Imperial Paradoxes

At war for sixty years, eighteenth-century Britain and France experienced demographic, social, and economic exchanges despite their imperial rivalry. Paradoxically, this rivalry spurred their participation in scientific and industrial developments. Their shared interest in standards of living and...

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

As a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and scholar of Latin and Greek, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. This book provides an overview of his legacy, highlighting the synergy between his critique of metaph...

Moral Puzzles

Malcolm Murray provides striking reinterpretations of classic moral puzzles from a contractarian perspective, one that views morality not as a set of eternal truths but as an evolved system of conditional cooperation.

Our Fundamental Problem

How can the world we live in and see, touch, hear, and smell, the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning, and value - how can all of this exist and flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe, made up of nothing but physical entities such as electrons and quarks...

The Book of Absolutes

Current dogma holds that all cultures and moral values are conditional, nothing human is innate, and Einstein proved that the whole universe is "relative." Challenging this position, William Gairdner argues that relativism is not only logically and morally self-defeating but that progress in scie...

The Invention of Journalism Ethics, Second Edition

An innovative theory of pragmatic objectivity to guide journalism today.

Emancipatory Thinking

A sustained defence of the political importance and ongoing relevance of the ideas of the French writer, feminist, and philosopher.

The Absolute Violation

State torture has found an increasing number of defenders in law, philosophy, and public policy. Their defences often ignore the empirical literature on torture and thus misunderstand its nature and the damage it does, as well as accepting the illusory benefits it promises.

Revolutionary Routines

Through its account of influential socio-political processes – such as the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy, the crafting of new technologies of governance, and the operation of digital media and algorithms – Revolutionary Routines rethinks not only how change works, but also what counts...

Northern Spirits

Canadians have devoted considerable thought to Hegel - a proposition born out by the work of John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor, three major Canadian political philosophers of the last century. In Northern Spirits, Robert Sibley examines how Watson, Grant, and Taylor found in Hegel the...

The Vitality of Contradiction

How the fundamental tensions of social and political life teach us to be free.

Materialist Ethics and Life-Value

A timely re-thinking of "the good life" that reveals its grounds in human life-requirements and identifies key social threats to happiness.

The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games

While educational research praises games for motivating students, this work asks: What kinds of people do games help us become? David Waddington examines how gameplay narrows human possibility through ideals of technolibertarianism and efficiency-maximization.

Raymond Klibansky and the Warburg Library Network

A new approach to the legacy of the Warburg Library and a companion to the pioneering work Saturn and Melancholy.

Beyond Vision

In this unique and exhilarating autobiography, Allan Jones - Canada's first blind diplomat - vividly describes how an untreatable eye disease slowly decimated his visual world, most challengingly during his postings in Tokyo and New Delhi, and how he discovered and took to heart the revelatory In...

The Experience of Beauty

An original answer to a question of permanent interest: the place of beauty in our lives.

Nietzsche's Justice

An exploration of Nietzsche's ideas of justice by one of his leading modern exponents.

Dawn of a New Feeling

Dawn of a New Feeling acknowledges that computers have become a formidable tool for creating art but contends that virtual reality is not conducive to meditations on the aesthetic object. Virtual or augmented reality, Raffaele Milani argues, is illusory and prevents the viewer from feeling a genu...

Global Journalism Ethics

An argument for a new system of ethics in journalism that will take into account its global reach and impact.

The New Rationalism

An engaging and timely rediscovery of an ethic grounded in compassion.

The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science

Examining the nature of myth-making and its surprising appearance in popular science writing.

Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal

A call for solidarity and renewal in the arts and the academy.

Singular Creatures

In Singular Creatures Mark Kingwell plumbs the depths of cultural and political meaning in the apparent transition to posthuman life. Can humans and their own creations co-exist in a cyberflesh world, or is a struggle for superiority inevitable? Singular Creatures is an attempt at sketching the f...

In Vivo

An exploration of the pivotal moments that transform and shape our lives.

The Problem of Atheism

The Problem of Atheism offers the first translation of Augusto Del Noce’s landmark book from 1964. One of the earliest works to recognize the new secularizing trends in Western culture following World War II, this book remains relevant to contemporary debates about secularization, political theol...

Ideas, Concepts, and Reality

An original exploration of the distinction between subjective ideas and objective concepts.

Attending

Moral theory has been agonized by dualism – motivation is analyzed into beliefs and desires, descriptions of facts and dissatisfactions with them, while action is represented as an effort to lessen dissatisfaction by altering the empirical world. In Attending Warren Heiti traces an alternative ge...

