The Times Biography of the Year
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize 2019
Shortlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Prize 2019
Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019
Longlisted for the Cundhill History Prize 2019

'Outstanding.' The Sunday Times

'A revelation.' Guardian

'Wonderful.' The Times

'Riveting.' New Statesman

Friedrich Nietzsche's work rocked the foundation of Western thinking and continues to permeate our culture, high and low - yet he is one of history's most misunderstood philosophers. Sue Prideaux's myth-shattering book brings readers into the world of a brilliant, eccentric and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand Nietzsche, the philosopher who foresaw - and sought solutions to - our own troubled times.

Bringing together active neuroscientists, neurophilosophers, and scholars this volume considers the prospects of a neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism and a pragmatically-informed neuroscience on issues ranging from the nature of mental life to the implications of neuroscience for education and ethics.

This book reflects the most recent research devoted to a systematized perspective and a critical (re)construction of previous theoretical attempts of explaining, justifying and continuing Kuhn's ingenious hypothesis in arts. Hofstadter, Clignet and Habermas revealed to be the most engaged scholars in solving this aesthetic "puzzled-problem". In this context, the structural similarities between science and arts are attentively evaluated, thus satisfying an older concern attributed to the historical Kuhn-Kubler dispute, extensively commented along the pages of this book. How can we track the matter of rationality and truth in art and aesthetics, inspired by scientific perspectives? Are artistic styles similar to scientific paradigms? Are we entitled to pursue paradigms and masterpieces as rational models in science, respectively in arts? On what possible grounds can we borrow from science notions such as progress and predictability, in the study of the evolution of art and its aesthetic backgrounds? Are the historical dynamics of science and art affected by political factors in the same manner? This book will be of interest to philosophers, but also to historians of science and historians of art alike in the reassessment it provides of recent debates on reshaping the art world using Kuhn's "paradigm shift".

The book explores Peirce's non standard thoughts on a synthetic continuum, topological logics, existential graphs, and relational semiotics, offering full mathematical developments on these areas. More precisely, the following new advances are offered: (1) two extensions of Peirce's existential graphs, to intuitionistic logics (a new symbol for implication), and other non-classical logics (new actions on nonplanar surfaces); (2) a complete formalization of Peirce's continuum, capturing all Peirce's original demands (genericity, supermultitudeness, reflexivity, modality), thanks to an inverse ordinally iterated sheaf of real lines; (3) an array of subformalizations and proofs of Peirce's pragmaticist maxim, through methods in category theory, HoTT techniques, and modal logics. The book will be relevant to Peirce scholars, mathematicians, and philosophers alike, thanks to thorough assessments of Peirce's mathematical heritage, compact surveys of the literature, and new perspectives offered through formal and modern mathematizations of the topics studied.

Reading Ricoeur through Law, edited by Marc de Leeuw, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan, is the first collection of essays solely focused on Ricoeur's thinking about law, bringing together both established and emerging scholars to offer a systematic and critical examination of Ricoeur's legal thinking. The chapters not only explore the specific contribution Ricoeur makes to the field of jurisprudence but also examine how Ricoeur's work on law fits, complements, or changes his overall anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The book provides a complex insight into how law, ethics, and politics intertwine both from within law as normative rule setting, as well as through the wider social-political and historical context in which law and legal institutions affect our inter-subjective and communal life as lived "with and for others in just institutions." The collection also makes available in English "The Just between the Legal and the Good," a key text in Ricoeur's reflections about law and justice. The core topics of this collection are rights, justice, responsibility, judging, interpretation, argumentation, punishment, and authority, but contributors but also offer original insights in how Ricoeur's philosophical reconceptualization of symbolism, action, ideology, narrative, selfhood, testimony, history, trauma, reconciliation, justice, and forgiveness can be made productive for our understanding of law and legal institutions.

