This book plays with the notion of the laughter of delight, and the way in which it has gone largely unheard in the Western interpretative tradition. The scope of the work stretches from the ancient to the modern, but it has a consistent leitmotif: the delighted laughter of the matriarch Sarah in the book of Genesis, when she gives birth to her son Isaac. This laughter is "heard" first through biblical commentaries, then through twentieth-century theorists of laughter; finally, contemporary feminist theorists are used to help realize the radical openness of the laughter of delight.

Stephen Neale presents a powerful, original examination of a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of reality, that accurate or true representations are those that correspond to the facts. Facing Facts will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of mind and language, and will have profound implications far beyond.

In this book, Touko Vaahtera explores how "bodies of latent potential," a cultural attachment to the idea of body as potentiality, carries with it hierarchizing hopes about better bodies. Vaahtera combines disability studies, cultural studies, feminist science studies, transgender studies, post-colonial studies, and Foucauldian genealogy to offer a provocative approach that interrogates capacities and capabilities as obvious frameworks for thinking about the body. Vaahtera explores how swimming skills emerged as a specific biopolitical question in Finland, a country that has been described as the "Land of a Thousand Lakes." Through a profound cultural analysis focusing both on Finnish cultural texts on swimming as well as manifold more globalized texts, Vaahtera considers how the legacy of eugenics and colonialism, the hopes of civilization, and homogenizing assumptions about bodies frame how we think about human capacity.

Thomas White, in the quatercentenary of his birth, is due for historical rehabilitation. English Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and scientist, he was a renowned and notorious figure in his own day; and, though long forgot ten, his work exemplifies aspects of major current concern to historians of ideas: in particular, the significance of the newly-revived sceptical philosophy; the complexity ofthe transition from scholasticism to the new philosophy; and the whole role of"minor," non-canonical figures in the historyofthought. White's writings embrace theology, politics, and natural philosophy, or science'; and in all these three areas, his work, after centuries of comparative neglect, has slowly been resurfacing. His theological significance received intermittent recognition through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries; but more recently his great importance as leader of a whole "Blackloist" faction of English Catholics has become increasingly clear. Condemned by co-religionists in his own time as a dangerous heretic, he has been assessed by modem scholars as an anticipator of twentieth-century trends in Catholic theology, and even as "probably, after John Henry Newman, the most original thinker as yet producedby modem English Catholicism."2 Blackloism implied not only a theological, but also a political position; and that position was clarified and publicised by White in his single political treatise, The Grounds of Obedience and Government, published in the mid 1650s. His provocative stance was widely misunderstood and misinterpreted, and was soon anyway rendered untenable by the restoration of the monarchy."

This book offers an exploration of the postcolonial hybrid experience in anglophone Caribbean plays and performance from a feminist perspective. In a hitherto unattempted consideration of Caribbean theatre and performance, this study of gendered identities chronicles the postcolonial hybrid experience - and how it varies in the context of questions of sex, performance and social designation. In the process, it examines the diverse performances of the anglophone Caribbean. The work includes works by Caribbean anglophone playwrights like Derek Walcott, Mustapha Matura, Michael Gikes, Dennis Scott, Trevor Rhone, Earl Lovelace and Errol John with more recent works of Pat Cumper, Rawle Gibbons and Tony Hall. The study would also engage with Carnival, calypso and chutney music, while commenting on its evolving influences over the hybrid imagination. Each section covers the dominant socio-political thematics associated with the tradition and its effect on it, followed by an analysis of contemporaneously significant literary and cultural works - plays, carnival narrative and calypso and chutney lyrics as well as the experiences of performers. From Lovelace's fictional Jestina to the real-life Drupatee, the book critically explores the marginalization of female performances while forming a hybrid identity.

This is the first English translation of Condillac's most influential works: the Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge (1746) and Course for Study of Instruction of the Prince of Parma (1772). The Essays lay the foundation for Condillac's theory of mind. He argues that all mental operations are, in fact, sensory processes and nothing more. An outgrowth of Locke's empirical account of ideas and sensations as a source of knowledge, Condillac's theory goes beyond Locke's foundations, introducing his universal method for understanding any complex entity: the reduction of all matters to their origins and then to their simplest forms. The Course, originally written to teach Prince Ferdinand of Parma to think and to develop good habits of mind following the principle of association of ideas, covers grammar, writing, reasoning, thinking, and ancient and modern history. Philip writes in the introduction: "[the] mind is moldable to reason and to 'nature' which gave it a model and provides the ultimate authority for all it can know or do."

