Buber's application of his...

Diversity is both an unavoidable aspect of twenty-first century living and a powerful challenge to older philosophical traditions that still assume as normatively universal a set of values, ways of thinking, institutions, and habits of living that...

In Constructing Twenty-First Century Socialism: The Role of Radical Education, Motta and Cole explore the role of the politics of knowledge and pedagogy in the reinvention of socialism for the twenty-first century. Through a critical analysis of Brazil,...

Alternatives in Semantics is the first volume to focus on alternatives as a key theme. It offers a survey of the use of alternatives in semantics and pragmatics, and an overview of current approaches and applications of alternative-based semantics, from...

What makes some international firms and managers successful and why do others fail? What can firms and managers do to adjust to the specific local business environment? Can we observe patterns that could guide the adjustment strategies of multinational...

Jan De Vos starts where other critiques on psychology end, presenting the argument that psychology is psychologization.This fresh and pioneering approach asks what it means to become the psychologist of one's own life. If something is not working in our...

Welshon argues for a new interpretation of Nietzsche's metapsychology and philosophy of mind. Rather than rehearsing Nietzsche's criticisms of souls and religious and philosophical uses of souls and subjects yet again, Welshon starts from the idea that...

The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts and Humanities are resulting in fresh approaches and methodologies for the study of new and traditional corpora. This 'computational turn' takes the methods and...

Experts from academia, governments, think tanks, NGOs, trade unions, and businesses investigate whether the public should play a greater role in foreign policy making by analyzing their current role in the Iraq war (USA), PostApartheid (South Africa),...

A first in English, this book engages with the ways in which Hegel and Sartre answer the difficult questions: What is it to be human? What place do we have in the world? How should we live? What can we be?

The greatest myth of modern times is the suggestion that capitalism and corporations do better with less government. The global economic crisis has certainly put paid to this idea. But the massive emergency state bailouts and interventions put in place...

This collectionis the first to examine the life experiences of young adult immigrants in Europe, as transmitted by the young adults themselves, and together with the analytical framework, seeks to uncover mechanisms at work in these individuals' lives.

Mind and Machine offers both an up-to-date overview of central questions and topics in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, as well as a distinct stance on many of the key debates, all the while focusing on two central questions: - Could a machine...

Scientists often try to understand the world by creating simplified or idealised models of it. And yet modelling is hard to make sense of, not least because it seems to involve learning about things that don't exist, like ideal oscillators or perfect...

Michael Mann's films receive a detailed analysis as existential dramas, includingHeat, Collateral, The Last of the Mohicans and Public Enemies. Thebook demonstrates that Mann's films perform critical engagement with existentialism, illustrating the...

This book offers new direction in disability studies, by integrating the medical and social model of disability. The first aim is to provide an integral approach to thinking about impairment and disability through the integrative lens of being vulnerable...

There have been two major models of the mind's relation to its environment in Western though, both of which employ the term 'representation', but in quite different ways. The newer one, dominant today in philosophy, takes the mind to have states about...

Children's texts are highly responsive to social change and to global politics, and are implicated in shaping the values of children and young people. New World Orders, now in paperback for the first time, shows how texts for children and young people...

Animals and Sociology challenges traditional assumptions about the nature of sociology. Sociology often centers on humans; however, other animals are everywhere in society. Kay Peggs explores the significant contribution that sociology can make to our...

Triantafillou analyzes the changing ways of governing the public sector and the ways in which public organizations have become the target of interventions seeking to improve their efficiency and quality. He exposes how political and social science...

Originally called "Physics and Philosophy from a 16-year-old," this is a book that aims to produce an eloquent painting-a painting that creatively illustrates many of our universe's secrets. This painting is made through the blending of religion and...

Economics is today among the most influential of all professions. Economists alter the course of economic affairs and deeply affect the lives of current and future generations. Yet, virtually alone among the major professions, economics lacks a body of...