Postmodernism is an important part of the cultural landscape which continues to evolve, yet the ideas and theories surrounding the subject can be diverse and difficult to understand. Fifty Postmodern Thinkers critically examines the work of fifty of the most important theorists within the postmodern movement who have defined and shaped the field, bringing together their key ideas in an accessible format. Drawing on figures from a wide range of subject areas including literature, cultural theory, philosophy, sociology and architecture those covered include: John Barth Umberto Eco Slavoj Zizek Cindy Sherman John Cage Jean-Francois Lyotard Charles Jencks Jacques Derrida Homi K. Bhabha Quentin Tarantino Each entry examines the thinkers' career, key contributions and theories and refers to their major works. A valuable resource for those studying postmodern ideas at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, this text will appeal across the humanities and social sciences.

This monograph presents a unitary account of Dewey's philosophy of science and demonstrates the relevance for contemporary debates. The book is written from a theoretical angle and explains Dewey's via on Experience, Language, Inquiry, Construction and Realism. Via taking this route the book addresses key philosophical problems - such as the nature of language, the idea of experience, the notion of logical constructivism, the criticism of representationalism and the nature of scientific practices. John Dewey (1859-1952) is one of the most representative philosophers of the United States. He is well known for his work in education, psychology and social reform and one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism. His Philosophy of Science underwent a period of almost total unpopularity and neglect. In recent times, however, as a consequence of the strong pragmatist renaissance we are now witnessing, Dewey's philosophy of science has attracted new attention. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of Dewey's philosophy of science and will be of interest to scholars working in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy of science and on the relationship between Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism.

John Laird (1887 1946) was a Scottish philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and moral philosophy. In this book, which was first published in 1929, Laird provides a detailed analysis of the philosophical nature of value. The text begins with a discussion of the main definitions of value, before going through a more detailed examination of the various applications of value in turn. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in value and the history of philosophy."

The significance of Henry More's vitalist philosophy in the history of ideas has been realized relatively recently, as the bibliography will reveal. The general neglect of the Cambridge Platonist movement may be attributed to the common prejudice that its chief exponents, especially More, were obscure mystics who were neither coherent in their philosophical system nor attractive in their prose style. I hope that this modern edition of More's principal treatise will help to correct this unjust im pression and reveal the keenness and originality of More's intellect, which sought to demonstrate the relevance of classical philosophy in an age of empirical science. The wealth of learning -- ranging as it does from Greek antiquity to 17th century science and philosophy -- that informs More' s intellectual system of the universe should, in itself, be a recom mendation to students of the history of ideas. Though, for those in search of literary satisfaction, too, there is not wanting, in More's style, the humour, and grace, of a man whose erudition did not divorce him from a sympathetic understanding of human contradictions. As for More's elaborate speculations concerning the spirit world in the final book of this treatise, I think that we would indeed be justified in regarding their combination of classical mythology amd scientific naturalism as the literary and philosophical counterpart of the great celestial frescoes of the Baroque masters."

Originally published in 1944, this book presents a study of the life and work of Roman Catholic priest and scholar Alfred Loisy, written by fellow Modernist Maude Petre. Petre died shortly after completing this short biography, and the text begins with a note on her life by James A. Walker. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in this important figure in the controversial Catholic Modernist movement.

The overarching argument of the book is that Godard's conception and practice of cinematic language opens new, important possibilities for thinking about radical alterity. This book reads a series of Godard films as interventions in contemporary debate about the language of difference. Godard has something he wants both to preserve (singularity) and destroy (visual and aural totalitarianism). How is it possible to speak about the Other? How is it possible for the Other to speak? Does all speaking about or by the Other render that speaking common, thereby rendering what is different identical? These questions gather together a number of issues that cross and intersect disciplinary boundaries: signification, representation, ethics, politics.The problematics with which Drabinski is concerned begin in the debate between Levinas and Derrida, then later in dialogue with Blanchot and Irigaray. To this extent, Godard is particularly well-suited as an interlocutor. Godard's work, especially in the 1970s, is itself a self-conscious form of philosophy. His films theorize themselves, produce a reflexive sound-image language, and so in many ways match the very essence of philosophy: thought thinking thought.Still, the medium of sound and image complicates any rendering of Godard's work as philosophy. Godard produces a philosophically significant cinematic language rather than simply narrating or representing philosophical ideas in the medium of film. And this language must be taken seriously in the context of the problem of difference. For, if difference is concerned with signification as such, then the visual and aural retain equal rights with writing (and all questions obtaining therein).The nature of the debate in this project - how the language of alterity is possible or impossible - immediately breaks disciplinary borders between philosophy, literary theory, film studies and cultural studies. What it means to engage with film in this context, however, is complicated. To wit, there are two standard treatments of film in philosophy. Film is typically either an example of a philosophical position or philosophy is used to interpret motifs, characters, plot lines, etc. In neither case is film engaged as a form of philosophizing itself,that is, as a language engaged with philosophical problems. The aim of the project is to read Godard's work as primary texts, with all the attention due the idiosyncratic language of those texts. Framed by the debate about difference and signification, these primary texts register and resonate as transformative interventions.