A companion volume to Drake's Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (2002), French Intellectuals from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation traces the political positions adopted by French writers and artists from the end of the 19th century to the Liberation. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it offers a clear and accessible analysis of the intellectuals' engagement with nationalism, pacifism, communism, anti-communism, surrealism, fascism and anti-fascism, which is located within the evolving national and international context of the period.

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity is the first full-length study of Beauvoir's political thinking. Best known as the author of The Second Sex, Beauvoir also wrote an array of other political and philosophical texts that are less well known. Together, these constitute an original contribution to political theory and philosophy. The book both locates Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context and demonstrates her continuing significance. For, in her unique voice, Beauvoir still speaks to a range of pressing theoretical and practical questions concerning politics. These include the political value and dangers of liberal of humanism; how oppressed groups become complicit in their own oppression; how social identities are perpetuated; the limits to rationalism and the place of emotions, such as the desire for revenge, in politics. In discussing Beauvoir's reflections on these and other matters the book puts her ideas into conversation with those of many contemporary thinkers, including feminist and race theorists, as well as with historical figures in the liberal, Hegelian, and Marxist traditions. Beauvoir's political thinking emerges from her fundamental insights into the ambiguity of human existence. Combining phenomenological descriptions with structural analyses, she focuses on the tensions of human action as both free and constrained. To be human is to be an embodied self, to be capable of free choice and yet to be constrained and physically vulnerable. It is also to be in the world with many other such selves, whose relationships may be both reciprocal and conflictual or oppressive. Such ambiguities are intrinsic to politics, and they are not subject to resolution. Beauvoir thus shows us that failure is a necessary part of political action, and she insists that we acknowledge this while also assuming responsibility for the outcomes of what we do.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

Philosophical questions about the mind preoccupied much of Wittgenstein's later writing, and his contribution to them is deep and wide-ranging, bearing upon philosophical issues concerning sense-experience, concept formation, perception, introspection, the science of psychology, aspect perception, the self, the understanding of rules, the relation between mind and brain, artificial intelligence, and many other subjects of current concern. According to a growing number of eminent philosophers, however, many of Wittgenstein's most important insights have still not been properly absorbed by contemporary philosophical debates on these topics. If anything, work on these subjects is less informed by Wittgenstein's examples and discussions than ever before. In this volume, philosophers from inside and outside of Wittgensteinian circles explore Wittgenstein's treatment of philosophical questions about the mind or issues in contemporary philosophy of mind upon which Wittgenstein's philosophy may have significance. Bringing to bear their broad range of perspectives on his philosophy, these philosophers collectively demonstrate how Wittgenstein revolutionized the philosophy of mind.

Cultural and historical accounts of the public intellectual and French feminism have been remiss in their failure to recognise an important group of major women intellectuals in France. In particular, studies of French feminism and public intellectuals have overlooked the contribution of notable figures such as Francoise Parturier, Gisele Halimi and Elisabeth Badinter amongst many others which has necessarily had a detrimental effect on discourses about the gendered phenomenon of the public intellectual in France. By studying the work of these neglected intellectuals alongside those of more recognised women thinkers such as Assia Djebar, Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux, this book aims to provide a much broader picture of the activities, both political and literary, of female key public in the aftermath of May 1968. By exploring the relationship between their interventions in the public sphere and their creative work it throws new light on the reasons for their omission in standard theoretical and empirical work on the French intellectual. In so doing, this book offers a cultural and theoretical re-evaluation of the gendered phenomenon of the public intellectual in France, as such it is important reading to students and scholars of French Feminism and French public intellectuals more generally.

This book explores the concept of the end of literature through the lens of Hegel's philosophy of art. In his version of Hegel's 'end of art' thesis, Arthur Danto claimed that contemporary art has abandoned its distinctive sensitive and emotive features to become increasingly reflective. Contemporary art has become a question of philosophical reflection on itself and on the world, thus producing an epochal change in art history. The core idea of this book is that this thesis applies quite well to all forms of art except one, namely literature: literature resists its 'end'. Unlike other arts, which have experienced significant fractures in the contemporary world, Campana proposes that literature has always known how to renew itself in order to retain its distinguishing features, so much so that in a way it has always come to terms with its own end. Analysing the distinct character of literature, this book proposes a new and original interpretation of the 'end of art' thesis, showing how it can be used as a key conceptual framework to understand the contemporary novel.

