In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a 'flattering illusion of concentric arrangement'. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot's life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot's career-from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such-Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot's development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.

'Beautiful, moving, profoundly imaginative in itself - this book is as entertaining as it is relevant and practical' ALAIN DE BOTTON 'Anyone who has an imagination - that is, everyone - should read this book' EDWARD ENNINFUL 'An extraordinary book - an elaborate cabinet of curiosities' SPECTATOR For some, the imagination is a luxury in the modern age; something which is by turns elusive, difficult to employ and better left to others. But what is it to imagine exactly? How do we go about it, and why is it so important that we imagine for ourselves? In this insightful and life-affirming book, Albert Read puts the imagination back at the forefront of our lives. Not merely a nebulous concept reserved for artists and creatives, it is a muscle - an essential faculty of the mind to be trained and developed over a lifetime. It is boundless in its potential, infinitely rewarding and central to human achievement. Spanning pre-historic times through to the twenty-first century, The Imagination Muscle explores the genesis of ideas - from Thomas Edison's serial embracing of failure to Jane Jacobs' vision of how we should build cities together; from Steve Jobs' approach to office design to the Japanese concept of Ma. Touching on art, music, film, literature, science and entrepreneurship, this book examines how the imagination has evolved - in shape, power and pace - through the millennia. Albert Read reveals how we can harness the imagination in our day-to-day lives and why, in the new Age of Technology, it is more pressing than ever that we do so. Discover where to find ideas, how to foster skill in observation and connection, and how to be more attentive to the fluxes of our own minds. After all, as Read expertly outlines, the imagination is our supreme gift, our biggest opportunity, our greatest source of fulfilment and our most vital asset for the future.

Thomas Paine is a unique political thinker who has continued to attract scholarly and popular attention from the time he wrote about both the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. This collection brings together the most recent essays debating the meaning and relevance of Paine's works. It includes an historiographical survey of scholarship about Paine and articles by the leading authorities in the field. The essays survey his life, analyze his ideas, place them in their social and intellectual context, and appraise their significance today.

- author has an international reputation - book has the potential to be a classic in the field

The Cambridge Handbook of Religious Epistemology, the first to appear on the topic, introduces the current state of religious epistemology and provides a discussion of fundamental topics related to the epistemology of religious belief. Its wide-ranging chapters not only survey fundamental topics, but also develop non-traditional epistemic theories and explore the religious epistemology endorsed by non-Western traditions. In the first section, Faith and Rationality, readers will find new essays on Reformed epistemology, skepticism and religious belief, and on the nature of evidence with respect to religious belief. The rich second section, Religious Traditions, contains chapters on Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian epistemologies. The final section, New Directions, contains chapters ranging from applying disjunctivism and knowledge-first approaches to religious belief, to surveying responses to debunking arguments. Comprehensive and accessible, this Handbook will advance the field for years to come.

'An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.' Sylvia Townsend Warner There are many ways of telling the story of a life and how we've got to where we are. The questions of why and how we think the way we do continues to preoccupy philosophers. In The Stuff of Life, Timothy Morton chooses the objects that have shaped and punctuated their life to tell the story of who they are and why they might think the way they do. These objects are 'things' in the richest sense. They are beings, non-human beings, that have a presence and a force of their own. From the looming expanse of Battersea Power Station to a packet of anti-depressants and a cowboy suit, Morton explores why 'stuff' matters and the life of these things have so powerfully impinged upon their own. Their realization, through a concealer stick, that they identify as non-binary reveals the strange and wonderful ways that objects can form our worlds. Part memoir, part philosophical exploration of the meaning of a life lived alongside and through other things, Morton asks us to think about the stuff, things, objects and buildings that have formed our realities and who we are and might be.

It is not words, song, or art that are tremendous, but the human soul, and what is set in motion when it is stirred to the depths. Where Epics Fail is a collection of over 800 aphorisms from acclaimed writer, essayist and poet Yahia Lababidi. Offering wit and wisdom, inspiration and spirituality, these meditations appeal to our shared humanity and attempt, with art, to guide us through the landscape of everyday life.

