Philosophy

'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.'
Voltaire

Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Smith, Gibbon, Bentham... These are among the great thinkers who contributed to the dramatic developments in religion, science and philosophy that we now call the Enlightenment. They dominated the second half of the eighteenth century and their writings continue to shape the intellectual and political worlds we now inhabit.

Written by a world authority, this brief history of the Enlightenment concludes with a perceptive assessment of the cultural, religious, ethical and political dimensions of its legacy.

'A remarkable short tour of the Enlightenment that is brisk but never hurried, covering more than seems possible. Kenny is as spirited and opinionated as the age he describes, tempered by a moderation and breadth of knowledge that comes from experience and hindsight.'
Julian Baggini, founder editor of The Philosophers' Magazine

'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration. . . the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.'

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) remains a major influence in philosophy, especially in the areas of epistemology, ethics, theology, political theory and aesthetics. This brief history helpfully explains the development of Kant's thought, and highlights its contemporary relevance, by considering each of his major works in their order of appearance.

The book has a brief chronology at the front plus a glossary of key terms and a list of further reading at the back.

Brilliant and still-timely analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life from Canada’s most influential philosophers, reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Andrew Potter.

Originally published in 1969, Technology and Empire offers a brilliant analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life. The author of Lament for a Nation, George Grant has been recognized as one of Canada’s most significant thinkers. In this sweeping essay collection, he reflects on the extent to which technology has shaped our modern culture.

This recently discovered and very timely 1970 Massey Lectures by Nobel Prize-winning scientist George Wald, now in print for the first time ever.

Where did we come from, who are we, and what is to become of us — these questions have never been more urgent. Then, as now, the world is facing major political and social upheaval, from overpopulation to nuclear warfare to environmental degradation and the uses and abuses of technology. Using scientific fact as metaphor, Nobel Prize–winning scientist George Wald meditates on our place, and role, on Earth and in the universe. He urges us to therefore choose life — to invest in our capabilities as human beings, to heed the warnings of our own self-destruction, and above all to honour our humanity.

In spite of modern ideals and achievements in the area of freedom and choice, people today are often afflicted with a sense that they cannot change things for the better. They feel helpless, constrained, caught -- in a word, fatalistic. Beyond Fate, Margaret Visser's 2002 CBC Massey Lectures, examines why.

This timely and important book investigates what fate means, and where the propensity to believe in it and accept it comes from. Visser takes an ancient metaphor -- ubiquitous, influential, perhaps unavoidable -- where time is "seen" and spoken of as though it were space; she examines how this way of picturing reality can be a useful tool to think with -- or, on the other hand, may lead us into disastrous misunderstandings. There are ways out. But first, by observing how fatalism manifests itself in our daily lives, in everything from table manners and shopping to sport, we understand our profound attachment to fate, so that we can consider its role in our lives and our cultures.

Progress. It is one of the animating concepts of the modern era. From the Enlightenment onwards, the West has had an enduring belief that through the evolution of institutions, innovations, and ideas, the human condition is improving. This process is supposedly accelerating as new technologies, individual freedoms, and the spread of global norms empower individuals and societies around the world. But is progress inevitable? Its critics argue that human civilization has become different, not better, over the last two and a half centuries. What is seen as a breakthrough or innovation in one period becomes a setback or limitation in another. In short, progress is an ideology not a fact; a way of thinking about the world as opposed to a description of reality.

In the seventeenth semi-annual Munk Debates, which was held in Toronto on November 6, 2015, pioneering cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and bestselling author Matt Ridley squared off against noted philosopher Alain de Botton and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell to debate whether humankind’s best days lie ahead.

Six magnificent and stimulating essays examining the role of technology in shaping how we live, by one of Canada’s most influential philosophers, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 1986, the six essays that comprise Technology and Justice offer absorbing reflections on the extent to which technology has shaped the way we live now. George Grant explores the fate of traditional values in modern education, social behaviour, and religion, and offers his insights into some of the most contentious ethical deliberations of the past half-century.

In essays ranging in content from classical philosophy to the morals of euthanasia, Technology and Justice showcases Grant’s stimulating commentary on the meaning of the North American experience.

This book critiques the relation between sovereignty and democracy. Across nine theses, Vardoulakis argues that sovereignty asserts its power by establishing exclusions: the sovereign excluding other citizens from power and excludes refugees and immigrants from citizenship. Within this structure, to resist sovereignty is to reproduce the logic of exclusion characteristic of sovereignty.

In contrast to this “ruse of sovereignty,” Vardoulakis proposes an alternative model for political change. He argues that democracy can be understood as the structure of power that does not rely on exclusions and whose relation to sovereignty is marked not by exclusion but of incessant agonism.

The term stasis, which refers both to the state and to revolution against it, offers a tension that helps to show how the democratic imperative is presupposed by the logic of sovereignty, and how agonism is more primary than exclusion. In elaborating this ancient but only recently recovered concept of stasis, Vardoulakis illustrates the radical potential of democracy to move beyond the logic of exclusion and the ruse of sovereignty.

Our world is a world of pain and suffering—at the individual level of private lives as well as the level of historical and political events. The familiar examples of suffering we need to engage with range from everyday unpleasantness, such as a prolonged illness, to massive horrors epitomized in world wars and genocides, such as, at the extreme, the Holocaust. We know, in most cases, how to explain these evils: medical science tells us how and why illnesses occur, geology explains earthquakes, and history and social psychology explain what happened at the darkest moments of our civilization, and why. However, even when everything has been explained, many of us feel that we still fail to properly understand why unspeakable events like brutal mass murders and war crimes happen. Those with religious convictions may wonder why God, if God exists, allows such things to exist. The theological and philosophical tradition of theodicy is an influential attempt to respond to such questions focusing not so much on explaining suffering but on the normative question of justifying suffering.
This book introduces antitheodicy as a critical ethical response to the problem of evil and suffering. While the mainstream debate on this problem in the philosophy of religion continues to focus on theodicies seeking to justify or excuse God’s allowing that there is apparently meaningless suffering, this introduction not only explains why an antitheodicist alternative is ethically superior to such attempts but also, more importantly, extends the antitheodicist approach from the philosophy of religion to broader ethical engagements with suffering. Sketching some of the historical milestones of antitheodicist thought as well as the most important contemporary versions of antitheodicy, the book argues that antitheodicy is the only decent account of suffering and that theodicies are incompatible with ethical seriousness. Theodicies tend to instrumentalize suffering in the service of some imagined overall good, or a metaphysical scheme failing to recognize the individual perspective of the victim. The significance of this essentially ethical argument against theodicies reaches far beyond the philosophy of religion, as the theodicy versus antitheodicy opposition also has interesting secular varieties. Any explicit or implicit instrumentalization of suffering in the service of real or imagined overall goodness may be claimed to be quasi-theodicist, even if it has nothing to do with religious or theological attempts to justify suffering. Antitheodicist critique is therefore needed across a range of ethical and political problems.

Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research, to which he has contributed for over half a century.

In clear, precise, and nontechnical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in the study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language bears to thought, and its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as those that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. Chomsky reviews how new discoveries about language overcome what seemed to be highly problematic assumptions in the past. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of human cognitive capacities and what the human mind can seriously investigate, in the light of history of science and philosophical reflection and current understanding. Moving from language and mind to society and politics, he concludes with a searching exploration and philosophical defense of a position he describes as "libertarian socialism," tracing its links to anarchism and the ideas of John Dewey and even to the ideas of Marx and Mill, demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our historical past and urgent relation to matters of the present.

Todo lo que los filósofos griegos pensaron hace mucho tiempo para mejorar tu vida ahora mismo.

¿Qué le diría Epicuro a Elon Musk? ¿Y Diógenes a una celebrity de Instagram? Es más, ¿qué te dirían los viejos filósofos a ti? Sí, a ti.

Eres más griego de lo que piensas, todo lo que te pasa les pasó antes a ellos, tus problemas son los mismos y sus recetas para la vida siguen estando vigentes, pero desgraciadamente las hemos olvidado o malinterpretado. Es hora de volver a ellos.

El escritor y aventurero Fabián C. Barrio ha recorrido el mundo en busca de respuestas y las ha encontrado en los filósofos de hace tres mil años, cuyo pensamiento logró modelar quienes somos hoy. Sus enseñanzas son la base de este libro ameno, socarrón e iconoclasta que quiere subsanar «la duda más roedora a la que se enfrenta el primate moderno: ¿cómo coño consigo estar bien?».

La clave está en las cuatro escuelas principales del pensamiento griego: el estoicismo, el epicureísmo, el escepticismo y el cinismo. Ellos nos enseñaron a controlar los placeres, a lidiar con el deseo, a sobrellevar los miedos y a cultivar la belleza. Estos «griegos apolillados» tienen mucho que decir al hombre moderno, y a nosotros sólo nos toca aprender a releer conceptos como ataraxia, eudaimonía y epoché.