Keith Donnellan of UCLA is one of the founding fathers of contemporary philosophy of language, along with David Kaplan and Saul Kripke. Donnellan was and is an extremely creative thinker whose insights reached into metaphysics, action theory, the history of philosophy, and of course the philosophy of mind and language. This volume collects the best critical essays on Donnellan's forty-year body of work. The pieces by such noted philosophers as Tyler Burge, David Kaplan, and John Perry, discuss Donnellan's various insights particularly offering new readings of his views on language and mind.

A paradox lies at the heart of modernity: the simultaneous demand to create ideas to make us better humans and communities, along with the contrary imperative that we criticize all ideals, especially the ones we have created. In philosophy we see this paradox most acutely in figures like Immanuel Kant, who states that we cannot know the essence of things and yet we must retain old ideas - God, freedom, and the soul - in order to become better and more ethical humans. Or in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal recurrence, a self-created myth whose sole purpose is to get us to see the value in the everyday. This basic scheme - belief and un-belief - is one of the fundamental elements of modernity, manifesting itself in the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault, along with the theologies of Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, William James, Sallie McFague, and Philip Clayton. How do we live out the values we know to be constructions? This question holds captive our ability to solve public goods problems and make our lives more meaningful. Instead of seeing this paradox of modernity as self-deception or bad faith, Zachary Simpson employs cognitive and social scientific research to explain how best to realize values that we know to be false: through art, community, and ritual. In Simpson's account, the values we construct must conform to narrative, be reinforced through community, and habituated through ritual. And yet modernity has also undermined collectivity and ritual. Thus arises the second paradox of modernity: the best tools we have for realizing values are those which devalue the individual modern subject.The last part of the book attempts to make three normative points regarding modernity. First, the modern, individualist subject is insufficient to realize the very values and aspirations of modernity. We must recognize that humans are collective and communal. Second, we cannot simply create values - they must arise in communities and be realized through narrative and ritual. And, third, if we are to live meaningful lives as contemporary meta-ethicists and positive psychologists argue, then such lives must include art, community, and ritual as a way to affirm and reinforce one's values.Let's Pretend is a statement about one of the dilemmas of the contemporary western world and how that dilemma is, and might be, resolved. How do we believe in the values that we know will make a better world, even if they are of our own making? We must do so, in part, by becoming less modern, by engaging with one another and imagining more.The book should serve as both an essay in the history of Western thought as well as a constructive argument about the nature of the modern epoch and what resources we have to realize the central aspirations of modernity. It aims to fill a critical lacuna in theoretical and philosophical approaches to modernity. While most texts focus on either the need for created values or the need to remedy modern subjectivity, few, if any, link the two problems together. Moreover, they do not ground their analyses in the social sciences and contemporary findings regarding the efficacy of narrative, communal action, and rituals.The book is unique, then, because it asks a central question - how do we believe in what we know to be false? - and because it answers this question using interdisciplinary methods that allow us to see the faultlines and paradoxes of our age.

In dark or desperate times, the artwork is placed in a difficult position. Optimism seems naive, while pessimism is no better. During some of the most demanding years of the 20th century two distinctive bodies of work sought to respond to this problem: the writings of Maurice Blanchot and American film noir. Both were seeking not only to respond to the times but also to critically reflect them, but both were often criticised for their own darkness. Understanding how this darkness became the means of responding to the darkness of the times is the focus of Noir and Blanchot, which examines key films from the period (including Double Indemnity and Vertigo) alongside Blanchot's writings (particularly his 1948 narrative Death Sentence). What emerges from this investigation is the complex manner in which these works disrupt the experience of time and the event and in doing so expose an entirely different mode of material expression.