Truth Matters

A pioneering study of why truth is important in philosophy, public culture, and everyday life.

Justice, Rights, and Toleration

The political theory of Richard Vernon has made major contributions to the many complex dimensions of political morality, democratic dialogue, justice, and toleration. Justice, Rights, and Toleration offers critical engagement with the central ideas of his work on the perennial political challeng...

Art as Revolt

Using philosophies of immanence – conceived by Deleuze, Braidotti, and others – and the arts to challenge contemporary capitalist ways of being human subjects.

The End of Ethics in a Technological Society

A critical assessment of the failure of liberal ethics to meet the challenges posed by techno-science.

Embodiment and the Meaning of Life

A brazen defence of the good of human limitations in the face of naive technological optimism.

Engaging the Thought of Bernard Lonergan

Original essays that present Bernard Lonergan’s bold undertakings and intellectual achievements and apply his ideas to human learning and action.

Fate and Life

Fate remains central to many cultural outlooks, and in our age of conflict, climate change, and pandemic, it features conspicuously in debates about the future. A careful examination of this important idea is not only informative and intriguing but also timely. Fate and Life confronts the idea of...

Being Vulnerable

Interrupting the dialectic by which sovereignty manages to be both the cause of our vulnerabilization and the tool of its prevention, in Being Vulnerable Arne De Boever explores how today’s experiences of vulnerabilization can be translated into a collective human power that dismantles the form o...

Not Even a God Can Save Us Now

A lively interpretation of Machiavelli’s thought, applied to contemporary philosophy.

Logic in the Wild

In Logic in the Wild Patrick Girard presents logic as the guardian of coherence. Logic, Girard argues, finds coherence in the patterns of reasoning shared across science, religion, and everyday decision making – logic provides neutral ground for the healthy pursuit of common goals and interests.

An Exceptional Dialogue, 1925–1948

In 1925 the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev formed a friendship with the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. Their endeavours shaped the European philosophical world by promoting the essential dignity and rights of human beings. An Exceptional Dialogue, 1925–1948 translates their correspond...

Neurowaves

Neurowaves demonstrates how the brain’s inner time and its dynamics produce the mind and mental features like thoughts and feelings. Northoff proposes that the world is structured by waves of time, and the passing of these waves through our brains – neurowaves – is the basis of our mental experie...

Fichte in Berlin

Fichte in Berlin offers a new reading of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophical output during his time in Berlin from 1804 to 1806. The study focuses on the philosopher’s second set of lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre from 1804, one of the most exemplary versions of Fichte’s philosophical project.

The Culturalist Challenge to Liberal Republicanism

An exploration of the volatile mix of politics and diversity.

The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom

The spiritual crisis of the digital age is overload boredom. This book attends to sensation and emotion to show how our interior lives are radically reconfigured by information, stimulation, and choice overload. Sharday Mosurinjohn argues that the antidote is not withdrawal or resistance, but ked...

Struggles for Self-Rule

Drawing on case studies in Italian history, Struggles for Self-Rule asks, do the centralizing tendencies of modern politics sap the self-organizing powers of individuals and communities, and what, if anything, can be done about it?

Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation

A lucid introduction to a living philosophical tradition and a creative contribution to change-oriented scholarship.

Finding Freedom

Scholars generally think that Hegel's philosophy is conservative and reactionary with regard to women's rights and as a result dismiss his philosophical account of the relationship between family and the political community as irrelevant. Sara MacDonald argues that in fact the logic of Hegel's th...

A Logician’s Code of Conduct

Arguing for logic as a tool we can use for fairness instead of reinforcing injustice and exclusion, A Logician’s Code of Conduct reimagines logic as flexible, creating spaces of inquiry neutral in content and equitable in participation.

Once upon a Time in the West

Western civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky’s trenchant exploration of the roots of global cultural and ecological collapse. Once Upon a Time in the West documents how a narrow epistemological style has left us blind to critical features of reality, and how the terrifying consequences of t...

Evolutionary Intuitionism

It seems impossible that organisms selected to maximize their genetic legacy could also be moral agents in a world in which taking risks for strangers is sometimes morally laudable. Brian Zamulinski argues that it is possible if morality is an evolutionary by-product rather than an adaptation.

Cause for Thought

An innovative exploration of causal agency as it functions in physical, biological, psychological, and cosmological domains.

