Looking for Philosophy

The New Rationalism

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

Descartes and the Enlightenment

Peter Schouls examines the role played by the concepts of freedom, mastery, and progress in Descartes' writings, arguing that these ideas express a vital and fundamental feature of Descartes' thought. These theories also occupy a central position in the thought of the Enlightenment. Since the mor...

The Philosophy of Hegel

The Experience of Beauty

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

This Great National Object

In This Great National Object, Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor - the unparalleled experts on the subject - recount the story of the canals, with particular emphasis on the experiences of the engineers, contractors, and labourers who built the inland waterways between 1824 and 1889.

An Aristotelian Account of Induction

Through a study of argument, science, art, and human intelligence, Louis Groarke explores and builds on a line of Aristotelian thought that traces the origins of logic and knowledge to a mental creativity that is able to leap to insightful and truthful conclusions on the basis of restricted evide...

Modal Logics and Philosophy, Second Edition

The first text to combine a clear introduction to formal modal logic with a rigorous presentation of its uses as a tool for philosophical analysis.

Time and Philosophy

In Time and Philosophy, John McCumber presents a detailed survey of continental thought through a historical account of its key texts. The common theme taken up in each text is how philosophical thought should respond to time.

Film, Theory, and Philosophy

An invaluable collection of major thinkers for students and teachers of film and philosophy.

Moralism

In Moralism: A Study of a Vice, Craig Taylor delves into one of the most overlooked ethical concerns of our time: the vice of moralism, or the distortion of moral thought, reflection, and judgment. This flawed tendency in human nature is pervasive on all levels of society, and affects people from...

The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism

A defining work on the scientific chacterization of reality.

The New Pragmatism

A brilliant overview of the development of a key philosophical movement.

The Philosophy of Agamben

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.

Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference

The most influential theories of oppression have argued that belief in the existence of a shared human essence or nature is ultimately responsible for the injustices suffered by women, First Nations peoples, blacks, gays and lesbians, and colonised people and have insisted that struggles against ...

The Social History of Ideas in Quebec, 1760-1896

The first synthesis of the history of ideas over a century in Quebec.

Life Embodied

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

Realism and Anti-Realism

An introduction to realism and anti-realism - a major subject in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.

John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England

This perceptive study of John Case, teacher of philosophy at Oxford from the mid-1560s until his death in 1600 and author of expositions of Aristotle which became standard textbooks of the time, focuses on his intellectual and cultural milieu and reveals

Beyond Liberty and Property

Professor Gunn presents a fresh, revealing picture of the public mind in Britain, from the Glorious Revolution to the First Reform Act, showing how British people of the eighteenth century came to a new understanding of politics. Departing form the usual

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.

Nietzsche's Justice

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

God

Questions of God's existence have exercised philosophers since antiquity. Are there adequate reasons to think that God exists? And, if God exists, what is God like? In this book Jay Wood provides a sustained and fresh examination of these central questions.

Robert Brandom

Embodiment and the Meaning of Life

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

The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science

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

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...

The Crisis of Modernity

A selection of essays on modernity and secularization by one of the most distinguished Italian thinkers of the mid-twentieth century.

Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal

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

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...

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...

Minor Ethics

Minor Ethics takes up a range of canonical ethical questions and thinks through concrete ethical problems relating to drug addiction, environmental responsibility, xenophobia, trauma, refugees, political parties, and cultural difference. The responses to these concerns demonstrate the minoritaria...

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...

Grace and Philosophy

A case for the reinstatement in philosophy of astonished wonder about life, and the poetic and artistic expressions of such wonder.

In Praise of Natural Philosophy

Science and philosophy need to be put together to recreate natural philosophy in order to serve the best interests of humanity.

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?

Language Ethics

An innovative interdisciplinary approach to the political ethics of linguistic diversity.

Reasonable Self-Esteem, Second Edition

A philosophical investigation of the moral ideal of reasonable self-esteem.

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...

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 Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill

This scholarly edition is the first extensive English translation of Jacobi's major literary and philosophical classics. A key but somewhat eclipsed figure in the German Enlightenment, Jacobi had an enormous impact on philosophical thought in the later pa

Interpreting Modernity

There are few philosophical questions to which Charles Taylor has not devoted his attention. His work has made powerful contributions to our understanding of action, language, and mind, and he has had a lasting impact on our understanding of the way in which the social sciences should be practise...

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...

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 ...

Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness

Upending some of our most cherished beliefs about the maternal breast, Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness explores the historical, political, and symbolic roots of the sacrosanct advice that “breast is best.” Phyllis Rippey rejects the dichotomy of inferior versus best, offering a new fra...

The Invention of Journalism Ethics, Second Edition

An innovative theory of pragmatic objectivity to guide journalism today.

The Failure of Remain

The Failure of Remain offers the first comprehensive study of the UK’s grassroots anti-Brexit movement after the June 2016 referendum. Through first-hand interviews, a survey of anti-Brexit activists, and an analysis of their campaign materials, Adam Fagan and Stijn van Kessel assess the ideology...

Rethinking the Political

From 1937 to 1939, a group of French intellectuals of diverse origins and disciplines gathered under the leadership of Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois to form the Collège de Sociologie. Inspired by Durkheim's theory of the sacred as the symbolic found

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.