Usted se encuentra aquí es un divertido e irreverente viaje al pasado para traer al presente, a nuestras aceleradas vidas del siglo XXI, la filosofía que lleva siglos ayudándonos a vivir mejor. Nadie como Fabián C. Barrio para que sus lecciones nos lleguen tan frescas como si hubiesen sido pensadas expresamente para ti.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Everything the Greek philosophers thought long ago to improve your life right now.

What would Epicurus say to Elon Musk? And Diogenes to an Instagram celebrity? More importantly, what would the old philosophers say to you? Yes, you.

You are more Greek than you think. Everything that happens to you happened to them before, your problems are the same, and their life lessons are still relevant today. Unfortunately, we have forgotten or misinterpreted them. It’s time to return to them.

The writer and adventurer Fabián C. Barrio has traveled the world in search of answers and found them in the philosophers of three thousand years ago, whose thinking shaped who we are today. Their teachings form the foundation of this entertaining, sarcastic, and iconoclastic book, which aims to resolve “the most gnawing doubt faced by the modern primate: how the hell do I manage to feel okay?”

The key lies in the four main schools of Greek thought: Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Cynicism. They taught us to control pleasures, deal with desire, overcome fears, and cultivate beauty. These “moth-eaten Greeks” have a lot to say to modern humans, and it’s up to us to relearn concepts like ataraxia, eudaimonia, and epoché.

You Are Here is a fun and irreverent journey into the past to bring philosophy into the present, helping us navigate our fast-paced 21st-century lives. No one like Fabián C. Barrio to make his lessons feel as fresh as if they were written just for you.

A pioneering biography of an overlooked but integral figure in the history of the Frankfurt School. 

Friedrich Pollock was many things. The son of an industrialist who wanted to abolish private property. A Jew who didn’t want anything to do with Judaism. A professor who published little. An economist who squandered his wealth on the stock market. A communist who thought Marxism was anachronistic. And finally: a critical intellectual. 

When dealing with the political culture of the Weimar Republic, the development of Critical Theory and German-Jewish emigration to the USA, there is no way around Pollock. Max Horkheimer’s companion and the founder of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt plays an important part in German-Jewish intellectual history as one of the most prominent representatives of Critical Theory.

Populism has become a contested and controversial word in contemporary politics. But what does “populism” really mean?

Despite its relatively short history, the term follows a rather volatile trajectory in terms of its historical development and presence as a political practice. When we look at its political and moral impact, one can see that despite its often strict national commitments and narratives, populism is rather a global political phenomenon. As embodiment of anti-establishment narratives, polarizing attitudes, and emancipatory appeal, we can follow its occurrence from Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the USA and UK, the Middle East, all the way to China and India. 

This edited volume helps fill a gap in the existing literature on Critical Theory (broadly construed) and populism, focusing on the multiple dimensions of historical and contemporary contexts for today’s rising populist movements and their often – but not necessarily – hostile relations towards cosmopolitanism, globalization, environmentalism, and general notions of inclusion and justice.

Contributors include: Emília Barna, Ronald Beiner, Dustin J. Byrd, Samir Gandesha, Carlos Antonio Giovinazzo Júnior, Mlado Ivanovic, Yonathan Listik, Grigoris Markou, Jeremiah Morelock, Felipe Ziotti Narita, Ágnes Patakfalvi- Czirják, Maria Cristina Dancham Simões and Hassan Zaheer.

Revolutionary Subjectivity in the Thought of Karl Marx presents a rigorous interdisciplinary analysis of Marx’s social philosophy.

Paul Elias critically examines a terminal inconsistency within Marx’s idea of revolutionary subjectivity. In doing so, major areas of Marx’s thinking which have been misrepresented in scholarly discourse are coherently interpreted and rearticulated, providing a basis for exploring the incipient psychology and theory of mind in his work. This project reveals a novel theoretical waypoint whereby Husserl’s phenomenology and Freud’s psychoanalysis (particularly as developed by Melanie Klein) can engage in conversation with his social theory. While this critique poses a significant challenge to Marxism, it also offers an innovative prospect to sublate the insights of Marx’s work and reanimate his thinking for our contemporary period.

"Everything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation."

Nature, Baudelaire says, is ugly—and art is what saves us from it. This wicked, brilliant fragment defends makeup not as deception but as devotion: a ritual rebellion against decay, chance, and animal life. To paint the face is to reject nature’s chaos and choose artifice—freely, proudly, and exquisitely.

“There are only four or five who maintain the dictator… not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.”

Tyranny is not imposed; it is invited. La Boétie maps how power metastasizes through favors, flattery, and fear—how millions bend the knee so a few can rise. A cold, lucid anatomy of submission, and a quiet, devastating call to end it.

The book reconstructs in detail the genesis of Schopenhauers philosophy and its aporias.

It is divided into four parts. The first part concerns the pietistic education of the young Schopenhauer and his meeting with philosophy through the courses of G.E. Schulze and the study of Plato, Schelling and Kant. Oppressed by the "negative" results of Kant's criticism (unknowability of the thing in itself), the young Schopenhauer first confronts himself with Fichte and Schelling (second part of the volume). But these two philosophers, in his opinion, rather than maintaining and developing the results of Kant, actually end up abandoning them. Nevertheless he tacitly inherits some nodal points from Fichte und Schelling.

The third part concerns his first attempt to elaborate a new post-Kantian metaphysics: the theory of „better consciousness".

In the fourth part it is shown how the internal contradictions of that theory and the decisive encounter with Indian wisdom (Hinduism and Buddhism) lead him to abandon his first attempt at system and to build his metaphysics of will.

In the last chapter of the book, the most substantial, the author faces the aporias of Schopenhauer’s mature system starting from the genetic perspective.

The problem of knowledge, as Aristotle commented in metaphysics, is inscribed in human nature. We all desire to know and understand our reality, the world and God who transcends it. From ancient times it has been a study that, linked to the mystery and complexity of human existence, has required multiple approaches. Furthermore, modern philosophy has given – we could say excessively – a central place to the problem of what can be known and how it is known. From this centrality, the development of German idealism and even existentialism, phenomenology, scientific positivism and analytical philosophy can be understood as a response to what has been presented with a totalizing character and that has opened new forms of address the problem of man's relationship with reality.

We live in a time where culture increasingly denies the truth and the very desire to seek it. Furthermore, we are confused by the diversity of approaches and what is true in the different areas of our existence and being in the world. Person and Knowledge acknowledges the importance of asking the questions that exist behind knowledge in its various modalities and aspects.

This book is an in-depth discussion between researchers which both enriches the respective visions and moves towards a more comprehensive understanding of human knowledge and its relationship with the human person.

Mary Wollstonecrafts Streitschrift „Eine Verteidigung der Rechte der Frauen“ aus dem Jahr 1792 repräsentiert eine zeitgenössische Auseinandersetzung mit den Theorien des Gesellschaftsvertrags von John Locke und Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Die Autodidaktin Wollstonecraft analysiert scharfsinnig, wie es diesen Theoretikern gelingt, einerseits natürliche Gleichheitsrechte „aller“ Menschen zu postulieren, gleichzeitig aber diese Rechte allen Frauen sogleich wieder abzusprechen. Als eine der ersten Philosophinnen überhaupt kritisiert sie die Annahme, Frauen seien Männern aufgrund ihrer natürlichen Eigenschaften an Intellekt und politischer Kompetenz unterlegen. Doch legt sie nicht nur Leerstellen und Widersprüche in der Argumentation der Theoretiker des Gesellschaftsvertrags offen, sondern formuliert weitsichtige Forderungen nach gleicher Bildung und politischer Repräsentation für Frauen. Zu ihren Lebzeiten war Wollstonecraft eine bekannte und viel diskutierte Schriftstellerin. Ihre Werke wurden in hohen Auflagen verbreitet und in viele Sprachen – auch ins Deutsche – übersetzt. In der Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie wird die Bedeutung ihrer Schriften bis heute unterschätzt. Die nun vorgelegte Neuausgabe ihrer „Verteidigung der Rechte der Frau“ in der Übersetzung der deutschen Frauenrechtlerin Bertha Pappenheim aus dem Jahr 1899 lädt zur Neu- und Wiederentdeckung dieser bedeutenden Philosophin des 18. Jahrhunderts ein.

Una guía práctica que transforma los principios del estoicismo en reglas simples para la vida moderna, enfocándose en su aplicación diaria para mejorar nuestras vidas y la de los demás, de la mano de William Mulligan, el fundador de The Everyday Stoic a quien las enseñanzas estoicas le salvaron la vida.

William Mulligan, fundador de The Everyday Stoic, convierte los principios milenarios del estoicismo en una guía práctica y contemporánea para superar los retos actuales y cultivar la calma interior. Inspirado en la sabiduría de grandes filósofos como Marco Aurelio y Séneca, este libro no solo ofrece una puerta de entrada al rico legado del estoicismo, sino también una oportunidad para que seas parte de una inquebrantable comunidad que busca vivir de acuerdo con esta filosofía atemporal.