What would Caligula do? What the worst Roman emperors can teach us about how not to lead If recent history has taught us anything, it's that sometimes the best guide to leadership is the negative example. But that insight is hardly new. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Suetonius wrote Lives of the Caesars, perhaps the greatest negative leadership book of all time. He was ideally suited to write about terrible political leaders; after all, he was also the author of Famous Prostitutes and Words of Insult, both sadly lost. In How to Be a Bad Emperor, Josiah Osgood provides crisp new translations of Suetonius's briskly paced, darkly comic biographies of the Roman emperors Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. Entertaining and shocking, the stories of these ancient anti-role models show how power inflames leaders' worst tendencies, causing almost incalculable damage. Complete with an introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Be a Bad Emperor is both a gleeful romp through some of the nastiest bits of Roman history and a perceptive account of leadership gone monstrously awry. We meet Caesar, using his aunt's funeral to brag about his descent from gods and kings-and hiding his bald head with a comb-over and a laurel crown; Tiberius, neglecting public affairs in favor of wine, perverse sex, tortures, and executions; the insomniac sadist Caligula, flaunting his skill at cruel put-downs; and the matricide Nero, indulging his mania for public performance. In a world bristling with strongmen eager to cast themselves as the Caesars of our day, How to Be a Bad Emperor is a delightfully enlightening guide to the dangers of power without character.

This book focuses on how Indigenous knowledge and methodologies can contribute towards the decolonisation of peace and conflict studies (PACS). It shows how Indigenous knowledge is essential to ensure that PACS research is relevant, respectful, accurate, and non-exploitative of Indigenous Peoples, in an effort to reposition Indigenous perspectives and contexts through Indigenous experiences, voices, and research processes, to provide balance to the power structures within this discipline. It includes critiques of ethnocentrism within PACS scholarship, and how both research areas can be brought together to challenge the violence of colonialism, and the colonialism of the institutions and structures within which decolonising researchers are working. Contributions in the book cover Indigenous research in Aotearoa, Australia, The Caribbean, Hawai'i, Israel, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, Philippines, Samoa, USA, and West Papua.

This accessible and jargon-free book features readings of over 20 key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including Homer, Plato, Beowulf , Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau. Simon Haines presents a thought-provoking and theoretically aware account of Western literature and philosophy, arguing that the history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different conceptions of the self: the 'romantic' (or dualist) vs the 'realist' or ('extended').

Hans Kelsen's efforts in the areas of legal philosophy and legal theory are considered by many scholars of law to be the most influential thinking of this century. This volume makes available some of the best work extant on Kelsen's theory, including papers newly translated into English. The book covers such topics as competing philosophical positions on the nature of law, legal validity, legal powers, and the unity of municipal and international law. It also throws much light on Kelsen's intellectual milieu--as well as his intellectual debts.

With few exceptions, the field of Eastern Christian studies has primarily been concerned with historical-critical analysis, hermeneutics, and sociology. For the most part it has not attempted to bring Eastern Christian philosophy into serious engagement with contemporary thought. This volume seeks to redress the matter by bringing the Eastern Christian tradition into a meaningful dialogue with contemporary philosophy. It boasts a diverse group of scholars-specialists in ancient philosophy, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophy-who engage with a wide range of pressing issues. Among other things, it addresses such topics as contemporary atheism, the metaphysics of action, religious epistemology, the philosophy of language, bioethics, the philosophy of race, and human rights. In so doing, it aims to introduce contemporary readers to unique perspectives and novel arguments often overlooked by mainstream anglophone philosophy.

Sophie Grace Chappell develops a picture of what philosophical ethics can be like, once set aside from the idealising and reductive pressures of conventional moral theory. Her question is 'How are we to know what to do?', and the answer she defends is 'By developing our moral imaginations'. The series of studies presented in Knowing What To Do contribute to the case that the moral imagination is a key part of human excellence or virtue by showing that it plays a wide variety of roles in our practical and evaluative lives. There is no short-cut or formulaic way of knowing what to do; but the longer and more painstaking approach is more rewarding anyway. This approach involves developing our repertoire of natural human capacities for imagination, open deliberation, and contemplative attention to the world, the people, and the reality of value around us.

'what can be said at all can be said clearly; and of what one cannot talk, about that one must be silent' Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922, is one of the most influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century. It played a fundamental role in the development of analytic philosophy, and its philosophical ideas and implications have been fiercely debated ever since. This new translation improves on the two main earlier translations, taking advantage of the scholarship over the last century that has deepened our understanding of both the Tractatus and Wittgenstein's philosophy more generally, scholarship that has also involved discussion of the difficulties in translating the original German text and the issues of interpretation that arise. Michael Beaney's translation is accompanied by two introductory essays, the first explaining the background to Wittgenstein's work, its main ideas and their subsequent development and influence, and some of the central debates, and the second providing an account of the history of the text and the two earlier translations. It is accompanied by detailed notes, explaining key points of translation and interpretation, a glossary, chronology, and other editorial material designed to help the reader understand the Tractatus and its place in the history of philosophy.

Richard Kennington (1921-1999), a professor for many years at Pennsylvania State University and the Catholic University of America, was renowned for his insight in reading and teaching early modern philosophy. Although he published articles and spoke widely, never before have his writings been collected in a book. On Modern Origins deftly shows how modern thinkers assessed the errors of the classical tradition and established in its place a philosophy that fuses a new meaning of nature and of theory with humanitarian goals. This volume is an essential source for scholars seeking to understand the contemporary significance of the dawning of the modern era.

This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives-from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noe, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.