Making Sense of Myth

For Luc Brisson, one of the great living Plato scholars, myth is a key factor in what it means to be human – a condition of life for all. Making Sense of Myth offers a series of conversations with Brisson on life, myth, and Plato.

Aesthetic Dilemmas

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is frequently portrayed as an aloof writer, out of step with modern sensibilities. Aesthetic Dilemmas re-evaluates his place in twentieth-century European Modernism by arguing that his work is not escapist but instead engages the consciousness of readers through dynamic enco...

Bird on an Ethics Wire

An exploration of the urgent need to rebalance individuals' unfettered freedom to choose, especially regarding birth and death.

The Science of Culture and the Phenomenology of Styles

How science and art have influenced each other throughout the ages.

Reimagining Love

Reimagining Love offers a meditation on the ethical and existential significance of this elusive concept. Informed by philosophy and literature, it presents an original argument for understanding love as a spiritual practice.

Liberalism in Time

Drawing on a range of thinkers from John Locke to John Rawls, Liberalism in Time contributes to current debates within and about liberal politics and shows how liberal patterns of thought have been characterized by temporal paradoxes throughout history.

The Age of Secularization

A thought-provoking collection of essays and lectures by one of the most perceptive Italian cultural critics of the twentieth century.

Might Nature Be Canadian?

How Canada is leading the way in mutual accommodation on the world stage.

Shattering Silos

Is truth politically impotent? Are politics inherently false? Is the search for truth still relevant when political leaders blithely reject facts in the public domain? Interweaving epistemology, social criticism, and political thought, this book provides a path-breaking response to these question...

The Suicide of the Revolution

First published in Italian in 1978, The Suicide of the Revolution argues that Giovanni Gentile’s nineteenth-century critique of Marxism had a foundational influence on the thinking of Antonio Gramsci and other anti-fascists.

The Enigma of Perception

An innovative exploration of how we acquire knowledge and the principle on which that theory depends.

Wish I Were Here

An urgent, timely, and political analysis of the boredom that dominates our everyday immersion in distracting technologies.

Life Embodied

A compelling tour through the scientific, philosophical, and cultural meanings of vital force in Spanish modernity.

Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity

James Tully is one of the most influential political philosophers at work today. Offering a wide-ranging critical discussion of his work by leading scholars from various fields of study, Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity provides a rich perspective on the full extent of Tully’s contribution.

Ecological Nation

Canada faces two existential threats: runaway climate change and the rising global tide of right-authoritarian imperialism. The inextricable relationship between the two highlights the need to safeguard Canada’s environmental and political sovereignty, requiring bold vision and sacrifice to build...

Uttering the Unutterable

Uttering the Unutterable explores how we use literature as an honorific term to describe texts that are so overpowering that the encounter with meaning exceeds the capacities of ordinary language. Through a new reading of Aristotelian philosophy, Groarke identifies an experience of transcendence ...

Network Democracy

A unique hybrid of ancient and contemporary conservative thought that offers a radical challenge to Western liberalism.

The Jena System, 1804-5

Translated into English for the first time in this edition, The Jena System, 1804-5: Logic and Metaphysics is an essential text in the study of the development of Hegel's thought. It is the climax of Hegel's efforts to construct a neutral theory of the categories of finite cognition ("logic") as ...

Reasonable Self-Esteem

In this fascinating look at the philosophy of self-esteem, Richard Keshen develops and defends the idea of reasonable self-esteem -- a concept based on an ideal of reasonableness -- and argues that individuals who think of themselves in terms of this paradigm will lead happier and more fulfilling...

Schiller, Hegel, and Marx

Schiller, Hegel and Marx looked back to ancient Greek culture, viewing it as the historical embodiment of certain ideals central to aesthetic theory. This volume investigates their viewpoints and how they use Greek culture as an ideal model for remaking t

Perception

Debate about the nature of perceptual knowledge and the objects of perception runs through the history of philosophy, making perception one of the central topics in the philosophical tradition. Barry Maund's account of the major issues in the philosophy of perception highlights the importance of ...

Environmental Philosophy

As anxiety about environmental change and its effects grows, we need to understand both the scientific processes and the ethical and aesthetic judgments involved in deciding which changes we should welcome and promote and which we should try to avoid. In Environmental Philosophy Christopher Belsh...

Kierkegaard's Livingroom

In Kierkegaard's Livingroom David Mercer weaves his way through the Philosophical Fragments, bringing the reader a new understanding of Kierkegaard's work. Placing the Philosophical Fragments in the context of Kierkegaard's others works, Mercer's commentary shows how literary style and character ...

