Claude Levi-Strauss is one of the major thinkers of the modern age. Regarded as a crucial figure in the development of structuralism, his writings are studied across a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Levi-Strauss presents a major reassessment of his work and influence. The fifteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume engage with the controversies that have surrounded his ideas, and they probe the concealed influences and cliches that have obscured a true understanding of his work. The contributors are experts drawn from a number of fields, demonstrating the durability and importance of Levi-Strauss's work in the academy. Written for students and researchers alike, these incisive, jargon-free essays will be essential reading for anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this important thinker.

Moral certainty refers to those aspects of morality- moral acting, feeling, and thinking-that are beyond doubt, explanation, and justification. The essays in this book explore the concept of moral certainty and its application and usefulness in contemporary moral debates.

Shows how agential realism can be applied in research across a variety of different disciplines and levels of scholarship. With a foreword by Karen Barad and audio transcripts and videos have their explicit permission / endorsement to be included. Based on a seminar held in South Africa and largely attended by scholars from the global south - reviewers praised for diversity.

This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the practical philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. It features original essays by leading Sellars scholars that examine his ethical theory, his theory of practical reasoning, and his theory of intentional agency. While most scholarship on Sellars's philosophy has focused on his epistemology, metaphysics, or philosophy of language and mind, Sellars himself regarded his practical philosophy as central to his overall project of situating rational beings within the natural order. The chapters in this volume address this neglected area of Sellars's philosophy. The chapters are divided into thematic sections covering Sellars's theory of we-intentions - influential in contemporary debates on collective intentionality - naturalism and the manifest image, and the moral point of view. Together, they demonstrate how Sellars's practical philosophy contributes to important debates in contemporary philosophy regarding, for example, expressivist approaches to moral thought and group agency in the collective intentionality literature. Ethics, Practical Reasoning, Agency: Wilfrid Sellars's Practical Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in Wilfrid Sellars, American philosophy, and ethics.

The aim at the core of this book is a synthesis of increasingly popular and culturally significant forms of digital literature on the one hand, and established literary and critical theory on the other: reading digital texts through the lens of canonical theory, but also reading this more traditional theory through the lens of digital texts and related media. In a field which has often regarded the digital as apart from traditional literature and theory, this book highlights continuities in order to analyse digital literature as part of a longer literary tradition. Using examples from social media to video games and works particularly by postmodern and poststructuralist theorists, Digital Literature and Critical Theory contextualises digital forms among their analogue precursors and traces ongoing social developments which find expression in these cultural phenomena, including power dynamics between authors and readers, the individual in (post-)modernity, consumerism, and the potential for intersubjective exchange.

Moral certainty refers to those aspects of morality- moral acting, feeling, and thinking-that are beyond doubt, explanation, and justification. The essays in this book explore the concept of moral certainty and its application and usefulness in contemporary moral debates.

Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938) is the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School with its strong tradition in logic and its scientific approach to philosophy. Twardowski's unique way of doing philosophy, his method, is of central importance for understanding his impact as a teacher. This method can be understood as a philosophical grammar, which is also how Leibniz conceived his universal language of thought. Analytic philosophy in the twentieth century can be characterized by its opposition to psychologism, on the one hand, and its opposition to metaphysics, on the other. This is changing now, as questions within the philosophy of mind and metaphysics are raised by analytic philosophers today. Maria van der Schaar shows in her book that we can improve our analytic methods by making use of Twardowski's philosophical grammar. Twardowski's positive attitude to psychology and metaphysics may also help us to develop an analytic metaphysics and to get a better understanding of the relation between psychology and philosophy.

The philosophy of Deleuze is as relevant to contemporary thought as it is obscure and complex. Deleuze at the End of the World guides readers through this maze by exploring the raw material that Deleuze took from various fields of knowledge to construct his own concepts, some of them well known (such as Hegel, Kant, Husserl, Balibar and Blanchot) and some widely unexplored (Selme, Guillaume, Bakhtine and Dalcq). At the same time, readers will gain access to South American perspectives on contemporary philosophy. Contextualized with an Introduction by one of the pioneers of the Deleuzian Studies at a global level, Dorothea Olkowski, this book provides both a unique tool for comprehending the philosophy of Deleuze, but also insight into to the way it has been read in the periphery of the American and European scholarship -where "the end of the world" means not only a geographical contingency, but the encounter of thought with its own limits. This collection is both a refreshing approach to Deleuzian philosophy, as well as a continuous and innovative experience of thinking.