This book offers a thorough reanalysis of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which for many people represents the work that alone gave rise to evolutionism. Of course, scholars today know better than that. Yet, few resist the temptation of turning to the Origin in order to support it or reject it in light of their own work. Apparently, Darwin fills the mythical role of a founding figure that must either be invoked or repudiated. The book is an invitation to move beyond what is currently expected of Darwin's magnum opus. Once the rhetorical varnish of Darwin's discourses is removed, one discovers a work of remarkably indecisive conclusions. The book comprises two main theses: (1) The Origin of Species never remotely achieved the theoretical unity to which it is often credited. Rather, Darwin was overwhelmed by a host of phenomena that could not fit into his narrow conceptual framework. (2) In the Origin of Species, Darwin failed at completing the full conversion to evolutionism. Carrying many ill-designed intellectual tools of the 17th and 18th centuries, Darwin merely promoted a special brand of evolutionism, one that prevented him from taking the decisive steps toward an open and modern evolutionism. It makes an interesting read for biologists, historians and philosophers alike.

"This original study offers a timely reconsideration of the work of French hilosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard in relation to art, performance and writing. How can we write about art, whilst acknowledging the transformation that inevitably accompanies translations of both media and temporality? That is the question that persistently dogs Lyotard's own writings on art, and to which this book responds through reference to artists from the recently-formed canon of performance art history, including the myths of seminal figures Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci, and the controlled documentation of Gina Pane's actions. Through the unstable, untranslatable element that Lyotard calls the figural, his thought is brought to bear on attempts to write a history of performance art and to question the paradoxically prescriptive demand for rules to govern 're-performance'. Kiff Bamford contextualises Lyotard's writings and approach with reference to both his contemporaries, including Deleuze and Kristeva, and the contemporary art about which they wrote, whilst arguing for the pertinence of Lyotard's provocations today."

This book studies how the relationship between philosophy, morality, politics, and science was conceived in the Vienna Circle and how this group of philosophers tried to position science as an antidote to totalitarianism and irrationalism. This leads to investigation of the still understudied views of the Vienna Circle on moral philosophy, meta-ethics, and the relationship between philosophy of science and politics. Including papers from an international group of scholars, The Socio-ethical Dimension of Knowledge: The Mission of Logical Empiricism addresses these topics and makes them available to scholars in the field of history of philosophy of science.

The importance of Stoicism for Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense and Michel Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject and The Care of the Self is well known. However, few students of either classics or philosophy are aware of the breadth of French and Italian receptions of Stoicism. This book firstly presents this broad field to readers, and secondly advances it by renewing dialogues with ancient Stoic texts. The authors in this volume, who combine expertise in continental and Hellenistic philosophy, challenge our understanding of both modern and ancient concepts, arguments, exercises, and therapies. It conceives of Stoicism as a vital strand of philosophy which contributes to the life of contemporary thought. Flowing through the sustained, varied engagement with Stoicism by continental thinkers, this volume covers Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Emile Brehier, Barbara Cassin, Giorgio Agamben, and Pierre Hadot. Stoic sources addressed range from doxography and well-known authors like Epictetus and Seneca to more obscure authorites like Musonius Rufus and Cornutus.

This book investigates a number of central problems in the philosophy of Charles Peirce grouped around the realism of his semiotics: the issue of how sign systems are developed and used in the investigation of reality. Thus, it deals with the precise character of Peirce's realism; with Peirce's special notion of propositions as signs which, at the same time, denote and describe the same object. It deals with diagrams as signs which depict more or less abstract states-of-affairs, facilitating reasoning about them; with assertions as public claims about the truth of propositions. It deals with iconicity in logic, the issue of self-control in reasoning, dependences between phenomena in their realist descriptions. A number of chapters deal with applied semiotics: with biosemiotic sign use among pre-human organisms: the multimedia combination of pictorial and linguistic information in human semiotic genres like cartoons, posters, poetry, monuments. All in all, the book makes a strong case for the actual relevance of Peirce's realist semiotics.