En Ser un estoico, descubrirás cómo:

• Confrontar la imprevisibilidad de la vida con resiliencia, mediante consejos prácticos y acciones concretas.
• Comprender que nuestros pensamientos crean la realidad, permitiéndote no solo enfrentar adversidades, sino prosperar a pesar de ellas.
• Mejorar tu salud mental aplicando los principios estoicos para transformar tu actitud ante los desafíos y obstáculos.

Con un estilo claro y accesible, esta guía transformadora canaliza las enseñanzas de la antigua Grecia y Roma para ayudarte a encontrar paz, fortaleza y equilibrio, sin importar lo que la vida moderna te depare.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A practical guide that transforms the principles of Stoicism into simple rules for modern life, focusing on their daily application to improve both our own lives and the lives of others—brought to you by William Mulligan, the founder of The Everyday Stoic, whose life was saved by Stoic teachings.

William Mulligan, founder of The Everyday Stoic, turns the timeless principles of Stoicism into a practical, contemporary guide for overcoming today’s challenges and cultivating inner calm. Inspired by the wisdom of great philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, this book not only serves as an entryway into Stoicism’s rich legacy but also invites you to be part of an unbreakable community dedicated to living by this enduring philosophy.

In Being a Stoic, you’ll discover how to:

• Face life’s unpredictability with resilience through practical advice and actionable steps.
• Understand how your thoughts shape reality, allowing you not just to endure hardships but to thrive despite them.
• Improve your mental health by applying Stoic principles to transform your mindset in the face of challenges and obstacles.

With a clear and accessible style, this transformative guide channels the teachings of ancient Greece and Rome to help you find peace, strength, and balance—no matter what modern life throws your way.

Una guía práctica a través de las enseñanzas del filósofo estoico Séneca para alcanzar una vida buena.

El estoicismo, la filosofía más influyente del imperio romano, ofrece formas refrescantemente modernas de fortalecer nuestro carácter interior frente a un mundo impredecible. Ampliamente reconocido como el escritor más talentoso y humanista de la tradición estoica, Séneca nos enseña a vivir con libertad y propósito. Sus más de cien «Cartas de un estoico» escritas a un amigo cercano explican cómo manejar la adversidad; superar el dolor, la ansiedad y la ira; transformar los retrocesos en oportunidades de crecimiento; y reconocer la verdadera naturaleza de la amistad.

En El arte de vivir como un estoico, el filósofo David Fideler extrae las obras clásicas de Séneca en una serie de capítulos y explica claramente las ideas de Séneca sin simplificarlas demasiado. Disfrutado mejor como un ritual diario, como una taza de café energizante, la sabiduría de Séneca nos proporciona un flujo constante de consejos probados en el tiempo sobre la condición humana, que no ha cambiado mucho en los últimos dos mil años.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A practical guide to the teachings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca for achieving a good life.

Stoicism, the most influential philosophy of the Roman Empire, offers refreshingly modern ways to strengthen our inner character in an unpredictable world. Widely recognized as the most talented and humanistic writer of the Stoic tradition, Seneca teaches us how to live with freedom and purpose.

His Letters from a Stoic, written to a close friend, provide wisdom on overcoming adversity, managing pain, anxiety, and anger, transforming setbacks into opportunities for growth, and understanding the true nature of friendship.

In Breakfast with Seneca, philosopher David Fideler distills Seneca’s classical works into a series of accessible chapters, explaining his ideas clearly without oversimplifying them. Best enjoyed as a daily ritual, like an energizing cup of coffee, Seneca’s wisdom offers timeless guidance on the human condition—one that has remained unchanged for two thousand years.

In Defense of Reason After Hegel builds upon and enlists the arguments of Hegel to refute the disempowerment of reason perpetrated by the peddlers of misinformation in public life and by analytic philosophy and postmodernism in the academy. Undermining their assaults on truth, In Defense of Reason After Hegel shows how the fundamental character of nature and of mind allow reason to be autonomous and allow us to enact a reality of freedom in accord with right and freely create works of fine art. The book examines how life and language provide the means for reason to be autonomous and how the autonomy of thought precludes natural evolution or bioengineering from enhancing our capacity for philosophical thinking. It unravels the perplexities of the logic of self-determination and to show how the will can achieve self-determination in the conventions by which agents engender the institutions of freedom. The book then unveils the limitations of the principle of contradiction, which bars the way to an understanding of how anything can be determinate and how thought and action can be free. Thereupon the paradoxes that arise in thinking time are resolved by liberating thought of the formality of the principle of contradiction. The revolutionary character of Hegel’s conception of consciousness is next explored to make intelligible how animals and young children can be conscious and self-conscious, as well as how philosophical thought can overcome the epistemological limitations of the opposition of consciousness. On this basis, the book draws upon Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind to show how language can originate and be an appropriate vehicle of autonomous reason. The book examines the structure of the institutions of freedom that talking animals can enact. It highlights the philosophical underpinnings of the fundamental shortcomings in the American constitution and American society and draws lessons from the author’s recent campaign to shed light on how the philosophy of right can be a guide to social reform. It also examines how the autonomy of fine art can be realized in sculpture, contrary to claims made by Hegel that would tie this individual art to the classical style.

The present book addresses the background, rationale, general structure, and particular aims and arguments characterizing our third and last volume about "humor" and "cruelty". A guiding foray is provided into the vast expert literature that can be retrieved in the Western humanities and social sciences on these two terms. Pivotal thinkers and crucial notions are duly identified, highlighted, and examined. Apposite subsidiary references are also included, especially with regard to psychodynamics and clinical psychology, existentialism, feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and representative recent studies in the philosophy of humor and its cognates. The stage is thus set for the exploration and assessment of the conflicts between humor and cruelty unfolding in Part 2 of Volume 3. Being the philosophical terminus of our entire research project, Volume 3 counterbalances, complements, and, occasionally, complexifies the numerous forms of mutual cooperation between humor and cruelty that the preceding Volume 2 had unearthed and discussed.

"Like Aristotle and Dewey, Arnarsson and Baruchello do not define their terms at the outset, but instead they relentlessly pursue the meanings of two ordinary words that everyone vaguely understads to arrive at a critical insight into the concepts these words represent, which are both disparate and interrelated." - Richard Marc Rubin, President, George Santayana Society

Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, fomenter of the May 1968 revolt in France, and author of The Society of the Spectacle, was also the creator of six tantalizingly inaccessible films. Technically and aesthetically, these films are among the most brilliantly innovative works in the history of the cinema. But they are not so much “works of art” as carefully calculated subversive provocations.

Following the still-unsolved Mafia-style assassination of the films’ financer and producer in 1984, all the films were withdrawn from circulation for nearly twenty years. One of the films is an adaptation of Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle. Others evoke his adventures in the bohemian underworld of 1950s Paris, which he contrasts with the increasingly ignorant, ugly, and alienated world that has since been produced by modern capitalism. In each case Debord simultaneously attacks the film medium itself, challenging spectators to create their own adventures instead of passively consuming the pseudo-adventures that are presented to them.

Ken Knabb’s meticulous translation of all the filmscripts (which Debord’s widow Alice asked him to make to accompany the long-awaited rerelease of the films, beginning with a complete retrospective at the Venice Film Festival) is supplemented with numerous illustrations and documents and elucidated by extensive annotations. For this new edition Knabb has revised the translations, updated the filmography, and added the scathing video that Debord made shortly before his death: Guy Debord, His Art and His Time.

Selah is the second title from Aora Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to exploring transformational thought and culture that transcends borders, disciplines, and traditions. Rooted in an ethos of polyvocality and planetary consciousness, Aora publishes works that forge bold connections across time, place, ideas, and beings often seen as separate. 

Helene Druskowitz (1856–1918) was the first German-speaking women to acquire a PhD in philosophy. She explored free will, religion, metaphysics, and feminism. In the four small books presented in this volume, she discusses previous attempts to replace religion (esp. Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Lange, Nietzsche, Duboc, Düring, and Salter), advocates replacing religion with knowledge-based worldviews, proposes a dualism between matter and transcendent reality, and argues for moral responsibility without free will.

The paperback edition includes the English translations and a comprehensive introduction. The hardcover edition, which includes the English translations, a comprehensive introduction, and the German text, is available here:

As a radical feminist, Druskowitz advocated for gender segregation and women-led societal reform, even proposing human extinction as a moral imperative. Her ideas on male dominance and environmental degradation anticipated later eco-feminist thought. Though not widely recognized in her time, Druskowitz’s work offers valuable insights into feminist philosophy, eco-feminism, and discussions on free will and criticisms of religion, providing historical context for these ideas’ evolution in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird eine normative Analyse und Verteidigung der Erbschaftssteuer unternommen. Zunächst wird eine egalitaristische Argumentation für die Steuer entfaltet. Aufgrund ihrer progressiven Struktur ist die Erbschaftssteuer ein geeignetes Instrument, um der wachsenden ökonomischen Ungleichheit entgegenzuwirken und letztlich verschiedene egalitäre Ideale (politische Gleichheit, Chancengleicheit etc.) zu befördern. Anschließend wird untersucht, wie aus normativer Perspektive zu beurteilen ist, dass der Erblasser bei Erhebung der Steuer nicht mehr lebt. Die restliche Arbeit besteht in einer Auseinandersetzung mit den wichtigsten Einwänden gegen die Erbschaftssteuer. So wird oft behauptet, diese verletze die natürlichen Eigentumsrechte des Erblassers bzw. des Erben und sie ignoriere zudem die Verdienstansprüche des Erblassers. Schließlich sei die Steuer aus diversen „familien-basierten" Erwägungen abzulehnen. Nicht nur werden diese Einwände erfolgreich zurückgewiesen; ferner wird gezeigt, dass einige der, diesen Argumenten zugrundeliegenden, Prinzipien selbst zur Verteidigung einer egalitären Erbschaftssteuer (also einer Erbschaftssteuer, die aus egalitären Prinzipien folgt) herangezogen werden können.