In everyday life, we generally assume that we can make our own decisions on matters which concern our own lives. We assume that a life followed only according to decisions taken by other people, against our will, cannot be a well-lived life - we assume, in other words, that we are and should be autonomous. However, it is equally true that many aspects of our lives are not chosen freely: this is true of social relations and commitments but also of all those situations we simply seem to stumble into, situations which just seem to happen to us. The possibility of both the success of an autonomous life and its failure are part of our everyday experiences. In this brilliant and illuminating book, Beate Roessler examines the tension between failing and succeeding to live an autonomous life and the obstacles we have to face when we try to live our life autonomously, obstacles within ourselves as well as those that stem from social and political conditions. She highlights the ambiguities we encounter, examines the roles of self-awareness and self-deception, explores the role of autonomy for the meaning of life, and maps out the social and political conditions necessary for autonomy. Informed by philosophical perspectives but also drawing on literary texts, such as those of Siri Hustvedt and Jane Austen, and diaries, including those of Franz Kafka and Sylvia Plath, Roessler develops a formidable defense of autonomy against excessive expectations and, above all, against overpowering skepticism.

This is a short and accessible introduction to the complex and evolving debates around queer theories, advocating for their critical role in academia and society. The book traces the roots of queer theories and argues that Foucault owed an important debt to other European authors including the feminist and homosexual liberation movements of the 1960-1970s and the anticolonial movements of the 1950s. Going beyond a simple introduction to queer theories, this book situates them firmly in a European and Italian context to offer a crucial set of arguments in defence of LGBTQI+ rights, in defence of the freedom of teaching and research, and in defence of a radical idea of democracy. The narrative of the book is divided into three short chapters which can be read independently or in sequence. The first chapter argues that queer theories are rooted in the critical philosophical tradition, the second presents a critique of heterosexism and the binary inherent to the gender-sex-sexual orientation system, and the third chapter sketches a history of the queer debate. The book offers a useful typology of queer theories by sorting them into three basic paradigms: Freudo-Marxism, radical constructivism, and antisocial and affective theories, clarifying the complexities of the nature of the debates for undergraduates. The book is both accessible and original, and is suitable for both specialist researchers and undergraduate students new to queer studies. It will be essential reading for those studying philosophy, sexuality studies and gender studies.

A "New York Times" bestseller people can believe in--by "a pioneer of the new urban Christians" ("Christian Today magazine").
Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, addresses the frequent doubts that skeptics and non-believers bring to religion. Using literature, philosophy, anthropology, pop culture, and intellectual reasoning, Keller explains how the belief in a Christian God is, in fact, a sound and rational one. To true believers he offers a solid platform on which to stand against the backlash toward religion spawned by the Age of Skepticism. And to skeptics, atheists, and agnostics he provides a challenging argument for pursuing the reason for God.
The remarkable "New York Times" bestseller by the "C.S. Lewis for the 21st century" ("Newsweek").
Watch a Video

Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body. In Broadway Bodies, author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West's Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside? In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway's inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.

This book explores the analyst's countertransference experience in clinical settings from a number of theoretical perspectives in order to develop a transtheoretical definition of countertransference. Stemming from an examination of the definition of countertransference itself, the author utilizes a philosophical hermeneutic approach to ask how pathological countertransference develops, how analysts separate themselves from the patient's experience, and what analysts should do to prevent their countertransference response from interfering with treatment. Through the unique hermeneutic methodology, philosophical themes within selected writings are explored as a way of gaining a deeper meaning and understanding of countertransference. By re-interpreting these selected writings in a new light, the book develops a transtheoretical definition and approach to countertransference. As such, the author offers a timely reassessment of the meaning and understanding of countertransference as it has evolved over the past century, going from being considered an obstacle to treatment brought on by the analyst's unconscious conflicts to being understood as a way of communicating and understanding the patient's unconscious material. It also provides a unique pathway through various depth psychological, therapeutic, and theoretical approaches to countertransference, foregrounding the significance and therapeutic value of the concept and seeking a new transtheoretical definition. This volume will appeal to scholars and researchers of psychology and mental health.

This collection of new essays interprets and critically evaluates the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It offers innovative historical scholarship on Feyerabend's take on topics such as realism, empiricism, mimesis, voluntarism, pluralism, materialism, and the mind-body problem, as well as certain debates in the philosophy of physics. It also considers the ways in which Feyerabend's thought can contribute to contemporary debates in science and public policy, including questions about the nature of scientific methodology, the role of science in society, citizen science, scientism, and the role of expertise in public policy. The volume will provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the topics which Feyerabend engaged with throughout his career, showing both the breadth and the depth of his thought.