This book is an autobiographical meditation on the way in which the world's population has been transformed into a society of refugees and emigres seeking -indeed, demanding- an alternative way of political belonging. Focusing on the interregnum we have precariously occupied since the end of World War II-and especially after 9/11- it constitutes a series of genealogical chapters that trace the author's journey from his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany to the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In doing so, it explores his search for an intellectual vocation adequate to the dislocating epiphany he experienced in bearing witness to these traumatising events. Having subsequently lost faith in the logic of belonging perpetuated by the nation-state, Spanos charts how he began to look in the rubble of that zero zone for an alternative way of belonging: one in which the old binary -whose imperative was based on the violence of the Friend/enemy opposition- was replaced by a paradoxical loving strife that enriched rather than negated the potential of each side. The chapters in this book trace this errant vocational itinerary, from the author's early undergraduate engagement with Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Cornel West, moving from that disclosive occasion in the zero zone to this present moment.

The aim at the core of this book is a synthesis of increasingly popular and culturally significant forms of digital literature on the one hand, and established literary and critical theory on the other: reading digital texts through the lens of canonical theory, but also reading this more traditional theory through the lens of digital texts and related media. In a field which has often regarded the digital as apart from traditional literature and theory, this book highlights continuities in order to analyse digital literature as part of a longer literary tradition. Using examples from social media to video games and works particularly by postmodern and poststructuralist theorists, Digital Literature and Critical Theory contextualises digital forms among their analogue precursors and traces ongoing social developments which find expression in these cultural phenomena, including power dynamics between authors and readers, the individual in (post-)modernity, consumerism, and the potential for intersubjective exchange.

Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the "Orient" constitute the "limit" of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault's experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault's journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

This book approaches post-truth and relativism in a multidisciplinary fashion. Researchers from astrophysics, philosophy, psychology, media studies, religious studies, anthropology, social epistemology and sociology discuss and analyse the impact of relativism and post-truth both within the academy and in society at large. The motivation for this multidisciplinary approach is that relativism and post-truth are multifaceted phenomena with complex histories that have played out differently in different areas of society and different academic disciplines. There is hence a multitude of ways in which to use and understand the concepts and the phenomena to which they refer, and a multitude of critiques and defenses as well. No single volume can capture the ongoing discussions in different areas in all their complexity, but the different chapters of the book can function as exemplifications of the ramifications these phenomena have had.

This book offers a fresh and up-to-date account of the ethical thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest theologians: Karl Barth. In it, the author seeks to recover Barth's ethics from some widespread misunderstandings, and also presents a picture of it as a whole. Drawing on recently published sources, Dr Biggar construes the ethics of the Church Dogmatics as it might have been had Barth lived to complete it. However, The Hastening that Waits is more than apology and description. For it recommends to contemporary Christian ethics the theological rigour with which Barth expounds the good life in terms of the living presence of God-in-Christ to his creatures; his conception of right human action as that which is able to hasten in the service of humanity precisely by waiting prayerfully upon God; and his discriminate openness to moral wisdom outside the Christian church. Among particular topics treated are: the concept of human freedom and of created moral order; moral norms and their relation to individual vocation; the relative ethical roles of the Bible, the Church, philosophy, and empirical science; moral character and its formation; and the problem of war.

What is power? Where does it come from and who is in possession of it? How should we think about power and authority in a post-secular society in which traditional boundaries between individual and collective faith and secular governments and institutions are becoming increasingly blurred? The way which we conceive of power in the twenty-first century will effectively determine how we approach issues such as market reform and environmental disaster. Placing the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault into critical conjunction with the apostle Paul, Foucault/Paul re-evaluates the way in which power operates within society and underpins our ethical and political actions.

This is the first collection of essays devoted to the thought of Anselm W. Muller. It brings to the attention of the English-speaking world an influential and highly regarded philosopher who has made important contributions to a wide range of philosophical debates. Arguably, Muller's most important contributions are to the philosophy of action and virtue ethics. The contributors, who include friends, colleagues, and former students, engage with different aspects of Muller's thought in these areas. Subjects include his interpretation of Aristotle and Wittgenstein, the teleology of thought and action, the Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis and its application to ethical upbringing, and the possibility of practical knowledge and practical truth. Teleological Structures in Human Life will be of interest to researches and advanced students working on virtue ethics, philosophy of action, and practical reasoning.

This book applies the general theory of critical rationalism in order to develop a new sociology of the open society, in general, and a new analysis of the transition from a closed society to an open society in particular. It presents a criticism of Karl Popper's analysis of human action for opening up a closed society, followed by a critical study of the mainstream sociology to show how justificational models of knowledge and rational action have prevented sociology from addressing the contribution of human action to social change. This book provides new sociologies of closed and open societies. It argues that in the closed society "a low level" of critical rationality is activated by people to define the meaning of the good life and social institutions of law, polity and economy. Masoud Mohammadi Alamuti proposes five mechanisms of opening up closed society through the model of social change, inspired by the philosophy of critical rationalism. This volume is "the first systematic attempt" to apply the philosophy of critical rationalism in order to present a "normative sociology of the open society". It will be of interest to postgraduate researchers and professional readers in philosophy, sociology, moral science, law, politics and economics. In addition, this book would benefit research centres, policymakers and civil society activists interested in the ideas of critical rationalism and the open society.