Eros, Song and Philosophy in Plato raises critical issues regarding conceptions of how song and philosophy in erotic contexts are treated by Plato in his attempt to rewrite, to some degree, the cultural tradition. A question that seems to be repeatedly raised throughout the Platonic dialogues is why it is precisely song that needs to be put aside before we can start doing philosophy - as a more serious and perfect kind of song. Extensive discussion of this key thematic cluster with an emphasis on the concept of beauty, which is harmoniously interwoven with eros and song, has been absent. Chara Kokkiou argues that there is a constant interplay among erotic, musical-poetic and spatial motifs and the way those are incorporated into the very essence of philosophical dialectic is indicative of the unique nature of Plato's philosophy. Her analysis centers on paiderastic and mousikos eros, which, if thoroughly purified, contribute significantly to the composition of Socrates' portrait as mousikos philosophos. The Socratic philosophical logos displays reformed erotic and song-authorized patterns, such as the power to inspire and heal. Through close reading of certain Platonic passages and detailed attention to choral and mythical patterns, such as those included in the eschatological myths of Republic and Phaedo, and to the descriptions of locus amoenus in Phaedrus and Laws, she demonstrates that Plato through his painstakingly purged philosophical model delineates the route towards

This volume rethinks the work of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) on the centenary of his birth, by presenting an overview of the current debates based on Ellul's insights. As one of the most significant twentieth-century thinkers about technology, Ellul was among the first thinkers to realize the importance of topics such as globalization, terrorism, communication technologies and ecology, and study them from a technological perspective.

The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses Ellul's diagnosis of modern society, and addresses the reception of his work on the technological society, the notion of efficiency, the process of symbolization/de-symbolization, and ecology. The second analyzes communicational and cultural problems, as well as threats and trends in early twenty-first century societies. Many of the issues Ellul saw as crucial - such as energy, propaganda, applied life sciences and communication - continue to be so. In fact they have grown exponentially, on a global scale, producing new forms of risk.

Essays in the final section examine the duality of reason and revelation. They pursue an understanding of Ellul in terms of the depth of experience and the traditions of human knowledge, which is to say, on the one hand, the experience of the human being as contained in the rationalist, sociological and philosophical traditions. On the other hand there are the transcendent roots of human existence, as well as "revealed knowledge," in the mystical and religious traditions. The meeting of these two traditions enables us to look at Ellul's work as a whole, but above all it opens up a space for examining religious life in the technological society.

The question of Nietzsche's use of political theory has a long and vexed history. The contributors of this book re-situate debates around the notion of difference, in relation to historical and scholarly concerns, but with a view to the current political context. Given that today we are faced with a host of political challenges of domination and resistance, the question raised in this volume is how Nietzsche helps us to think through and to address some of the problems. The authors also discuss how his writings complicate our desire for swift solutions to seemingly intractable problems: how to resist slavishness in thought and action, how to maintain hard-won civil liberties and rights in the face of encroaching hegemonic discourses, practices and forces, or how to counteract global environmental degradation, in short, how to oppose 'totalitarian' movements of homogenization, universalization, equalization, and instead to affirm, both politically and ontologically, a culture of difference.

This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting the essential articles by the eminent and highly influential philosopher Saul A. Kripke. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished articles from various stages of Kripke's storied career.
Included here are seminal and much discussed pieces such as "Identity and Necessity," "Outline of a Theory of Truth," "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference," and "A Puzzle About Belief." More recent published articles include "Russell's Notion of Scope" and "Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference" among others. Several articles are published here for the first time, including both older works ("Two Paradoxes of Knowledge," "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities," "Nozick on Knowledge") as well as newer ("The First Person" and "Unrestricted Exportation"). "A Puzzle on Time and Thought" was written expressly for this volume.
Publication of this volume -- which ranges over epistemology, linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, theory of truth, and metaphysics -- represents a major event in contemporary analytic philosophy. It will be of great interest to the many who are interested in the work of one its greatest living figures.