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie Subjektivität als wesentlich geschichtlich gefasst werden kann. Ein aktuelles Problem besteht darin, den Begriff der Subjektivität mit der Idee der Geschichtlichkeit in Einklang zu bringen.

Um dieses Problem zu lösen, schlägt die Arbeit vor, auf Schellings Frühwerk, insbesondere das System des transzendentalen Idealismus, und auf Heideggers Daseinsphilosophie zurückzugreifen. Im ersten Teil wird eine Perspektive auf Subjektivität entwickelt, die auf einer Praxisauffassung basiert. Dabei werden Schelling und Heidegger kritisch interpretiert und in den aktuellen Debatten zum Naturalismus und zur Perspektive der ersten Person angewendet. Im zweiten Teil wird der Fokus themenspezifisch auf die Geschichtlichkeit gerichtet. Hierbei werden insbesondere Schellings früher Zeitbegriff und Heideggers Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins diskutiert und mit Blick auf die Frage der personalen Identität in der Zeit aktualisiert.

Die Monografie richtet sich an Forscherinnen und Forscher der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, der Hermeneutik, der Philosophie der Praxis sowie der breit gefassten Philosophie des Geistes.

Part 2 of Volume 3 addresses in detail the conflicts between humor and cruelty, i.e., how cruelty can be unleashed against humor and, conversely, humor can be utilized against cruelty. Potent enmities to mirth and jollity are retrieved from a variety of socio-historical contexts, ranging from Europe’s medieval monasteries to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. Special attention is paid to the cruel humor and humorous cruelty arising thereof, insofar as such phenomena can reveal critical aspects of today’s neoliberal socio-economic order. In parallel, settings where humor has been used as an instrument to cope with suffered cruelty, whether natural or human in origin, are also retrieved and discussed. These also vary greatly and encompass domains such as hospital wards, 20^th-century Jewish ghettoes, and contemporary funeral homes. A set of concluding reflections is then offered on the psychological, theological, ethical, and metaphysical roots of humor—and its cruel rejection.

"Like Aristotle and Dewey, Arnarsson and Baruchello do not define their terms at the outset, but instead they relentlessly pursue the meanings of two ordinary words that everyone vaguely understads to arrive at a critical insight into the concepts these words represent, which are both disparate and interrelated." - Richard Marc Rubin, President, George Santayana Society

Sex, love, and friendship play an integral role in Immanuel Kant’s conception of human life. Against common prejudices, Kant provides substantial contributions to the philosophical discussion of these topics. This unique collection of essays sheds light on how the notions function in Kant’s philosophy, both individually and in conjunction with each other. The essays examine intertwined issues such as theory of sexuality, marriage (including same-sex marriage), morality and sexual objectification, love and autonomy, love of human beings, the conceptual structure of love, friendship, misanthropy, and the highest good. The contributors include internationally well-known experts in the field. They approach the topics diversely from historical, philosophical, critical, and interpretative perspectives. The collection will be an invaluable resource for Kant scholars and for anyone interested in affective social relations in the history of philosophy and beyond.

Ist libertarische Handlungsfreiheit eine Voraussetzung moralischer Verantwortung im tugendethischen Sinn? Um diese Frage zu beantworten, wird die libertarische Theorie der bisher in Deutschland noch wenig rezipierten Philosophin Helen Steward analysiert und um eine Theorie der moralischen Verantwortung erweitert. Ihre Kernthese ist, dass Handlungen in vielen Details, durch die Menschen und Tiere neue Anfänge machen können, frei sind. Ausgehend davon wird argumentiert, dass moralische Verantwortung und tugendethische Charakterbildung, bei der Handlungsprozesse und konkrete Umstände im Fokus stehen, libertarische Freiheit voraussetzen. Diese Freiheit in Details kann wiederum nur eine Rolle für moralisches Handeln spielen, wenn es in der Ethik nicht nur um das Ergebnis einer Handlung geht.

In einem großen systematischen Bogen werden Metaphysik, Handlungstheorie und Tugendethik verbunden, um die Voraussetzungen moralischer Verantwortung zu begründen. Die Arbeit liefert nicht nur einen detaillierten Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der Debatte um Handlungs- und Willensfreiheit, sondern bringt mit der Verbindung von Libertarismus und Tugendethik auch selbst eine neue Perspektive in die Debatte ein.

The central claim of this comparative study of Kant and Kierkegaard is that the aesthetic experience of the sublime is both autonomous and formative for extra-aesthetic ends. Aesthetic autonomy is thus inseparable from aesthetic heteronomy.

In Part I, through an examination of Kant’s Critique of Judgement and his essays on the French Revolution, the Kantian sublime is shown to conflict with our existing cognitive, moral and political frames of meaning, at the same time that the engagement of the aesthetic judge (Chapter 1) or the enthusiastic spectator (Chapter 2) with this conflict furthers our pursuit of cognitive, moral and political ends. The Kantian sublime is built on the autonomy of aesthetic judgement, which nevertheless has non-aesthetic value.

Part II argues that certain aesthetic and ethical-religious figures in Kierkegaard’s work can be shown to be transfigurations of the Kantian sublime, despite the absence of the term. Antigone and the silhouettes from Either/Or embody what I coin the tragic sublime and sublime grief. The God-man in Practice in Christianity is interpreted as a sublime image of contradiction. The figures are submitted to aesthetic representation, while their contradictory interior lives are unrepresentable. The Kierkegaardian sublime is built on a radical critique of aesthetic autonomy, whose failure serves the end of ethico-religious self-formation.

In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price.

Islamic scriptural sources offer potentially radical notions of equality. Yet medieval Islamic philosophers chose to establish a hierarchical, male-centered virtue ethics. In Gendered Morality, Zahra Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.

Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics. In close readings of foundational texts by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani, she interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. Yet in the course of prescribing ethical behavior, the ethicists speak of complex gendered and human relations that contradict their hierarchies. Their metaphysical premises about the nature of the divine, humanity, and moral responsibility indicate a potential egalitarian core. Gendered Morality offers a vital and disruptive new perspective on patriarchal Islamic ethics and metaphysics, showing the ways in which the philosophical tradition can support the aims of gender justice and human flourishing.

Do we really need to be divided from those whose opinions are different from our own? And are there ways that we can overcome these differences and divisions?

Exploring a variety of moral issues through engaging, real-life examples—including promise keeping, lying, adultery, favoring our friends and loved ones, harming innocent people for the good of the majority, the obligation to give to charity, and other ethical quandaries, Thinking Ethically: A Handbook for Making Moral Choices doesn’t tell you what to think or do! Using common—as well as hot-button—issues, it explores different points of view to illustrate how people make moral judgments and decisions.

While conclusions may differ, this thought-provoking guide shows that people share the same moral foundations of honesty, kindness, promise-keeping, and a commitment to not harming others—and recognizes that our shared values can help heal other divisions! By explaining how we can all use our natural ability to think, debate, and evolve, this enlightening book offers numerous valuable insights, including …

Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Stoicism, Skepticism, Cynicism, Continental philosophy, ethics, government and governing, virtue, love, life, and death. Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Bertrand Russell, and Michel Foucault…. From famous figures in the history of philosophy to the deepest questions of religion to the relationship between knowledge and power, The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book: The Ancient Greek Influence on Modern Understanding makes esoteric ideas and the jumble of names easy to understand, enriching readers’ lives and answering the question, What does philosophy have to teach us about life and society?

Today many people experience a loss of trust in government and organized religion. There's increased social isolation and a rise in insult politics. Seeking an alternative, some have experimented with new forms of politics, social organization, and spirituality. All these developments have led to a great deal of confusion and puzzlement. Who and what can we believe, and how can we know it is correct? From its beginning, philosophy was conceived as a conversation or dialogue, and The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book raises and offers answers to questions like these …

Philosophy is the pursuit of answers to big questions about the purpose of life, death, and existence. Philosophy is about how to reason and find the answers for yourself. Philosophy is a puzzle. You collect clues. You make connections. The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book is a perfect companion for anyone seeking wider truths and happiness. It is an informative, accessible, easy-to-understand guide to the big questions about living. With more than 120 photos and graphics, it is richly illustrated. Plus, its helpful bibliography, glossary of terms, and extensive index add to its usefulness.

Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Sartre, and many more. Who were they? What did they say? Why should we care? How did changing philosophical thought affect the history of civilization? How does philosophy affect pop culture, politics and government, and our everyday lives?

Combining a basic history of philosophical thought with the often quirky personal stories of famous philosophers, The Handy Philosophy Answer Book introduces the reader to the world of philosophy. This comprehensive survey analyzes the collective effort of philosophers throughout history in the pursuit of truth and wisdom. It explores the tangible significance of philosophical thought to modern society and civilization as a whole, and answers more than 1,000 questions, including …

Leer a Descartes es uno de los mejores ejercicios para mantener vivo el más importante impulso de la filosofía moderna: una duda previa absoluta, un escepticismo como punto de partida del genuino saber.

El cartesianismo hace mucho tiempo que murió. El pensamiento de Descartes, sin embargo, pervive y pervivirá mientras exista como guía de reflexión la libertad de pensar. Este principio constituye la más deliciosa fábula que el hombre pudo inventar, y eso se lo debe a la humanidad, en buena parte, a Descartes y, especialmente, a las dos obras que el lector tiene entre sus manos.

Con todo, el principal mérito del que pasa por ser el primer racionalista oficial de la historia de la filosofía ha consistido en su matizada crítica al pensamiento dogmático. Nada, efectivamente, puede ser aceptado en virtud de una autoridad cualquiera. Este héroe del pensamiento moderno, en palabras de Hegel, ha llevado a la filosofía por caminos apenas percibidos anteriormente, atreviéndose, por decirlo en palabras de Dalembert, a enseñar a las buenas cabezas a sacudirse el yugo de la escolástica, de la opinión, de la autoridad; en una palabra, de los prejuicios y de la barbarie. Y gracias a la rebelión de Descartes—su enfoque en la duda y el pensamiento crítico—cuyos frutos recogemos hoy, la filosofía se ha vuelto más importante.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Reading Descartes is one of the best exercises for keeping alive the most important impulse of modern philosophy.

Cartesianism has long since died. However, Descartes' thought endures and will continue to do so as long as the freedom to think remains a guiding principle of reflection. This notion is perhaps the most exquisite fable humanity has ever conceived, and to a great extent, it owes it to Descartes—especially to the two works the reader now holds in their hands.

Reading Descartes is one of the best ways to sustain the fundamental impulse of modern philosophy: an absolute prior doubt, a skepticism that serves as the starting point of genuine knowledge.

That said, the primary merit of the philosopher regarded as the first official rationalist in history lies in his nuanced critique of dogmatic thinking. Nothing, indeed, should be accepted merely on the basis of authority. This hero of modern thought, as Hegel described him, led philosophy down paths barely glimpsed before. He dared—borrowing the words of D'Alembert— to teach bright minds to shake off the yoke of scholasticism, opinion, and authority; in short, to free themselves from prejudice and ignorance. And thanks to Descartes' rebellion—his focus on doubt and critical thinking—whose fruits we reap today, philosophy has become more important.

How can criminal punishment be morally justified? Zisman addresses this classical question in legal philosophy. He provides two maybe surprising answers to the question. First, as for a methodological claim, it argues that this question cannot be answered by philosophers and legal scholars alone. Rather, we need to take into account research from social psychology, economy, anthropology, and so on in order to properly analyze the arguments in defense of criminal punishment. Second, the book argues that when such research is properly accounted for, none of the current attempts to justify criminal punishment succeed. But that does not imply that the state should do nothing about criminal wrongdoing. Rather, the arguments that were supposed to justify criminal punishment actually speak in favor of an alternative approach to criminal law: restitution to the victim and restorative justice. That is to say, the state should coerce offenders to provide restitution for the harm inflicted on victims, and whenever possible restorative approaches should be taken to address criminal wrongdoing.

This work is a historical study of the philosophical writings emerging from Imperial Russia's theological "academies" – Orthodoxy’s higher educational institutions that ran parallel to the secular universities – from their inception to the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Unlike with nineteenth century Russian revolutionary thought, there are few secondary studies of the philosophical works stemming from the academies. These philosophical works focused on ontology and, as such, stand in sharp contrast to the shift toward epistemology in that century as happened in Germany. Another feature of the "academy" philosophies was the continual and explicit attempt to set themselves apart from the pervasive "subjectivism" of Western philosophical systems, although a largely unacknowledged influence persisted. At no time did the academy philosophers look to rational inquiry for more than an assist in understanding their theology. Instead they appealed to tradition and to an alleged direct insight into religious truths at the expense of logic and rational argument. The ultimate result was the pecular historical insularity of their community and concomitantly a subservience to the political state, traits that persist to this day.

Vermander revisits the encounter between Chinese and Western philosophy while unfolding questions about the way "comparative philosophy" is conducted today.

In the vulgate of intellectual history, "Western thought" has constructed a substantialist view of reality that puts "relations" and "processes" into a subordinate position. The same view explains for the primacy given to the autonomy of individual beings. In contrast, according to the same vulgate, Chinese thought has been stressing the fluidity of all phenomena and forms of life to best adapt to their overarching patterns.

The critique of these representations is a preliminary for tackling the following question: in today’s context, what style of cross-cultural philosophical engagement should be imagined and fostered? Cross-cultural philosophical dialogue is indeed indispensable to the revival of philosophies that could be both local and genuinely dialogic.

The first two chapters focus upon the dominant model propounded by Western sinologists when it comes to comparing the Western philosophical tradition with the Chinese one. The third chapter shifts to Chinese narratives about local, comparative, and global philosophies, notably assessing its self-positioning vis-à-vis Western authors, topics, and concepts. Chapter 4 offers a general reading of ancient Chinese classics, alternative to the one that presently dominates the landscape described in Chapters 1 to 3. Chapter 5 harnesses the results and insights already gathered, offering a blueprint as to the way to positively draw upon different philosophical traditions to engage common questions and pursue shared endeavors. A last chapter presents four cases of ongoing transcultural philosophical dialogues and the promises they bear, while the conclusion recapitulates the journey and opens further perspectives.

Once it develops outside pre-formatted narratives, the web shaped by our philosophies and wisdoms suggests the outlines of a world that we could inhabit together.

The purpose of this anthology is to bring together in one volume some of the texts published in the series "Werkprofile", which focus on Kant’s relationship to his philosophical contemporaries and predecessors, and to make them accessible to a wider audience in English. In doing so, the volume is aimed at those who have an interest in better understanding the premises of Kant's philosophy, its historical context, and the development of many of Kant’s fundamental ideas. As it is often hard to glean philosophical motivation directly from reading Kant’s texts, understanding Kant’s commitment to answering certain questions and his silence on others, requires a historical approach. This broader purview will also be helpful for grasping deeper systematic questions at work throughout Kant’s philosophy. The anthology thus aims at inviting a more wide-angled view of Kant’s philosophy by focusing on overlooked references and historical figures. Scholarship on these references is still at an early stage, even though important steps have been taken in this direction in recent years. The aim of our volume is to build on this development and to supplement and expand the content of existing research.

Humor and cruelty can be the best of friends. Many cruel domains have facilitated hilarity of all kinds, whether experienced directly or vicariously, stretching from the torture chamber to the living room—or wherever else a screen is to be found. Conversely, many jests have provided the vehicle with which to dispense cruelty, whether callously or gleefully, in myriad settings, from public events to intimate family dinners. Combining the sources and resources of the humanities and social sciences, this book investigates the mutually supportive liaisons of humor and cruelty. We unearth the brutal, aggressive, and/or sadomasochistic roots of mockery and self-mockery, sarcasm and satire, whilst addressing contemporary debates in humor studies focusing on the thorny ethics and existential challenges arising from the acceptance of the much-appreciated yet seldom innocent channel for human interaction called "humor."

"Like Aristotle and Dewey, Arnarsson and Baruchello do not define their terms at the outset, but instead they relentlessly pursue the meanings of two ordinary words that everyone vaguely understads to arrive at a critical insight into the concepts these words represent, which are both disparate and interrelated." - Richard Marc Rubin, President, George Santayana Society

Safronov’s Nietzsche’s Political Economy is a pioneering appraisal of Nietzsche’s critique of industrial culture and its unfolding crisis. The author contends that Nietzsche remains unique in conceptualizing the upheavals of modern political economy in terms of the crisis of its governing values. Nietzsche scrutinises the norms which, not only preside over the unfathomable build-up in debt, the proliferation of meaningless, impersonal slavery and the rise of increasingly repressive social control systems, but inevitably set these precarious tendencies of modern political economy on a collision course liable to culminate in an unprecedented human and environmental catastrophe. Safronov explores the core themes of Nietzsche’s political economy—debt, slavery, and the division of labour—with reference to the influential views of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as well as against the backdrop of the Long Depression (1873–1896), the first truly international crisis of industrial capitalism, during which most of Nietzsche’s work was completed.