A comprehensive collection which contains essays from thirteen international contributors. Provides a fresh engagement with the ideas of two figureheads in philosophy - Kant and Wittgenstein - by putting them in touch with contemporary debates that are shaped by their legacy. The contributors draw upon ideas in phenomenology, dialetheism, and metamathematics to interrogate the ideas of two of the most important thinkers in modern philosophy.

What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms, and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that this book explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation, and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how "modernity" has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading rooms, and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class, or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies.

This book uses Deleuze's work to understand the politics of masculinity today. It analyses masculinity in terms of what it does, how it operates and what its affects are. Taking a pragmatic approach, Hickey-Moody shapes chapters around key Deleuzian concepts that have proved generative in masculinity studies and then presents case studies of popular subjects and offers overviews of disciplines that have applied Deleuze's work to the study of men's lives. This book shows how the concepts of affect and assemblage have contributed to, and transformed, the work undertaken by the foundational concept of performativity in gender studies. Examining the work of Deleuze and Guattari on the psychoanalytic boy, as exemplified by their writing on Little Hans, Hickey-Moody reconsiders the politics of their approach to psychoanalytic models of young masculinity. In this context, the author examines contemporary lived performances of young masculinity, drawing on her own fieldwork. The field of disability and masculinity studies has taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a nearly unprecedented fashion. Accordingly, the book also explores the gendered nature of disability, and canvases some of the substantive scholarly contributions that have been made to this interdisciplinary space, before introducing case studies of the work of North American photographer Michael Stokes and the popular Hollywood film Me Before You. The book provocatively concludes by challenging scholars to take up Deleuze's thought to re-shape gendered economies of knowledge and matter that support and contribute to systems of patriarchal domination mediated through environmental exploitation.

Professional philosophers have tended either to shrug off American philosophy as negligible or derivative or to date American philosophy from the work of twentieth century analytical positivists such as Quine. Russell Goodman expands on the revisionist position developed by Stanley Cavell, that the most interesting strain of American thought proceeds not from Puritan theology or from empirical science but from a peculiarly American kind of Romanticism. This insight leads Goodman, through Cavell, back to Emerson and Thoreau and thence to William James and John Dewey, as they assimilated to American circumstances and intellectual habits the currents of European thought from Kant to Wittgenstein.

This is a philosophical book about the idea of human freedom in the context of Chinese philosophy on truth, the good, and beauty. The book shows that there is a coherent and sophisticated philosophical discourse on human freedom throughout the history of Chinese Philosophy in aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology. Feng Qi discusses the development of freedom in light of the Marxist theory of practice. In the history of philosophy, the relation between thought and existence, which is fundamental to philosophy, has stimulated many debates. These debates, though they have assumed diverse forms in Chinese and Western philosophy, have eventually concentrated on three inquiries: the natural world (the objective material world); the human mind; and the concepts, categories, and laws that are representative forms of nature in the human mind and in knowledge. In Chinese philosophy, the three inquiries are summarized using three notions: qi (气 breath, spirit), xin (心 heart), dao (道 the Way). What relationship do the three notions have with each other? This book explores the way to human freedom through the divergent paths in Chinese philosophy. This book’s investigation of human activities brings the typical Chinese philosophical discourse from the cosmological realm into the realm of human beings as individuals. In this regard, the three inquiries can be described as being about real life, ideals, and individuals.

With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes on the basis of sexuate difference.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a logician, a philosopher, and one of the twentieth century's most visible public intellectuals. Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology brings those three aspects together to trace Russell's changing views on the role of science and technology in society throughout his long intellectual career. Drawing from cultural sociology, history of science, and philosophy, Javier Perez-Jara and Lino Camprubi provide a fresh multidimensional analysis of the general themes of science, technology, utopia, and apocalypse. The book critically examines Russell's influential interpretations of the turn-of-the-century mathematical logic, World War I, the metaphysics and epistemology of mind and matter, World War II, nuclear holocaust, and the Vietnam War. In Russell's compelling narratives, humanity was a powder keg and the match was represented by different meta-adversaries, such as religion, communism, and American imperialism. And the only way to avoid a coming global Holocaust was to follow his own salvific recipes. In working around Russell's role in the cultural perception of the final destiny of humanity, Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell invites the reader to think about the place of the techno-scientific sphere in human progress and decadence in both our current epoch and the distant future.