This work examines the rise of postmodernism in management scholarship and argues that the prevalence of postmodernist thought reflects a lack of understanding by management researchers of the core principles upon which Western business endeavour is based. The author highlights postmodernism's methodological and conceptual failings, such as disbelief in material progress and economic advancement, and its denial of generalizable laws to direct management research. In its place, the author proposes a return to traditional modernist principles in management research, based on scientific evidence. This ground breaking, timely work will spark debate and challenge previously accepted claims of postmodernism, a nice retort to the anti-business/anti-capitalist literature now prevalent in academia.

This book proposes a novel position in the debate on scientific realism: Modal Empiricism. Modal empiricism is the view that the aim of science is to provide theories that correctly delimit, in a unified way, the range of experiences that are naturally possible given our position in the world. The view is associated with a pragmatic account of scientific representation and an original notion of situated modalities, together with an inductive epistemology for modalities. It purports to provide a faithful account of scientific practice and of its impressive achievements, and defuses the main motivations for scientific realism. More generally, Modal Empiricism purports to be the precise articulation of a pragmatist stance towards science. This book is of interest to any philosopher involved in the debate on scientific realism, or interested in how to properly understand the content, aim and achievements of science.

Life on earth is currently approaching what has been called the sixth mass extinction, also known as the Holocene or anthropocene extinction. Unlike the previous five, this extinction is due to the destructive practices of a single species, our own. Up to 50% of plant and animal species face extinction by the year 2100, as well as 90% of the world's languages. Biocultural diversity is a recent appellation for thinking together the earth's biological, cultural and linguistic diversity, the related causes of their extinctions and the related steps that need to be taken to ensure their sustainability. This book turns to the work of Jacques Derrida to propose a notion of 'general ecology' as a way to respond to this loss, to think the ethics, ontology and epistemology at stake in biocultural sustainability and the life and death we differentially share on earth with its others. It articulates an appreciation of the ecological and biocultural stakes of deconstruction and provokes new ways of thinking about a more just sharing of the earth.

This book offers an inside look into the notoriously tumultuous, professional relationship of two great minds: Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend. It collects their complete surviving correspondence (1948-1967) and contains previously unpublished papers by both. An introduction situates the correspondence in its historical context by recounting how they first came to meet and an extensive editorial apparatus provides a wealth of background information along with systematic mini-biographies of persons named. Taken together, the collection presents Popper and Feyerabend's controversial ideas against the background of the postwar academic environment. It exposes key aspects of an evolving student-mentor relationship that eventually ended amidst increasing accusations of plagiarism. Throughout, readers will find in-depth discussions on a wide range of intriguing topics, including an ongoing debate over the foundations of quantum theory and Popper's repeated attempts to design an experiment that would test different interpretations of quantum mechanics. The captivating exchange between Feyerabend and Popper offers a valuable resource that will appeal to scientists, laymen, and a wide range of scholars: especially philosophers, historians of science and philosophy and, more generally, intellectual historians.

Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends Adorno's practical philosophy in response to these charges. He argues that Adorno's deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled with a strong optimism about human potential, and that this optimism explains his negative views about the social world, and his demand that we resist and change it. He shows that Adorno holds a substantive ethics, albeit one that is minimalist and based on a pluralist conception of the bad - a guide for living less wrongly. His incisive study does much to advance our understanding of Adorno, and is also an important intervention into current debates in moral philosophy.

Technology has extended its reach to the human body - not just in a literal sense, through implants, transplants and technological substitutes for biological organs, but in a more figurative sense too. Technological infrastructure and the instutions of a technified society today determine what perception is, how we communicate and what forms of social life are possible. A fundamental new conception of technology is therefore required. Technology can no longer be seen simply as a means of efficiently attaining pre-established ends. Rather, it needs to be considered as a total structure, something which makes some forms of human action and human relationship possible, while limiting the possibilities of others. In Intensive Technification, the celebrated German philosopher Gernot Bohme offers a critique of technology that explores the many dimensions in which technology presents problems for modern human beings. It is a book about the preservation of humanity and humane values under the challenging conditions of a technically advanced civilisation and makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the issues around the philosophy of technology today.