In Nietzsche’s assessment, modern political economy is predicated on the valuations that diminish humankind’s prospects and harm the planet’s future by consistently enfeebling the present, as long as there is profit to be made from it. Nietzsche’s critical insight, which challenges the most fundamental tenet of modern economics and finance, is that in order to build a stronger and intrinsically more valuable future in lieu of simply speculating on it, as though the liberal Promised Land could descend upon us like the manna from heaven at the wave of an invisible hand [of the market], it is necessary to walk from the future we dare to envisage resolutely back to the present we inhabit to determine what demands achieving such a vision would impose upon us, instead of embellishing the ‘here and now’ by cynically discounting the future to the [net] value of the present while disparaging, disowning and rewriting the past to unburden ourselves of its troubling legacy, as we continue to frivolously squander its capital to the alluring tunes of the ‘sirens who in the marketplace sing to us of the future’. The enabling mechanism for changing our valuing perspectives, Nietzsche tells us, lies dormant in us and it must be unlocked before it is too late.

The volume focusses on ancient Greek dialectic and its impact on later philosophical thought, up to Byzantium. The contributions are written by distinguished scholars in their respective fields of study and shed light on the relation of ancient Greek dialectic to various aspects of human life and soul, to self-knowledge and self-consciousness, to science, rhetoric, and political theory.

The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant’s theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant’s theory of beauty as grounded on the conception of disinterested pleasure. In the second part, disinterested pleasure is investigated in the light of contemporary debates on beauty. The volume clarifies the meaning, role, and implications of one of the most influential conceptions in traditional as well as contemporary approaches to beauty.

Our environment is changing rapidly, as is the spectrum of possible relationships we can entertain with it. Against this background, one important task emerging in contemporary philosophical discussion concerns defining the status of contemporary images and the "iconic spaces" we encounter with ever-increasing frequency in their various forms.

Within this context, the dimension of perception seems to be losing its primacy over the image, making a philosophical description of the relationships between image and reality all the more necessary. Among images, the classical distinction between documentary and fiction has been drastically called into question, and along with it the nature of the emotions and values we experience in these two domains.

Rozzoni promotes a phenomenology of the image, that is, a return to a description of images that starts from their essential features while avoiding simplistic dichotomies. By elucidating images’ intimate relationship with phantasy and aesthetic experience and their role in shaping our experience of "reality," this book develops a perspectival notion of "truth" intended to shed light on our contemporary interactions with images and the events, emotions, and values we experience through them.

Winner of the Italian Society of Aesthetics SIE 2024 Prize for the category "International Original Work".

There is a standard narrative that recurs throughout popular writings on yoga and tantra, from South Asian texts to Western esoteric thought: Kuṇḍalinī is the Serpent Power. She rests coiled at the base of the spine. If awakened, this divine feminine energy rises toward the crown of the head. Some are apprehensive of Kuṇḍalinī’s intense power, fearing physical and psychological turmoil. Others seek it out, hungry for experiences, both spiritual and sensual. But what does this story leave out? What are its cultural and historical roots? What do the many ways of experiencing Kuṇḍalinī tell us about this elusive phenomenon?

The Serpent’s Tale traces the intricate global histories of Kuṇḍalinī, from its Sanskrit origins to its popularity in the West. Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen explore its symbolic link with the serpent, its fraught connections to sexuality, and its commercialization in the form of Kuṇḍalinī yoga. Ranging from esoteric texts to global gurus, from the cliffs of California to the charnel grounds of Assam, they show that there has never been one single “authentic” model of Kuṇḍalinī but a multiplicity of visions. Bridging the gaps between textual and historical analysis and the complexities of embodied practice, Borkataky-Varma and Foxen reflect on the narration and transmission of experiences, including their own. Lively, accessible, and nuanced, The Serpent’s Tale offers rich insights for scholars, practitioners, and all readers drawn to Kuṇḍalinī.

An engaging and thought-provoking translation of Paul Ricoeur’s earliest work that is essential for understanding his philosophical development

The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau, now held in the Ricoeur Archive in Paris, was a qualifying thesis Ricoeur wrote at the age of twenty-one when he was just beginning his advanced university studies. In it he examines the use of the reflexive method by two important French philosophers from the nineteenth century, Jules Lachelier and Jules Lagneau. They both sought to develop an “integral metaphysics” that recognizes God as the principle underlying pure, impersonal thought and practical reason, and that requires a kind of philosophical faith. In his conclusion, Ricoeur criticizes their doctrine of God and philosophy of immanence for not being able to deal with the question of transcendence and for its failure to address concrete human existence, yet he concedes that it may be seen as a first truce in “the internecine war” between faith and reason.

Despite this criticism, Ricoeur later maintained that his own philosophy does stand “in the line of a reflexive philosophy” while remaining “within the sphere of Husserlian phenomenology” and striving to be “a hermeneutical variation of this phenomenology.” He also continued to address the question of faith and reason in works like Figuring the Sacred and (with André LaCocque) Thinking Biblically, as well as in many other essays.

The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau is necessary reading for anyone doing serious work on and with Ricoeur’s philosophy.

We are constantly being warned, but we seldom heed warnings. Cautioned about authoritarian leaders, climate change, technological dystopias, or other catastrophes, we fail to take action or even take them seriously. Too often warnings are dismissed—much like the artists, scientists, environmentalists, and intellectuals who deliver them. Why don’t we listen?

Santiago Zabala asks us to think of philosophy as a warning, a call to heed ominous “signs from the future.” He argues that warnings—as distinct from predictions—invite us to see the possibility of a radical break from the present. Predictions tell us to submit to the inevitable, but warnings ask us to take part in shaping a different future. A philosophy of warnings offers an alternative horizon of understanding beyond “the real” and “the normal,” and a politics of warnings helps us confront hidden emergencies through collective interpretation, listening, and action.

Signs from the Future places thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Arendt into conversation with present-day politics, art, and culture, drawing our attention to unheeded warnings. This timely and engaging book shows why unresolved crises from the past must be interpreted anew today if we are to imagine an equitable future—or a future at all.

Teaching for Moral Imagination: An Interdisciplinary Exploration examines the multifaceted nature of morality and ethics, moral development, and moral education so to provide educators with a clear yet complex understanding of theories, issues, practices, and curricular content. This text is intended to be an accessible work of academic significance that inspires educators’ deliberation about personal and societal values as well as approaches for fostering children’s and adolescents’ moral development, cultivating ethical classrooms and schools, and creating transformative moral education curricula.

Teaching for Moral Imagination will be a pertinent text for teacher preparation courses that specifically focus on the moral dimensions of education as well as more comprehensive classes about teaching, teachers, and classroom culture. Such classes are offered in undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs, professional studies for experienced teachers, educational studies classes in the liberal arts, and doctoral seminars for students becoming teacher educators and educational leaders. This book also is intended as a source for teachers’ professional development in schools and for reading groups. Finally, in our contemporary societies emphasizing extreme individualism, competition, conformity, and prejudice as well as unexamined beliefs leading to violence in words and actions, it is crucial to consider how schools can encourage ethical reasoning, compassion, and transformative alternatives for moral education.

The title of our volume on interdisciplinary semiotics is situated in a geographical metaphor and points to the possibility of uncovering meanings through shifting perspectives as well as to the possibility of understanding how these various modes of meaning are articulated and framed in particular cultural instances. Regardless of medium, semiotic rotations permit play between the surface and underlying levels of a communication, reveal the relationship between open and closed systems of signification, and modulate shades of meaning caught between the visible and invisible. Readerly play in these sets of apparent oppositions reveals that the less each pairing is held to be a coupling of oppositions and the more they are observed through perspectives gained by semiotic rotations, then the more complex and rich the modes of meaning may become.

Teachers not only serve as caretakers for the students in their classroom but also serve as stewards for society’s next generation. In this way, teachers are charged with responsibility for the present and the future of their world. Shouldering this responsibility is no less than an existential dilemma that requires not only professional solutions but also personal responsibility rooted in subjective authenticity. In the edited volume, authors will explore how the philosophy of Existentialism can help teachers, teacher educators, educational researchers, and policymakers better understand the existential responsibility that teachers shoulder.

The core concepts of Existential philosophy explored in this edited volume imply that a teacher’s lived experience cannot be defined solely by professional knowledge or dictates. Teachers have the capacity to create subjective meaning through their own agency, and there is no guarantee that those subjective meanings will accord with professional dictates. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that professional dictates are more valid than the existential realities of individual teachers. The philosophy of Existentialism encourages individuals to reflect on the existential realities of isolation, freedom, meaninglessness, and death in an effort to propel individuals towards more authentic ways of engaging in the world. The chapters of this edited volume advance the argument that being and becoming a teacher must be understood – at least in part – from the subjective perspective of the individual and that teachers are responsible for authoring the meaning of their lives and of their work.

Governments and organizations of all shapes and sizes espouse values of equity and social justice. Yet, there are many examples of unfair social arrangements and employment conditions, dysfunctional government practices, and growing income inequality in both developed and developing countries worldwide. The profession and transdiscipline of evaluation is well equipped to address issues of inequality and social injustice, but until recently has been much more focused on primary stakeholder and donor satisfaction (being as useful as possible to funders of interventions and evaluations) and accountability concerns.