To Will One Thing

The Democracy of Suffering

A philosopher's passionate intervention into the meaning of life, and the future of civilization, in the face of catastrophic climate change.

Greek Scepticism

The idea that Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato is simplistic and inaccurate. Much of modern and contemporary epistemology owes a debt not so much to Platonism or Aristotelianism as to their antithesis: scepticism. Recent discussions in the history of philosophy have sparked a great deal ...

Being and Its Surroundings

Gianni Vattimo, one of Europe's foremost contemporary philosophers and most famously associated with the concept of weak thought, explores theoretical and practical issues flowing from his fundamental rejection of the traditional Western understanding of Being as an absolute, unchanging, and tran...

Problems of Cartesianism

The typical Cartesian collection contains papers which treat the problems arising out of Descartes's philosophy as though they and it appeared for the first time in a recent journal. The approach of this collection is quite different. The eight contributo

Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid

All too often it is said that common-sense philosophers faIl to justify their appeal to common sense as a philosophical standard, and that they merely repeat one another in the glorification of philosophical trivialities. This book challenges these and ot

Dialectic of Love

Unravelling the contradictions and complexities of Friedrich Schiller's labyrinthine thought, David Pugh illuminates the inner dynamics of these writings and places them within a wider philosophical and cultural context. Modern discussions tend to focus o

Philosophy and Personal Relations

Form and Transformation

Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, lived in Rome during the third century AD. For many scholars -- not only classicists and philosophers but medievalists, renaissance specialists, Islamists, theologians, and students of religion -- he remains a figure

Kierkegaard

Science and Social Context

The first major product of agricultural biotechnology was recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH, also know as rbST), a drug produced by Monsanto to increase milk production in cows. Following worldwide debate about its safety, it was approved in the United States in 1993 but rejected in Canada ...

From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights

Focusing on the concepts of popular consent, representation, limit, and resistance to tyranny as essential features of modern theories of parliamentary democracy, Monahan shows a continuity in use of these concepts across the alleged divide between the Mi

Causation and Explanation

Stathis Psillos divides his account into three sections: causation, laws of nature, and explanation. He begins the causation section with Hume's classic "reductive" account and then focuses on the subsequent division between Humean and non-Humean accounts, examining topics such as regularities an...

The Notion of Tolerance and Human Rights

Former colleagues of distinguished philosopher Raymond Klibansky examine tolerance from a number of perspectives, including historical roots in Bayle and Locke, the plea for tolerance in literature and poetry, as well as judicial, cultural and societal aspects.

Truth

After a brief presentation of the classical conceptions of truth - correspondence, coherence, verificationist, and pragmatist theories - the book focuses on the debate between those who favour "substantive" conceptions of this classical kind and those who advocate so-called "minimalist" and "defl...

Orthodoxy and Enlightenment

Employing an interdisciplinary approach that gives equal consideration to Campbell's secular and religious writings, Jeffrey Suderman argues that Campbell used the critical tools of the Enlightenment to defend an orthodox Christian faith. This conclusion

Space, Time and Einstein

Cryptomimesis

In the last thirty years the living-dead, the revenant, the phantom, and the crypt have appeared with increasing frequency in Jacques Derrida's writings and, for the most part, have gone unaddressed. In Cryptomimesis Jodey Castricano examines the intersection between Derrida's writing and the Got...

Questions of Miracle

This collection of essays explores new avenues in the ongoing debate on miracles and sheds light on various theological and philosophical issues. Presented as a dialogue between Robert Larmer and other leading philosophers in the field, all sides of the issues are provocatively explored.

Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World

Bringing abstract moral theory to bear on the diversity of cultures and outlooks fundamental to today’s world.

A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules

Kusch argues that the apparent simplicity of Kripke's text is deceptive and that a fresh reading gives Kripke's overall argument a new strength.

Bernard Williams

From his earliest work - on personal identity - to his last - on the value of truthfulness - Bernard Williams' ideas and arguments have been sometimes controversial, often influential, and always worth studying. Mark Jenkins provides a comprehensive account of Williams' many significant contribut...

Water into Wine?

Two possible or actual occurrence of miracles has been vigorously debated since the concept was first introduced. In Water into Wine? Robert Larmer re-examines significant issues in this cross-disciplinary debate and attacks two basic assumptions governing it.

Rights

Sojourns in the New World

This collection of essays represents a reflective inquiry into the way in which our world is set apart from its past, its present defined and its destiny shaped by technology. The contributors tackle the subject from different perspectives within the fields of philosophy and politics.