In this short book Peter Sloterdijk clarifies his views on religion and its role in pre-modern and modern societies. He begins by returning to the Mount Sinai episode in the Book of Exodus, where he identifies the emergence of what he calls the 'Sinai Schema'. At the core of monotheism is the logic of belonging to a community of confession, of being a true believer - this is what Sloterdijk calls the Sinai Schema. To be a member of a people means that you submit to the beliefs of the community just as you submit to its language. Monotheism is predicated on the logic of one God who demands your utmost loyalty. Hence at the core of monotheism is also the fear of apotheosis, of heresy, of heterodoxy. So monotheism is associated first and foremost with a certain kind of internal violence D namely, a violence against those who violate their membership through a break in loyalty and trust. On the basis of this analysis of the inner logic of monotheism, Sloterdijk retraces its historical legacy and shows how this account enables us to understand why we react so nervously today to all forms of fundamentalism - whether that of radical Islamists, the Catholic Pius Brotherhood or evangelical sects in the USA

Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, the necessary and the contingent, the a posteriori and the a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.

Using empirical research, this book critically analyses the dynamics, culture and forms of subjectivity of neo-liberalism. It draws upon existing historical, sociological and cultural studies to excavate the geneaology of the capitalist subject with specific emphasis on the neo-liberal govern-mental context of the last four decades. Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality, which he developed in his College de France lectures of 1978 and 1979, is employed as an hermeneutic key to historically situate and critically analyse the regimes of subject-formation characteristic of neo-liberal capitalism. The current crisis in capitalism is surveyed, along with earlier forms of capitalism, and the transition in power from discipline to control is explored. The study concludes by tracing the changing face of Homo Economicus in relation to resistance levelled against neo-liberal capitalism and the resultant metamorphises it has undergone. Drawing upon political philosophy and political economy, Benda Hofmeyr presents a comprehensive Foucaultian analysis and historical contextualisation of the rise of neo-liberal governmentality.

Henrik Ibsen's plays have long beguiled philosophically-oriented readers. From Nietzsche to Adorno to Cavell, philosophers have drawn inspiration from Ibsen. But what of Ibsen's own philosophical orientation? As part of larger European movements to reinvent drama, Ibsen and fellow playwrights grappled with contemporary philosophy. Philosophy of drama found a central place with figures such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder, but reached its mature form, in Ibsen's time, in the works of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Kristin Gjesdal reveals the centrality of philosophy of theater in nineteenth-century philosophy and shows how drama, as an art form, offers insight into human historicity and the conditions of modern life. The Drama of History deepens and actualizes the relationship between philosophy and drama-not by suggesting that either philosophy or drama should have the upper hand, but rather by indicating how a sustained dialogue between them brings out the meaning and intellectual power of each. Her study reveals underappreciated aspects of Hegel's and Nietzsche's works through their reception in European art and investigates the philosophical dimensions of Ibsen's drama. At the heart of this interrelation between philosophy and drama is a shared interest in exploring the existential condition of human life as lived and experienced in history.

This book charts the shape of future philosophical investigation by posing the question: "What is the Matrix?" Guided by the example of the Matrix film trilogy, the author examines issues ranging from simulation, proof and action to value, culture and mythology, offering a progressively deeper diagnosis of modern philosophical conditions. In contrast to the contemporary focus upon cognitive science and a commitment to the distinction between appearance and reality, this book helps readers to explore the argument that such abstractions are inevitably displaced by a more concrete distinction between dreaming and waking, with the Matrix as the real and only world we inhabit. Researchers and scholars will find this work an engaging and enlightening examination of reality, via the medium of popular culture and film.

Recent technological and scientific developments have demonstrated a condition that has already long been upon us. We have entered a posthuman era, an assertion shared by an increasing number of thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Richard Grusin, and Bernard Stiegler. The performing arts have reacted to these developments by increasingly opening up their traditionally 'human' domain to non-human others. Both philosophy and performing arts thus question what it means to be human from a posthumanist point of view and how the agency of non-humans - be they technology, objects, animals, or other forms of being - 'works' on both an ontological and performative level. The contributions in this volume brings together scholars, dramaturgs, and artists, uniting their reflections on the consequences of the posthuman condition for creative practices, spectatorship, and knowledge.

To what extent can non-Christian religious traditions utilize Plantinga's epistemology? And, if there are believers from differing religious traditions that can rightfully utilize Plantinga's religious epistemology, does this somehow prevent a Plantingian's creedal-specific religious belief from being warranted? In order to answer these questions, Baldwin and McNabb first provide an introduction to Plantinga's religious epistemology. Second, they explore the prospects and problems that members of non-Christian religions face when they attempt to utilize Plantingian religious epistemology. Finally, they sketch out possible approaches to holding that a Plantingian's creedal-specific religious belief can be warranted, even given believers from other religious traditions who can also rightfully make full use of Plantinga's religious epistemology.