The authors in this volume challenge the field of evaluation to become more concerned about using evaluation to develop more equitable organizations, governments, and societies. Leading evaluation theorists and practitioners including Michael Scriven, Jennifer Greene, Thomas Schwandt, Emily Gates, Sandra Mathison, Karen Kirkhart, Saville Kushner, Lois-Ellin Datta, Ernest House, Robert Stake, Patricia Rogers, Robert Picciotto and Stewart Donaldson, provide a range of visions for how evaluation can play a much larger role in facilitating social justice across the globe.

Evaluation for an Equitable Society will be of great interest to evaluation practitioners, students and scholars. It will be of interest to those teaching and taking introductory evaluation courses, as well as advanced courses focused on improving evaluation theory and practice.

Is moral goodness really so desirable in the way that its proponents through the ages would like us to believe? For instance, in our time, there is even this latest version of the popular moral idea shared by many, when Dalai Lama suggested that “[w]e need these human values [of compassion and affection]….Even without religion,…we have the capacity to promote these things.” (WK 2009)

The naivety of this popular moral idea can be contrasted with an opposing (critical) idea advocated not long ago by Sigmund Freud (1966), who once wrote that “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them…someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.”

Contrary to the two opposing sides of this battle for the high moral ground, morality and immorality are neither possible nor desirable to the extent that their respective ideologues would like us to believe. But one should not misunderstand this challenge as a suggestion that ethics is a worthless field of study, or that other fields of study (related to ethics) like political philosophy, moral psychology, social studies, theology, or even international relations should be dismissed. Needless to stress, neither of these two extreme views is reasonable either.

Instead, this book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of ethics, especially in relation to morality and immorality—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). This book offers a new theory to transcend the existing approaches in the literature on ethics in a way not thought of before.

This seminal project is to fundamentally alter the way that we think about ethics, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.

“As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

At an ominous moment in American history, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC following President Trump’s second inauguration was a rare moment of moral clarity. Growing out of the most fundamental principles of Christian ethics, Bishop Budde’s address stands as a calm but resonant call for compassion in an increasingly vicious and punitive political culture.

Does being in motion change how we think? Tracing the connections between thinking and transit—including walking, being transported by a vehicle, and many other modes—this innovative book shows how embodiment and movement deepen, expand, and transform creative thought.

Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey provide a collaborative phenomenological exploration of thought in motion, interspersing lively first-person accounts with broader philosophical inquiry. Their investigation, structured around the four ancient elements—water, air, earth, and fire—ranges across swimming, boats, balloons, planes, cars, trains, and other modes of transport. Craig and Casey invite readers to recall their own experiences of travel and how thinking changes in tandem with shifting environments and whatever conveys a person from place to place. They also consider how changing climates and evolving technologies, with new rhythms and materialities, have shaped human thinking in its many varieties.

Thinking in Transit celebrates forms of movement and motion that carry the body and mind out of their habituated routines. This book urges a change in how philosophers have traditionally framed the setting for serious thought: from the austere, solitary space of a study to populated places of interaction and passage.

Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.

Dass die Würde des Menschen unantastbar sei, stellt eine der populärsten, aber auch eine der umstrittensten Aussagen des Grundgesetzes dar. Dabei wird eine sachorientierte Diskussion oft durch mehr oder minder unausgewiesene semantische und historische Annahmen blockiert. Aus dieser Beobachtung heraus wird zum einen überlegt, wie sich unterschiedliche Bedeutungen des Ausdrucks "Menschenwürde" unterscheiden und ethischen Fragestellungen resp. Positionen zuordnen ließen. Zum anderen wird die Einführung des Ausdrucks in das Verfassungsrecht nachgezeichnet. Das Hauptaugenmerk gilt dabei Art.1 Abs. 1 Grundgesetz, dessen Gehalt in Auseinandersetzung mit der bisherigen Rechtsprechung rekonstruiert wird.

Kant’s account of emotions has only recently begun to receive the attention that this topic deserves, as it casts new light over the manifold features of transcendental philosophy. The authors expand the contemporary overview of the Kantian treatment from both a neuroscientific and a continental philosophical perspective. The volume opens paths to reevaluate neglected aspects of the Kantian model of human rationality.

Die Neuauflage ist vollständig überarbeitet und greift vor allem die Diskussion auf, die um dieses Buch entstanden ist.

Das Buch verschafft einen Überblick über die neueste Willensfreiheitsdebatte, wobei es auch die Konsequenzen der Hirnforschung für das Freiheitsproblem erörtert. Zudem entwickelt der Autor eine originelle eigene Position. Er widerspricht dem philosophischen Konsens, dass die Fähigkeit, sich so oder anders zu entscheiden, mit dem naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild unverträglich sei. Geert Keil argumentiert: Wir können zwar keine Naturgesetze abändern und sind auch nicht die ersten Beweger, aber dies ist auch nicht unbedingt nötig.

Der Begriff der Ursache spielt eine zentrale Rolle, wenn es um Verantwortung, Erklärungen oder Kontrolle von Ereignissen geht. Dabei ist aber auch trotz der langen Tradition des Begriffs in der Philosophie nicht klar, ob es überhaupt zwingende Kausalverhältnisse gibt.

In diesem neuen Grundthemen-Band folgt der Autor dem bewährten Prinzip der Reihe: Nach einem historischen Abschnitt über den Ursachenbegriff entwickelt er mit Bezug auf gegenwärtige Debatten einen eigenen Ansatz. Dabei verbindet er aktuelle philosophische mit naturwissenschaftlichen Theorien.

Anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and cishetsexism remain with us. The intransigence of such oppressions, this book proposes, is stayed by the unrecognized force that sovereignty maintains across the domains of "Western" philosophy. To corroborate this original thesis, the book uncovers how the rationales of sovereignty secure dominant "Western" theories about the nature of reality, the promise of reason, and the status of humans. Such approaches rely on properties of sovereignty that essentialize difference, naturalize hierarchy, and valorize autonomy.

To redress these models and the supremacies they promote, Gilah Kletenik turns to Spinoza. Through a fresh reading of his Ethics, Kletenik develops an egalitarian alternative that starts with denaturalizing sovereignty. It is not a coincidence that Spinoza critiques the hegemonic rationales of "Western" philosophy nor that his doing so has eluded analysis. This is because his insurrection against "Western" sovereignties is sparked by the scintillas of immanence that he inherits from medieval Jewish and Islamic naturalism, the very philosophies that Christian, "Western," thought has repressed. This book recovers these marginalized voices, exposing centuries of interpretations that assimilate Spinoza's program to the sovereignties he disrupts. Kletenik thinks with Spinoza to unmask the supremacies of colonialism, neoliberalism, and cishetsexism alongside the sovereignties anchoring contemporary theory. In critiquing "Western" philosophy, Kletenik limns a more ethical alternative, oriented by immanence and disparity.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in both Marxism and German Idealism across the humanities, but the discourse around the two traditions has grown stagnant and is still defined by the same century-old debates—materialism versus idealism, history versus logic, revolution versus reform. With this exciting new work, Jensen Suther endeavors to transform this discourse by presenting an unprecedented systematic vision of the possibility of a Hegelian Marxism, grounded in Aristotle's logic of living form. Through engagement with three titans of literary modernism—Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett—Suther pursues not only an account of Hegel's materialism but also a new critique of capitalist modernity. Breaking with the received view of Marx's relation to German Idealism, the book argues that the materialist critique of capitalist production is inseparable from Hegel's idea that the demand for freedom is a demand for mutual recognition. The implication for Marxist criticism is that literary works cannot be understood apart from the political struggle for both recognition and new forms of social production. Anyone invested in socialist politics, the future of literary theory, the history of philosophy, and the study of modernism will want to contend with the way Suther rethinks Marxist theory and literary criticism from the ground up, starting with their foundations in Hegelian thought.

Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it.

During his early years in Basel, as professor of classical philology, Nietzsche develops an original understanding of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and culture, alongside a biting critique of contemporary German society and a call for its reform. These years see him publish his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where tragic drama is understood as the harmonizing of Apollonian and Dionysian drives. In it, Nietzsche traces the rise of tragedy as an art form, diagnoses its demise at the hands of Socratic rationalism, and champions its revival in Wagnerian music drama, as part of a larger project of German national renewal. The unpublished texts gathered here allow us to see tThe Birth of Tragedy within the larger context of Nietzsche's concerns at this time and chart the compositional and interpretive development of that first book while revealing some roads not taken. Included also are three book-length projects: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a literary presentation of a program for sweeping educational reform in the name of producing the genius; Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, a set of short philosophical, cultural, and historical interventions; and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, an investigation of early Greek philosophy in its cultural context. The celebrated essay "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," and two short pro-Wagner pieces, "Exhortation to the Germans" and "A New Year's Word for the Editor of the Weekly Im neuen Reich," round out this essential collection of early writings. Extensive translators' annotations supply critical background information and context for Nietzsche's comments on ancient Greek and contemporary German culture.