This book's overarching premise is that discussion and critique in the discourses of architecture and urbanism have their primary focus on engagements with form, particularly in the sense of the question as to what planning and architecture signify with respect to the forms they take, and how their meanings or content (what is "contained") is considered in relation to form-as-container. While significant critical work in these disciplines has been published over the past 20 years that engages pertinently with the writings of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, there has been no address to the co-incidence in the work of Benjamin and Foucault of an architectural figure that is pivotal to each of their discussions of the emergence of modernity: The arcade for Benjamin and the panoptic prison for Foucault have a parallel role. In Foucault's terms, panopticism is a "diagram of power." The parallel, for Benjamin, would be his understanding of "constellation." In more recent architectural writings, the notion of the diagram has emerged as a key motif. Yet, and in as much as it supposedly relates to aspects of the work of Foucault, along with Gilles Deleuze, this notion of "diagram" amounts, for the most part, to a thinly veiled reinstatement of geometry-as-idea. This book redresses the emphasis given to form within the cultural philosophy of modernity and-particularly with respect to architecture and urbanism-inflects on the agency of force that opens a reading of their productive capacities as technologies of power. It is relevant to students and scholars in poststructuralist critical theory, architecture, and urban studies. "This is a book about Foucault and Benjamin and it is grounded in a deep knowledge of and reflection upon their works, but it is also underpinned by an impressive erudition. There are reflections on Hegel and Heidegger (central to the author) and Derrida, along with Kierkegaard, and others. This leads to a rich and suggestive discussion ... in staging a spatial-architectural-political conversation between Foucault and Benjamin." - Anonymous Reviewer "Mark Jackson's Diagrams of Power in Benjamin and Foucault, The Recluse of Architecture juxtaposes and interrogates its two leading actors so as to draw from and through them a theory of architecture, which is inseparable from its recluse. In doing so it elaborates a series of complex connections with their various interlocutors and inspirations, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, the Kabbalah, Agamben, allegory, Marx, Deleuze, Klossowski, tragedy, capitalism, modernity, and so on. The list is long and impressive. This is not only done with an extremely high degree of scholarship, but is presented in a light, lucid and very compelling manner in a voice both personal and authoritative. The recluse is the figure of mimesis itself, the appearance of a withdrawal, always already a ruin. This book not only contributes a highly astute reading of its philosophical objects, but it enacts the ontology of the recluse through its own unfolding, simultaneously revealing and withholding the meaning of architecture 'as such', so that we not only understand its meaning, but feel the pulsing differential of the book's object as if it were alive within us." - Stephen Zepke, Independent Researcher, Vienna

This volume examines (1) the philosophical sources of the Kantian concepts "apperception" and "self-consciousness", (2) the historical development of the theories of apperception and deduction of categories within the pre-critical period, (3) the structure and content of A- as well as B-deduction of categories, and finally (4) the Kantian (and non-Kantian) meaning of "apperception" and "self-consciousness".

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different 'agential cuts' in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading's intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

Heidegger has often been seen as having no moral philosophy and a political philosophy that can only support fascism. Sonia Sikka's book challenges this view, arguing instead that Heidegger should be considered a qualified moral realist, and that his insights on cultural identity and cross-cultural interaction are not invalidated by his support for Nazism. Sikka explores the ramifications of Heidegger's moral and political thought for topics including free will and responsibility, the status of humanity within the design of nature, the relation between the individual and culture, the rights of peoples to political self-determination, the idea of race and the problem of racism, historical relativism, the subjectivity of values, and the nature of justice. Her discussion highlights aspects of Heidegger's thought that are still relevant for modern debates, while also addressing its limitations as reflected in his political affiliations and sympathies.