This book makes connections between selfhood, reading practice and moral judgment which propose fresh insights into Austen's narrative style and offer new ways of reading her work. It grounds her writing in the Enlightenment philosophy of selfhood, exploring how Austen takes five major components of selfhood theory-memory, imagination, probability, sympathy and reflection-and investigates their relation to self-formation and moral judgement. At the same time, Austen's narrative style breaks new ground in the representation of consciousness and engages directly with contemporary concerns about reading practice. Drawing analogies between reading text and reading character, the book argues that Austen's rendering of reading and rereading as both reflective and constitutive acts demonstrates their capacity to enable self-recognition and self-formation. It shows how Austen raises questions about the potential for different readings and, in so doing, challenges her readers to reflect on and reread their own interactions with her texts.

This book publishes, for the first time in decades, and in many cases, for the first time in a readily accessible edition, English language philosophical literature written in India during the period of British rule. Bhushan's and Garfield's own essays on the work of this period contextualize the philosophical essays collected and connect them to broader intellectual, artistic and political movements in India. This volume yields a new understanding of cosmopolitan consciousness in a colonial context, of the intellectual agency of colonial academic communities, and of the roots of cross-cultural philosophy as it is practiced today. It transforms the canon of global philosophy, presenting for the first time a usable collection and a systematic study of Anglophone Indian philosophy.
Many historians of Indian philosophy see a radical disjuncture between traditional Indian philosophy and contemporary Indian academic philosophy that has abandoned its roots amid globalization. This volume provides a corrective to this common view. The literature collected and studied in this volume is at the same time Indian and global, demonstrating that the colonial Indian philosophical communities were important participants in global dialogues, and revealing the roots of contemporary Indian philosophical thought.
The scholars whose work is published here will be unfamiliar to many contemporary philosophers. But the reader will discover that their work is creative, exciting, and original, and introduces distinctive voices into global conversations. These were the teachers who trained the best Indian scholars of the post-Independence period. They engaged creatively both with the classical Indian tradition and with the philosophy of the West, forging a new Indian philosophical idiom to which contemporary Indian and global philosophy are indebted.

The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards. Beginning with Plato’s extensive thinking about work’s relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world’s only treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe. This original study of Plato and his inheritors’ ideas provides practical suggestions for how to approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality.

This text offers an assessment of Jean-Paul Sartre as an exemplary figure in the evolving political and cultural landscape of post-1945 France. Sartre's originality is located in the tense relationship that he maintained between deeply held revolutionary political beliefs and a residual yet critical attachment to traditional forms of cultural expression. A series of case studies centred on Gaullism, communism, Maoism (Part 1), the theatre, art criticism and the media (Part 2), illustrate the continuing relevance and appeal of Sartre to the contemporary world.

Nietzsche's Immoralism begins a two-volume critical reconstruction of a socialist, democratic, and non-liberal Nietzschean politics. Nietzsche's ideal of amor fati (love of fate) cannot be individually adopted because it is incompatible with deep freedom of agency. However, we can create its social conditions thanks to an underappreciated aspect of his will-to-power psychology. We are driven not toward domination and conquest but toward resistance, contest, and play-a heightened feeling of power provoked by equal challenges that enables the non-instrumental affirmation of suffering. This incompatibilist, anti-teleological psychology leads to Nietzsche's distinctive immoralism: the abandonment of cultural means of human improvement for a historical materialist politics of breeding that produces future higher types through changes to our political order's material conditions. Politics becomes first philosophy: it is not grounded in moral values but is instead the very source of their legitimacy. Moreover, despite Nietzsche's professed aristocratism, his immoralism offers a stronger foundation for a renewed left, attacking conservative politics at its very root: the belief in moral order, authority, and responsibility.

This book examines the nature, sources, and implications of fallacies in philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it illustrates and evaluates various historical instances of this phenomenon. There is widespread interest in the practice and products of philosophizing, yet the important issue of fallacious reasoning in these matters has been effectively untouched. Nicholas Rescher fills this gap by presenting a systematic account of the principal ways in which philosophizing can go astray.

This book reassesses the ethics of reason in the Age of the Reason, making use of the neglected category of conscience. Arguing that conscience was a central feature of British Enlightenment ethical rationalism, the book explores the links between Enlightenment philosophy and modern secularisation, while responding to longstanding criticisms of rational intuitionism and the analogy between mathematics and morals, derived from David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Questioning in what sense British Enlightenment ethical rationalism can be associated with a secularising 'Enlightenment project', Daniel investigates the extent to which contemporary, and secular liberal, invocations of reason and conscience rely on the early modern Christian metaphysics they have otherwise disregarded. The chapters cover a rich collection of subjects, ranging from the Enlightenment's secular legacy, reason and conscience in the history of ethics, and controversies in the Scottish Enlightenment, to the role of British moralists such as John Locke, Joseph Butler and Adam Smith in the secularisation of reason and conscience. Each chapter expertly refines Enlightenment ethical rationalism by reinterpreting its most influential proponents in eighteenth-century Britain - the followers of 'Isaac Newton's bulldog' Samuel Clarke - including Richard Price (Edmund Burke's opponent over the French Revolution) and John Witherspoon (the only clergyman to sign the US declaration of Independence).