“You will never look at our planet in the same way.”

The Wise Man and the Story of Plenty depicts humanity’s unstoppable journey in a world of abundance, posing the critical question: Has humanity been wise in treating the planet in ways that now jeopardize its future?

As global crises multiply, solutions often fail to address the interconnected roots of these challenges, focusing instead on isolated problems with limited impact. This eye-opening resource highlights the deeper crisis of overexploitation by a species that perceives itself as separate from nature. Understanding the present crisis requires a reflection on humanity’s past and an exploration of the consequences of current trajectories.

From the dark caves of the Stone Age to today’s industrialized world, the story unpacks how a stable, plentiful environment enabled humanity to rise to dominance. Yet, this dominance, driven by a profit-centric system powered by fossil fuels, now threatens the planet—and humanity’s survival.

It’s therefore not about saving the planet, but about saving humanity.

In this historic moment of magnitude, what’s needed is a profound shift in mindset and a new sense of consciousness to reconnect with nature and rethink humanity’s role in a world that moves beyond overexploitation. Rather than polarizing, shaming, or blaming, this story offers instead a call for unity and optimism.

The most empowering aspect is that the ending to the Story of Plenty remains unwritten, and it’s down to humanity to decide how it will continue . . .

Hermeneutic philosophies of social science offer an explicit concern with the subject of the human. This volume outlines the key elements of a hermeneutic philosophy of social science. Contributions by key authors focus on politics, economics, applied ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, education as well as the history of philosophy. Themes in the history of philosophy are drawn from Plato to Descartes to Husserl.

Explores the possibilities and ethical dilemmas of radical life extension through biotechnology, examining the impact of potentially treating aging and living indefinitely on humanity, society, and individual identity

What if you could live not just longer, but healthier—and possibly forever? In his groundbreaking exploration of biotechnology, ethics, and the philosophy of very long lives, Thomas Ramge takes readers on a thought-provoking journey through the possibilities and consequences of radical life extension. Drawing on cutting-edge research in molecular biology, genetics, and AI-driven medicine, the book examines how humanity is on the brink of a revolution—one where aging may soon become a treatable condition. Through engaging thought experiments, such as choosing between three pills that extend life to 100, 200, or eternity, the book challenges our assumptions about mortality, identity, and purpose. Would centuries of life bring wisdom or existential despair? Could societies sustain themselves in a world where death is optional? And who would have access to these medical breakthroughs—everyone, or only the wealthy elite? Combining scientific rigor with philosophical depth, this book is a must-read for those fascinated by the intersection of technology, ethics, and the human condition. If the future of life itself is at stake, what will we choose?

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, existence is perpetual transformation. Humans and gods become plants and animals, stones and stars—or something in between. No rigid distinctions remain untroubled. In his own time and in ours, Ovid’s work challenges fundamental assumptions about the universe and humans’ place in it.

Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid’s masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genres—letters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among others—some picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marder’s metamorphoses invert protagonists’ relationships and reinterpret their transformations, playing with stylistic adaptations and foregrounding nonanthropocentric points of view. Above all, they explore the metamorphosis of language itself and ask in what, if any, sense the notion and the figure of the human are worth holding onto today.

Providing fresh perspective on Ovid’s classic in light of contemporary concerns, Metamorphoses Reimagined is a work of breathtaking philosophical, literary, and linguistic experimentation, proposing creative ways to write and think, to be and become.

The twentieth century holds many titles that emphasize the extraordinary. It was a century of totalitarianism, but also one of betrayal, an age of extremes and the incomprehensible. Betrayed, that is, at the mercy of unrestrained violence, were not only the people themselves, but also, as it were, the idea of the human being. For up to a certain point, one could weigh oneself in an unfounded security of an inner connection between people. As is well known, such certainties were knocked out of hand in that century. Many situations, many images, motifs and sources can be named for this experience of unbounded violence, which now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, requires new forms of transmission. In an era flooded with images, however, attention is more difficult. One has to embark on a search for traces; not because the sources are lacking, but because the form of inscription in history is problematic. This search for clues leads directly to the present monograph.

Consejos milenarios basados en la experiencia y el sentido común para enfrentarnos a los dilemas morales de hoy.

Reconocido universalmente como uno de los autores más importantes de la historia romana, Cicerón era también un brillante orador que quiso ofrecer a sus contemporáneos una guía de conducta para los tiempos difíciles y cambiantes del mundo en el que vivían. Su objetivo era aplicar, con sentido común y pragmatismo, las lecciones aprendidas en la filosofía a la práctica cotidiana.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Millennia-old advice based on experience and common sense to face today's moral dilemmas.

Universally recognized as one of the most important authors in Roman history, Cicero was also a brilliant orator who wanted to offer his contemporaries a guide for conduct during the difficult and changing times of the world they lived in. His goal was to apply, with common sense and pragmatism, the lessons learned in philosophy to everyday practice.

Eliza Fowler Haywood (c. 1693–1756) was a prolific writer, actress, a widely connected scholar, a critical philosopher, and economist. Her contributions to moral philosophy and economics provide a clear view of early 18^th century English society.

The second volume of the philosopher and economist’s Memoirs… focuses more closely on the political, strategical failures of the English ministries as mediators between the Sovereign and the people, examining the accompanying decadence and moral decline of the English population. At the core lies Haywood’s observation that women are the first to suffer from the consequences of societal and financial crises.

300 years after its first publication in 1724, this comprehensive edition of Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs… makes accessible a fundamental utopian text. Illustrating the threat of moral decline in financial crises, Haywood’s sharp critique of a government ignoring the needs of its own people remains compelling today.

This is a book about what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant, and their fears – and sometimes hopes – about living in a future world where private property has disappeared. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, an institution beset by terrifying enemies and racialised and gendered mobs: Levellers and Diggers, socialists and anarchists, fervent religious radicals, abolitionists, feminists, and haughty welfare-state bureaucrats. The history of private property is the history of a recurring nightmare that one or another of these groups would storm the castle and take control. That threatened social chaos is the central unifying story of this book.


Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman’s housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of ‘the mob’ has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space.

“The real obstacle to the development of modern art forms is erudition, conscious knowledge, and an excess of knowledge: all growth and development in the realm of art has to take place in the dead of night.”

The Greek Music Drama marks a significant moment in the development of Nietzsche’s thought. Delivered as a lecture in 1870, it was the first public articulation of the major themes of his later, philosophical work: the importance of aesthetic experience for culture, the primacy of the body and physiological drives, and the centrality of music to Greek tragedy. Nietzsche here repudiates abstract scholarly approaches to the art of classical antiquity, proposing instead that that art demands of us the cultivation of distinctive emotional and intellectual capacities.

While The Greek Music Drama was written on the brink of the insights that inform The Birth of Tragedy, it stands as a fascinating document in its own right. Paul Bishop’s preface and informative critical notes and Jill Marsden’s illuminating introduction serve to redress the comparative neglect that this seminal text—presented here in an elegant bilingual format—has suffered in Nietzsche studies. They also set in its original context a work that will prove essential to anyone interested in theater, performance, and the art of tragedy.

“There is a common fallacy that is oddly and sadly even more widespread amongst non-philosophers than philosophers, that art is somehow explained by philosophy. It is not.”

The philosopher Simon Critchley has long been drawn to the distinctive questions raised by tragedy. In this major new work, conceived as a sequel to his Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019), he describes the power of tragic drama as deriving from its depictions of 'stuckness': of the inescapable situation of being oneself. In readings of Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, and Samuel Beckett, Critchley offers an exceptionally perceptive account of how tragedy dramatises this irreducibly absurd condition.

I Want to Die, I Hate My Life is at once a searching philosophical engagement with tragedy and a bracing argument against the widespread tendency to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of philosophical ideas. Critchley’s exposition of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of tragic drama—of tragedy’s resistance to the kind of rational explanations that philosophers have sought to impose upon it—doesn’t just enhance our understanding of literature; it also points towards a wiser, more subtle, and more dynamic way of doing philosophy.

Underlying Julia Kristeva’s Nations Without Nationalism is the idea that otherness—whether it be ethnic, religious, social, or political—needs to be understood and accepted in order to guarantee social harmony. This book is an impassioned plea for tolerance and for commonality, aimed at a world brimming over with racism and xenophobia. Responding to the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Eastern Europe and the popularity of the National Front in France, Kristeva turns to the origins of the nation-state to illustrate the problematic nature of nationalism and its complex configurations in subsequent centuries. For Kristeva, the key to commonality can be found in Montesquieu’s esprit general—his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights.

Nations Without Nationalism also contains Kristeva’s thoughts on Harlem Desir, the founder of the antiracist organization SOS Racisme; the links between psychoanalysis and nationalism; the historical nature of French national identity; the relationship between esprit general and Volksgeist; Charles de Gaulle’s complex ideas involving the “nation” and his dream of a unified Europe. Nations Without Nationalism reflects a passionate commitment to enlightenment and social justice. As ethnic strife persists in Europe and the United States, Kristeva’s humanistic message carries with it a special resonance and urgency.