Badiou's Deleuze

"An outstanding piece of original argument and scholarship, it makes a definitive intervention into an important debate." James Williams, University of Dundee

Kierkegaard as Humanist

Arnold Come draws on Kierkegaard's major works, journals, and papers to reveal the humanist dimensions of his thought, highlighting the importance of the self as the central theme of all his writings.

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...

Becoming Bamboo

The many problems we face in today's world -- among them war, environmental destruction, religious and racial intolerance, and inappropriate technologies -- demand that we carefully re-evaluate such issues as our relation to the environment, the nature of progress, ultimate purposes, and human va...

Free Will

Free Will explores the determinist rejection of free will through detailed exposition of the central determinist argument and consideration of responses to each of its premises. At every stage familiar examples and case studies help frame and ground the argument.

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...

Eranos

A detailed account of a vital incubator for global humanism.

St Petersburg Dialogues

A classic renowned for both its content and its French literary style that today still influences the direction of far-right conservatism in Western political thought.

The Distant Relation

In The Distant Relation Eoin Thomson presents innovative readings of canonical philosophic and literary texts, focusing on the distance that mediates the relation between word and thing, past and present, I and you. Through a novel convergence, itself ari

The Eye of the Master

The Eye of the Master confronts the missed opportunities for a decolonial version of indépendance in Quebec and imagines a different future, detached from domination and exploitation, through models based in Indigenous thought and anti-racist, ecological, and feminist movements.

Might Nature Be Canadian?

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

Hegel's Phenomenology

How Hegel proves the truth of logic by examining the dynamics of lived experience.

Being at Large

Politicians and philosophers presenting themselves as the ultimate bearers of truth and reality have created unprecedented technological, cultural, and political framings. This new order conspires to undermine the interpretive practices of open-ended critique, normalizing a sense of threat to pre...

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...

Bird on an Ethics Wire

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

Humanism Betrayed

In Humanism Betrayed Graham Good offers a defence of liberal humanism against the illiberal trends, political and intellectual, that dominate today's university. He uses the McEwen Report episode at the University of British Columbia to illustrate the current political climate in universities, sh...

John McDowell

An intellectual primer for reading one of the most challenging contemporary philosophers.

Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law

Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law links the controversial ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to the common law legal tradition that has recently invigorated the idea of "the duty of care." Desmond Manderson argues that the ethicist and lawyer struggle with the same basic questions of wh...

Saul Kripke

An introduction to one of today's most original and creative philosophers whose work has sparked some of the most important philosophical debates of recent years.

Time and Space, Second Edition

Surveying both historical debates and modern physics, Barry Dainton evaluates the central arguments in a clear and unintimidating way that keeps conceptual issues comprehensible to students with little scientific or mathematical training and makes the philosophy of space and time accessible to an...

Cause for Thought

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

The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity

An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, w

Democracy and the Intersection of Religion and Traditions

An innovative approach to the ways in which a major philiosopher's ideas have been configured and incorporated in different countries and contexts.

Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism

New readings and perspectives on Nietzsche's work are brought together in this collection of essays by prominent scholars from North America and Europe. They question whether Nietzsche's work and the conventional interpretation of it is rhetorical and nihilistic.

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...

Logic

An text for introducing both formal and philosophical logic.

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.

Gilles Deleuze

A basic, rigorous, and accessible starting point for teaching Deleuze.

A Priori

In recent years many influential philosophers have argued that philosophy is an a priori science, yet few epistemology textbooks discuss a priori knowledge at any length, focusing instead on empirical knowledge and justification. Although a priori knowledge has moved to centre stage, the literatu...

James's Will-To-Believe Doctrine

In 1896 William James published an essay entitled The Will to Believe, in which he defended the legitimacy of religious faith against the attacks of such champions of scientific method as W.K. Clifford and Thomas Huxley. James's work quickly became one of the most important writings in the philos...

Truth Matters

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

Ethics for a Broken World

Imagine living in the future in a world already damaged by humankind, a world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs and where a chaotic climate makes life precarious. Then imagine looking into the past - back to our own time - and assessing the ethics of the early twenty...

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...

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...

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...

Uninvited

A historian and a philosopher respond in poetry to Plato's Symposium.

The Pause

When COVID-19 spread across the globe, protection measures such as social distancing, self-isolation, and self-quarantine were experienced as life on hold. A cultural inquiry into the moment of pausing and its social, political, and personal manifestations, The Pause captures the experience of be...

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...

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.

Outspoken

Outspoken interrogates the meaning and practice of being outspoken in a world of right-wing populism, global capitalism, and climate emergency. Some of the world’s most radical thinkers – Rosi Braidotti, Henry A. Giroux, Amelia Jones, and Slavoj Žižek, among others – chart progressive courses for...

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...

In Vivo

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

The Minds of the Moderns

What Would Cervantes Do?

A timely meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. Castillo and Egginton offer a tour-de-force commentary on politics and popular culture through critical comparative readings of Western cultural texts of the twentieth and twenty...

Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture

In the first comprehensive and critical assessment of Zygmunt Bauman's work on culture, Dariusz Brzeziński offers a comparative analysis of the theories of one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Foregrounding the sociologist and philosopher's Polish...

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.

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.

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...

The Science of Culture and the Phenomenology of Styles

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

State of Disappearance

State of Disappearance brings together abstract artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalization of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialization, along with wider concerns about what it means to be h...