This volume clearly communicates that Weber's influence is of great significance to the history of social science, and to appreciating the theoretical work of other social scientists in the modern age. Its insightful and timely publication comprises topical and innovative work discussing Weber in a range of historical and contemporary questions including: the controversy surrounding the Da Vinci code; the charismatic role of martyrs; the nuclear weapons strategy in a post-cold-war age and the affinity between Hindu belief systems and disenchanted computer science. Max Weber Matters illustrates the multidisciplinary and continued relevance of Weber's work and will be of interest to scholars across a range of disciplines, including historians, sociologists, political scientists and social theorists.

Routledge Great Minds presents ten of the best shorter works from the Classics series where some of its leading authors provide, in brief and accessible form, pithy statements of their ideas and arguments. Ideal for those unfamiliar with their work as a whole, for the time-pressed, or for the merely curious, these books contain the ideas of a great thinker in a nutshell. They are also an excellent starting point for anyone coming to Routledge Classics for the first time. Each volume includes a new foreword by a leading authority in the field.

'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West Tough times don't last. Tough people do. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. 'The hottest thinker in the world' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

  Brown Boy is an uncompromising interrogation of identity, family, religion, race, and class, told through Omer Aziz’s incisive and luminous prose. In the early 2000s, Toronto, Omer Aziz’s working-class neighbourhood is miles away from the wealthy white downtown. A first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy, Omer struggles to find his place in a world of violence and uncertainty, torn between cultures old and new. Dreading the aimless, angry future that he sees other young men succumbing to, Omer clings to his love for books and education, dreaming of a wider world.   That dream sees him through some of the most prestigious international institutions, from Ontario to Paris to Cambridge—and finally to Yale Law School. Yet despite his success, Omer has never banished the insecurities and doubts that come with being an outsider; a brown-skinned boy in an elite white universe that has never really accepted him. The more books he reads and the higher Omer soars, the stronger his need for community and identity becomes, pushing him to question everything and everyone around him. Was assimilation ever really an option? Can you truly transcend the barriers of race and class in a system that throws up obstacles at every turn? And can we—the collective West—ever honestly confront the darkness and consequences of our past?   Weaving together Omer’s powerful personal narrative with the stories and people that moved him, Brown Boy is an articulation of contradictions, displacement, and belonging. It’s a book for anybody who has ever felt unwanted or out of place; a testament to the complex process of creating an identity that fuses where you’re from, what people see in you, and who you know yourself to be. "A sterling portrait of personal revelation, cuts to the bone." -- Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "A brilliant and moving memoir of, among other things, class migration and the choices made by outsiders. Aziz writes with sensitivity and honesty about the tensions between growing up in a working class immigrant home and the worlds of elite education and politics. This book will surely make it onto any reading list exploring the twin preoccupations of our time: race and class." -- Zia Haider Rahman, author of In The Light of What We Know  "Omer Aziz’s astonishing journey from economic hardship and violence to Yale and becoming a foreign policy advisor would be fascinating even if it didn’t tell us things we absolutely need to know: Why have the white and minority communities withdrawn into their separate corners; what can be done to bring them together? An essential memoir." -- Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life and An Obedient Father. “This breathtaking, brilliant memoir had me from page one—I couldn’t put it down. Omer Aziz is a poet, his writing luminous. Brown Boy is eye-opening, achingly honest, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking—an unforgettable book.� —Amy Chua, author of Political Tribes and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother "Brown Boy is a poignant, unflinching exploration of cultural identity: the roles we perform, the ways we are misperceived, and the conflicted feelings we can have about our pasts. Omer Aziz illuminates what it is like to be the child of immigrants and the unique invisibility that comes with being South Asian. I saw myself reflected in these pages. How rare, to encounter one’s story with such candor and vulnerability. How rare, and how necessary." —Maya Shanbhag Lang, author of What We Carry, a New York Times Editors’ Choice

Wilber's groundbreaking synthesis of religion, philosophy, physics, and psychology started a revolution in transpersonal psychology. He was the first to suggest in a systematic way that the great psychological systems of the West could be integrated with the noble contemplative traditions of the East. Spectrum of Consciousness, first released by Quest in 1977, has been the prominent reference point for all subsequent attempts at integrating psychology and spirituality.

One of the only volumes that brings the humanities, social sciences and even the natural sciences under one remit to look at how they can be researched in an integrated and useful way, with policy and real world implications in terms of how we relate in and to the world. Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity have been around for a long time, but as as we move through a digital age they are becoming more and more important and interesting to the scholarly community and beyond. There is nothing on the market that pulls all of these subjects across disciplines together and works out a framework to construct the analysis in a way that asks and answers useful questions.

A beautiful book to connect us after such a challenging time.

'Dark clouds were looming in the distance. We watched them gather, and we wondered... When will it come? How long will it last?'

