When we talk about delusions we may refer to symptoms of mental health problems, such as clinical delusions in schizophrenia, or simply the beliefs that people cling to which are implausible and resistant to counterevidence; these can include anything from beliefs about the benefits of homeopathy to concerns about the threat of alien abduction. Why do people adopt delusional beliefs and why are they so reluctant to part with them? In Why Delusions Matter, Lisa Bortolotti explains what delusions really are and argues that, despite their negative reputation, they can also play a positive role in people's lives, imposing some meaning on adverse experiences and strengthening personal or social identities. In a clear and accessible style, Bortolotti contributes to the growing research on the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, offering a novel and nuanced view of delusions.

Computer-mediated communication and cyberculture are dramatically changing the nature of social relationships. Whether cyberspace will simply retain vestiges of traditional communities with hierarchical social links and class-structured relationships or create new egalitarian social networks remains an open question. The chapters in this volume examine the issue of social justice on the Internet by using a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives.

Political scientists, sociologists, and communications and information systems scholars address issues of race, class, and gender on the Internet in chapters that do not assume any specialized training in computer technology.

In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of Critical Theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive. In a series of discrete but interrelated interventions, Doran exposes the ethical underpinnings of theoretical discourses that are often perceived as either oblivious to or highly skeptical of any attempt to define ethics or politics. Doran thus discusses a variety of themes related to the problematic status of ethics or the ethico-political in Theory: the persistence of existentialist ethics in structuralist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial writing; the ethical imperative of the return of the subject (self-creation versus social conformism); the intimate relation between the ethico-political and the aesthetic (including the role of literary history in Erich Auerbach and Edward Said); the political implications of a "philosophy of the present" for Continental thought (including Heidegger's Nazism); the ethical dimension of the debate between history and theory (including Hayden White's idea of the "practical past" and the question of Holocaust representation); the "ethical turn" in Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty; the post-1987 "political turn" in literary and cultural studies (especially as influenced by Said). Drawing from a broad range of Continental philosophers and cultural theorists, including many texts that have only recently become available, Doran charts a new path that recognizes the often complex motivations that underlie the critical impulse, motivations that are not always apparent or avowed.

This book focuses on the complex relationships between inheritance, work, and desert in literature. It shows how, from its manifestation in the trope of material inheritance and legacy in Victorian fiction, "inheritance" gradually took on additional, more modern meanings in Joseph Conrad's fiction on work and self-making. In effect, the emphasis on inheritance as referring to social rank and wealth acquired through birth shifted to a focus on talent, ability, and merit, often expressed through work.The book explores how Conrad's fiction engaged with these changing modes of inheritance and work, and the resulting claims of desert they led to. Uniquely, it argues that Conrad's fiction critiques claims of desert arising from both work and inheritance, while also vividly portraying the emotional costs and existential angst that these beliefs in desert entailed. The argument speaks to and illuminates today's debates on moral desert arising from work and inheritance, in particular from meritocratic ideals. Its new approach to Conrad's works will appeal to students and scholars of Conrad and literary modernism, as well as a wider audience interested in philosophical and social debates on desert deriving from inheritance and work.

Distilling into concise and focused formulations many of the main ideas that Mari Ruti has sought to articulate throughout her writing career, this book reflects on the general state of contemporary theory as it relates to posthumanist ethics, political resistance, subjectivity, agency, desire, and bad feelings such as anxiety. It offers a critique of progressive theory's tendency to advance extreme models of revolt that have little real-life applicability. The chapters move fluidly between several theoretical registers, the most obvious of these being continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, Butlerian ethics, affect theory, and queer theory. One of the central aims of Distillations is to explore the largely uncharted territory between psychoanalysis and affect theory, which are frequently pitted against each other as hopelessly incompatible, but which Ruti shows can be brought into a productive dialogue.

Within the United States alone, almost fifteen percent of the population lives in poverty. Ethics in an Age of Savage Inequalities investigates what moral obligations the middle class might have to the poor. While there are no simple ethical prescriptions, the fact remains that many of us afford small luxuries while others in the world struggle to live on less than a dollar a day. James J. Winchester suggests that we can and should give not only charity, but restitution to the poor. Looking at extraction of minerals and the plight of service workers in the United States among many other things, this book demonstrates how the middle class benefits from the exploitation of the poor and harms the environment in ways that threaten people in poverty. Winchester argues that now is the time to take political action to reduce the savage inequalities in this world. Of interest to anyone involved in ethics, social justice, sociology, and even political science, Ethics in an Age of Savage Inequalities explores the idea that money is only a small part of what we owe to the poor.

Locating poetry in a philosophy of the everyday, Brett Bourbon continues a tradition of attention to logic in everyday utterances through Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Cavell, arguing that poems are events of form, not just collections of words, which shape everyone's lives. Poems taught in class are formalizations of the everyday poems we live amidst, albeit unknowingly. Bourbon resurrects these poems to construct an anthropology of form that centers everyday poems as events or interruptions within our lives. Expanding our understanding of what a poem is, this book argues that poems be understood as events of form that may depend on words but are not fundamentally constituted by them. This line of thought delves into a poem's linguistic particularity, to ask what a poem is and how we know. By reclaiming arenas previously ceded to essayists and literary writers, Bourbon reveals the care and attention necessary to uncovering the intimate relationship between poems, life, reading and living. A philosophical meditation on the nature of poetry, but also on the meaning of love and the claim of words upon us, Everyday Poetics situates the importance of everyday poems as events in our lives.