A monumental storm brings huge and sudden change. We follow a man and his dog through the uncertainty that it brings to their lives. Through their eyes, we see the difficulties of being apart, the rollercoaster of emotions that we can all relate to, and the realisation that by pulling together we can move through difficult times with new perspective, hope and an appreciation of what matters most in life.

REASON AND RESPONSIBILITY: READINGS IN SOME BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, 15E, International Edition has a well-earned reputation for clarity and breadth, with a proven selection of high-quality readings that cover centuries of philosophical debate. The anthology includes the central issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and ethics, as well as debates over the value of philosophy and the meaning of life. The book is clearly organized so that the readings complement each other, guiding readers through contrasting positions on key philosophical issues. Clear, concise introductions provide reading tips and background information to help readers engage directly and meaningfully with the primary sources.

The first monograph examining the implied metaphysics of the quest for the historical Jesus. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to historical Jesus research and making a significant, original contribution to the field.

This book features chapters on timely, emerging, and global issues, such as campus speech, racial and linguistic justice in education, climate education, neoliberalism in education, the future of higher education, international educational testing, educational problems of mass migration, and educational justice for working children across the world It addresses fundamental questions of educational theory and policy, such as the nature of educational justice, the roles of evidence and values in educational decision-making, the basis for prioritizing some educational aims over others, and widely-discussed educational aims such as human flourishing and global citizenship. The volume reflects important developments on both the epistemic (knowledge-focused) and value-focused (ethical, justice-related, and moral-developmental) wings of philosophy of education, and the ways these come together in important problems of civic life - especially, the polarization of public life and breakdown of public (i.e., shared) knowledge, and questions about how schools can do their jobs in a world in which controversy rages over things that are often matters of strong scientific consensus. In this regard, a particularly valuable aspect of the volume is its attention to the educational and civic importance of both virtues of mind (intellectual or epistemic virtues) and the ways in which epistemic virtues and vices interact with disciplinary knowledge, networks of epistemic trust and reliance, and the ways we teach. Relevant chapters here include ones on Mind, Reason, and Knowledge; Understanding as an Aim of Education; Cultivating Intellectual Virtues; Intellectual Character Education; Free Speech and Education; Democratic Education and the Controversy over Controversial Issues; College Teaching, Indoctrination, and Trust; and Climate, Science, and Sustainability Education. The volume reflects the increasing importance of multidisciplinary approaches in philosophy of education, and the relevance of many subfields of philosophy to philosophical work on education. Multidisciplinary approaches and developments in related subfields of philosophy allow contemporary philosophy of education to address new and important questions in compelling ways. This is evident throughout the volume. The chapters are authored by some of most distinguished philosophers writing on education today, and many of them also bring to their topics deep experience in educational and policy leadership. These authors include: Danielle Allen (a policy thought leader and currently candidate for Governor of Massachusetts), Harry Brighouse (who has done extensive education policy work), Nancy Cartwright (the world's leading philosopher of science and an international thought leader on the uses of social science in public policy), Ann Cudd (Provost at the U of Pittsburgh), Daniel Weinstock (one of Canada's leading public philosophers and contributors to policy debates), Sigal Ben-Porath (who has been consulted extensively by universities across the US when controversies have erupted over free speech), and Yuli Tamir (a former Minister of Education of Israel and university president).

International Relations and International Law continue to be accented by epistemic violence by naturalizing a separation between law and morality. What does such positivist juridical ethos make possible when considering that both disciplines reify a secular (immanent) ontology? International Law, Necropolitics, and Arab Lives emphasizes that positivist jurisprudence (re)conquered Arabia by subjugating Arab life to the power of death using extrajudicial techniques of violence seeking the implementation of a "New Middle East" that is no longer "resistant to Latin-European modernity", but amenable to such exclusionary telos. The monograph goes beyond the limited remonstration asserting that the problematique with both disciplines is that they are primarily "Eurocentric". Rather, the epistemic inquiry uncovers that legalizing necropower is necessary for the temporal coherence of secular-modernity since a humanitarian logic masks sovereignty inherently being necropolitical by categorizing Arab-Islamic epistemology as an internal-external enemy from which national(ist) citizenship must be defended. This creates a sense of danger around which to unite "modern" epistemology whilst reinforcing the purity of a particular ontology at the expense of banning and de-humanizing a supposed impure Arab refugee. This book will be of interest to graduate students, scholars, and finally, practitioners of international relations, political theory, philosophical theology, and legal-theory.